HIGHER EDUCATION HAS BROKEN FAITH WITH ITS CLIENTELE.

That's long been the Cold Spring Shops position.  I continue to be pleased to see people with bigger platforms than mine calling attention.  Reason's Steven Collis recently offered what could be a meta-short take.  "As long as academic institutions place social justice goals ahead of truth seeking and knowledge creation, they will lose the respect of the public and will not live up to their potential."  Well, yes, we had churches enforcing orthodoxies before we had academies.  In principle, academies can engage in the sort of sifting and winnowing that gets closer to the truth, and the rules of inference ought foster the sort of modesty implicit in "no final say" and in so doing build comity.

Academic institutions that revert to their religious roots, in the worst possible way, lose friends and alienate people.

In theory, at least, modern universities should be places that can help [build comity]. Sadly, too often, they are not playing that role. Many Americans do not trust these institutions or the people in them. And at least part of the problem, in my view, is a lack of understanding by faculty and administrators of the heavy cost that comes from moving universities away from seeking for and disseminating truth.

In a recent event at the Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center, Jonathan Rauch, Jonathan Haidt, and I engaged in a discussion with our audience about whether the missions of universities should be to pursue truth or to seek social justice. We also questioned whether that framing created a false dichotomy. As you might expect, the audience had mixed reactions. Different groups adopted each of the available views. Haidt, Rauch, and I then discussed the topic more in depth.

I return to it now to make a simple point. Universities must recognize the price that comes with deviating from a truth-seeking mission towards a social justice mission. That price is respect and credibility. And they will pay it whether they like it or not.

Yes, they have been paying that price, for a long time, and yet there are enough people whose salary depends on continuing with business as usual that business as usual, as bad for business as it is, will continue.

The problem arises when institutions—universities, departments within them, or academic organizations—adopt some ideology or solution that most of its faculty or administrators believe is just, then shut down all debate, discussion, or scholarship that contradicts what they have adopted. This can happen in formal ways, such as when a college declares that it will pursue only a certain type of approach in its research. Or it can happen informally, often through faculty refusals to consider or be generous to views contrary to their preferred orthodoxy.

When a researcher makes a discovery that seems to undermine an institution's claimed social justice mission, and those in the field discourage its publication, others who learn of such acts cannot help but be skeptical of any research that institution later produces. When faculty always produce "research" that comes down on just one side of whatever culture war issue is most important to them, they cannot expect others to respect them as much as scholars. They can find esteem as advocates. They can earn recognition as activists. But people will struggle to see them as serious seekers of truth. This is both expected and unavoidable. Universities cannot enjoy the respect given to institutions dedicated solely to exploring and propagating truth while being something other than that. Too often, however, too many people at them are hoping to achieve just that.

Undermining comes from several sources, some more defensible than others.  First, "no final say" comes into tension with "preponderance of evidence," with senior scholars understandably (I'm as guilty of that as anyone) being more skeptical of evidence contesting a strongly held position than that supporting it.  About the best one can do is avoid invoking "consensus."  Second, the enterprise of sponsored research and publication in highly regarded journals can deteriorate into self-referential reciprocity, if not outright censorship through skeptical research neither being funded nor published.  Third, the academy probably self-selects for the sort of non-conformist who would never be mistaken for a middle-schooler seated at the cool kids table.  Thus, being contrarian becomes the conformity.

Those who run our universities—faculty and administrators alike—cannot have it both ways. Americans' trust in higher education remains low. I am sure that, as with anything, there are multiple causes. But academics must come to understand that while truth and social justice are often not mutually exclusive, respect as a truth seeker and a relentless pursuit for social justice at the cost of truth are. If academics would like society generally to trust and respect them as creators of knowledge and seekers of truth, they would do well to ensure there is diversity in their ranks. If institutions would like more credibility in what they produce, they should avoid taking positions on the issues of the day or doing anything that would suppress certain types of research.

No kidding.  "Universities best serve their students through rigorous development of reasoning skills and respect for what we have learned. Rigor is likely to diminish incivility on campus, because students kept busy grappling with intellectual problems will have less time to fight with each other. Better that they be unhappy with a few demanding professors."  Let the presidents at Columbia and Harvard and Penn be sent back to faculty status to encourage the others.  "It took years, but elite colleges are learning the value of institutional neutrality."

Good.  There is still work to be done.

Having found a topic they do not want to talk about — the war between Israel and Hamas — the presidents of elite institutions, including Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell, have announced they will no longer issue statements on social and political events.

