Kalven and Hobbes: Protests, Politics and Power
When it comes to activism, do students know what they’re signing up for when they enroll at a college or university? Perhaps more importantly, does the institution and its leadership?
The protests and clashes that are shredding campuses across the country might be easier to judge if each institution involved had a clearly documented approach to either political neutrality or a codified set of alternative stances.
The University of Chicago, for one, has such a doctrine; the school formally adopted a position of political neutrality in its 1967 Kalven Report, which it reaffirmed in 2016. That may help to explain why protests and encampments on its campus remain peaceful thus far, and not, apparently, overly disruptive to daily campus life.?
“I think institutions would be well served if their boards would establish such a policy,” Dr. William ‘Brit’ Kirwan, chancellor emeritus of the University System of Maryland, told Volt last fall, as campuses faced their first round of crisis after Israel invaded Gaza.
Such a set of publicly stated values would clarify at least this one essential component of the social contract that students enter into. This would be particularly useful since, as Yalile Suriel, an assistant professor of history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, noted this week in an op-ed in Inside Higher Ed, colleges and universities function in a quasi-parental capacity that inherently positions them as targets of protest for young adults, and which can create a cyclical pattern of protest:
Student protesters, from the 1960s through today, understand the university to be fundamentally imbricated in the larger social, political and economic worlds they inhabit. From here, a familiar historical pattern reemerges: Campus protests that began as demonstrations against U.S. involvement in international affairs and university complicity in financing death and destruction abroad become protests about the arrests of student protesters on university grounds. For some protesters, this consequence further illuminates the interconnected nature of struggle.
It would be foolish to think that public declarations of political or apolitical intent would solve everything; creating standards doesn’t mean they won’t be ignored. But doing so could create a clear framework in which administrators could make — and explain — their decisions.
As David French noted in the New York Times this week, the boundaries between protest, civil disobedience, and lawlessness have been trampled on many campuses, disrupting classes and canceling commencement ceremonies. While many institutions created or updated their rules around how, when, and where protests can take place in recent months, those rules have not mitigated the current crisis.?
Meanwhile, as French notes, college leaders are probably hoping the clock runs out.
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At this moment, one has the impression that university presidents at several universities are simply hanging on, hoping against hope that they can manage the crisis well enough to survive the school year and close the dorms and praying that passions cool over the summer.
However all of this turns out, one thing seems certain: This isn’t going to help higher ed’s public-trust problem.
?? On that note...
These two episodes of Higher Voltage explored the nexus of political neutrality, campus protests, and higher ed leadership:
This week's newsletter written by Aaron Stern
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