Researchers say that 43 to 47 percent of high school students with autism go on to college, a significant shift from past decades.
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If there has been a vibe shift in higher education, one sign has been the rush by colleges and universities to adopt some version of the Chicago Principles, the definitive articulation of the ideal of institutional neutrality. The Chicago Principles are themselves controversial, and critics have made their displeasure known.
A lot of objections can be quickly dispensed with. The call for institutional neutrality is not the absurd demand that colleges and universities forswear all principles and values and operate in a normative vacuum. Instead, it calls for presidents and other administrators to hold their tongues when it comes to political matters of no direct relevance to their institutions. This leaves plenty of space for institutional commitments to well-recognized norms such as academic integrity and rigor, open-mindedness, fiscal responsibility, fairness in hiring and admissions, and so on.
Nor do we need to spend much time dispelling the notion that institutional neutrality means the leaders of colleges and universities must stand idle while hostile political actors attack funding, academic freedom or institutional autonomy. To adopt the Chicago Principles is not to surrender passively to laws intruding into matters that properly remain the purview of colleges and universities themselves, including decisions about diversity, equity and inclusion, general education, and curriculum. Administrators who hide behind institutional neutrality to keep silent in the face of open attacks on higher education are betraying the very principles they claim to be upholding.
While these criticisms of institutional neutrality are weak, there is a stronger one inviting a more substantive response. It goes like this: Colleges and universities are institutions existing in a social world, and they have by their nature all manner of political entanglements. Colleges and universities are also at the heart of cultural debates about the meaning and purpose of education; changing social mores regarding sex, gender and race; and the character of American government. More, members of the academic community are real people with beliefs and values and opinions, and they care a great deal about what happens in the broader world of which their institutions are a part. When controversy arises and political divides seem stark, they want to know which side their college is on. It is naïve, then, to suppose a college or university can stay out of political controversies.
In response, advocates for institutional neutrality typically offer two kinds of responses. One is pragmatic and the other principled. The pragmatic argument is twofold: 1) that violations of neutrality are not wrong per se, but that in perilous times they are a threat to academic freedom and free speech and 2) that they are politically dangerous. The first worry is that dissenting voices will feel pressure to remain silent if the administration takes sides in an ongoing controversy. The second is that by speaking out on a controversy, a college president may alienate lawmakers or others in a position to cut funding or otherwise damage the institution.
Whether or not violations of institutional neutrality will have these consequences is an empirical question, and the answer will vary across different circumstances. The actual threat to the academic freedom of a faculty member who disagrees with their president will depend on the overall climate of the institution and the health of academic freedom in that institution. In many cases, dissenters will be fine. Similarly, the threat of invoking political backlash will depend on the political climate in which a college or university finds itself.
The better defense of institutional neutrality is, I think, a principled one having to do with the academic mission itself and the nature of academic communities. To spell this out more clearly, we might look at the role of neutrality in liberal political philosophy.
Famously, John Rawls calls for liberal states to be neutral between what he called comprehensive doctrines, the systems of beliefs and values that individuals use to organize and make sense of their lives. Rawls starts with what he calls the “fact of reasonable pluralism”—the fact that there is no one single understanding of what constitutes a good life that enjoys the allegiance of all or even nearly all of us. Given this fact of life in secular liberal democracies, Rawls argues that questions of basic values or commitments are best left to individuals to decide for themselves. On such matters the state must remain silent.
Still, the state must act. A state is neutral, according to Rawls, when it can justify its actions to citizens using principles that do not assume the truth of any one comprehensive doctrine but instead appeal to reasons all can accept. Far from claiming that the state should have no values, the point of neutrality is to guarantee that the values and principles it acts on are shared by citizens despite their disagreements on fundamental questions. This is the language of “public reason,” the language of our shared political commitments to expansive civil liberties, material equality and respect for democratic norms. Public reason, Rawls argues, guarantees the equal standing of each citizen. At its core, liberal neutrality is about ensuring that each person sees themselves as a full and respected member of the political community. At stake is the perceived legitimacy of the state itself.
I would suggest that institutional neutrality functions in a similar manner. Public colleges and universities, as well as private and religious institutions that embrace the principles of academic freedom and open inquiry, are home to students, staff and faculty with a diverse set of religious, moral and political beliefs. They also answer, in different ways, to a comparably diverse public. While successfully pursuing the educational goals of advancing and disseminating knowledge, the members of the academic community need to look past their differences and work with a shared set of values and beliefs that are appropriate to a college or university. This works on two levels.
First, public colleges in pluralistic, secular societies are as properly governed by Rawls’s kind of neutrality as any other state institution. The restrictions here roughly correspond to the constitutional limits that prevent a public school from proclaiming the truth of a particular faith or requiring students to swear fidelity to controversial moral teachings. Things are more complicated with private and religious colleges, but those that most closely resemble their public counterparts will choose to abide by the same principles of tolerance and nondiscrimination. This is all fairly uncontroversial. So far, though, we still seem to have room for statements on properly political matters.
I think, though, we can appeal to something like Rawls’s neutrality in the context of academic culture to justify further restrictions on institutional speech. This will not be neutrality between comprehensive doctrines. Rather, it will be neutrality between political positions that cannot be posed or defended by appeal to the distinctive values and norms of the academic world.
There are many decisions that need to be made in the daily operations of a college or university—decisions about hiring and firing, classes to be offered or canceled, budgets and the allocation of resources. There are also bigger decisions to be made about longer-term goals and priorities and ultimately about the institution’s distinctive mission and purpose. These will often be properly controversial—reasonable people will disagree and argue. But ideally these disagreements will turn on educational priorities. Administrators and faculty will argue about how to spend money or which classes to offer or programs to trim, but we can hope their arguments reflect shared values such as promoting student achievement and excellence in research. Inevitably, there will be winners and losers, but, ideally, the losers will accept that the winners are acting on the right sorts of reasons and pursuing the right sorts of aims.
When the decisions made by administrators and faculty begin to reflect nonacademic priorities—when they turn on things like what will please or anger donors or state legislators, for example—we are looking at an institution in trouble. The same holds when the decisions and priorities begin to reflect partisan political commitments, as if promoting or resisting a particular political cause sits at the heart of the educational institution. At this point, dissenters will reasonably conclude their institution is working against them by pursuing nonacademic aims they do not share and which they might fundamentally oppose or despise.
This is the line colleges and universities cross when they violate institutional neutrality by issuing statements about affairs of the day that have no real pertinence to the college or university. When administrators or departments take official stances on controversial nonacademic matters, they undermine the shared endeavor that should be the focus of academic life.
At stake here is not the actual threat to academic freedom or a failure to act with political prudence. At stake is legitimacy. Violations of institutional neutrality reflect an intrusion of aims or priorities that are likely to be reasonably rejected by some faculty, students and staff. Even when secure in their ability to speak their mind, dissenters are put in the position of outsiders who will rightfully question the legitimacy of their own college or university. We should not be surprised when these doubts spread to the public on whose support higher education ultimately depends.