After years of pronouncing on social and political events, from the murder of George Floyd to the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion, campus leaders suddenly found themselves tongue-tied in the wake of Hamas’s terror attack on Israel. The reaction was swift and fierce: Alumni revolted, donors cut off funding and politicians opened investigations. Americans were shocked by the lack of moral decency and the hypocrisy. How could university presidents condemn the criminal invasion of Ukraine but not the horrific massacre committed by Hamas of Oct. 7?

A policy outcome that is not to the liking of the leaders of the universities that gundeck their U.S. News rankings is not an occasion for them to issue statements.  Indeed, when something happens that doesn't align with their priors, perhaps it is time for the presidents, provosts, and assorted deanlets to pipe down, or perhaps to have some of their colleagues in the relevant departments in for a public forum focusing on what they still don't understand.  That the people running higher education are rediscovering that fundamental principle is the strongest evidence that our universities have been run by terminally stupid people.

The reason these schools are adopting institutional neutrality should never be forgotten, but it is the correct policy. As Johns Hopkins observed in its recent statement, “taking institutional positions can interfere with the university’s central commitment to free inquiry and obligation to foster a diversity of perspectives within our academic community.” By refraining from taking official stances on controversial matters, institutions fulfill their true role as forums for free and open debate and inquiry, in which individuals pursue and share their ideas without fear of violating institutional orthodoxies.

As Tulane observed a few weeks ago, “Freed from the specter of an official imprimatur for any one view, competing opinions can fuel myriad contributions that advance society.”

I repeat, that should have gone without saying.  University administrators have been squandering institutional credibility for nearly fifty years, and it might take much longer than that to get it back.

Institutional neutrality will help to solve the reputational crisis facing higher education. Harvard noted an especially important consideration in its announcement: “The integrity and credibility of the institution are compromised when the university speaks officially on matters outside its institutional area of expertise.” More to the point, scholars and scholarly institutions undermine their own credibility when they present their political opinions as expertise. Gallup has shown two years in a row that only 36 percent of Americans have confidence in higher education, and this year it found that those lacking confidence reported “political agendas” as the top reason.

Predictably, the house organ for all wokeness all the time suggests some political agendas are more desirable than others.  "A new report from [American Enterprise Institute] adds to a growing wave of conservative criticism suggesting that academe should avoid taking a stance on contentious issues."  That's rich given that the report is calling attention to disciplinary associations, such as American Economic Association, American Political Science Association, American Sociological Association taking stances on topics that ought to be yielding all sorts of Minimal Publishable Units looking at all sorts of dimensions of the Hot Issues of the Day.

According to a new study from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, that was hardly a surprising position; 81 percent of scholarly societies have issued at least one official statement on one of five subjects—race, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war, immigration or climate change—which “almost uniformly reflect progressive orthodoxy,” the report noted.

As a result, the report’s authors argue, colleges and universities should stop giving faculty stipends to pay their fees for association memberships and conferences.

Dive deeper, though, and you get to a deflection that would be amusing were it not so pathetic.

“Contrary to what fellows employed by dark money think tanks might think, statements issued by professional associations aren’t issued willy-nilly by ideologically partisan professors,” Isaac Kamola, director of AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, told Inside Higher Ed via email. “Academic statements are not simply whipped up within some partisan blender. Rather, they come from organizations led by elected representatives.”

“Societies have a responsibility to address concerns raised by their members, and we believe strongly in protecting their freedom to do so,” ACLS president Joy Connolly wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “The report is disingenuous in suggesting that academic societies deserve defunding based on public statements, which is just one part of what they do.”

Defunding the conferences is not the best idea, but to the extent that the disciplinary societies have become self-referential and self-validating, those "elected representatives" might well be "ideologically partisan."  And Frederick Hess, AEI’s director of education policy studies notes, “I’m not sure which is worse: Whether it’s an organization that, in theory, is supposed to be studying these questions, and should perhaps leave room for good-faith academic disagreement … or whether it is a statement issued by organizations who have no particular claim to expertise in this area. Either way, it strikes me as deeply problematic.”  If a disciplinary association takes a stance on a topic that is within its purview, it had better be properly framed and hedged, with footnotes.  If it is taking a stance on a topic that is outside its purview, that is no better than a position taken by educated laymen and neither more credible nor less credible than the same position taken by the members of the bridge club or the Freemasons.

I'm surprised, though, that there is much money left in university budgets for travel to academic conferences.