There is a bit of controversy on my campus right now about the role of a university in public discourse. I find the debate interesting, so I thought I’d share it with the leftfielders.
On one side are advocates of the notion that universities should play an active role in social policy and setting the public agenda. That universities should take stands on issues, and lend their weight to the cause of justice, or freedom, or whatever. For example, a number of folks think that the university should file an amicus brief in California protesting Prop 8 as a violation of civil rights.
On the other side are people who believe that the purpose of the university is to not take sides, but rather to remain neutral so as not to discourage debate. That universities should promote the free exchange of ideas, even unpopular ones, and that taking a side in contentious social policy would have a chilling effect on opposition to that social policy on campus.
Of course, there is a continuum here. Nobody thinks that the university should avoid having an official stance on issues directly relevant to the university such as national financial aid policy, or federal oversight of higher education (and even contributing resources towards promoting such stances). And nobody thinks that students or student organizations should avoid taking stands or actively advocating for issues. And nobody thinks the university needs to have a public stance on every major policy issue. But the question is where the university should draw the line.
I find this to be a very challenging issue, personally. The university is uniquely situated to make an important impact on policy for the better. It is a concentration of very smart, very motivated people who think deeply about these issues and it seems a travesty to waste the political capital that universities have by not using it to improve the world. At the same time, I am very much of the opinion that the primary purpose of a university is to seek knowledge, which means being open to all sides and perspectives in a debate. And taking an official stand does sort of put a damper on that, at least in terms of face validity.
Prop 8 is the case that has raised this to a boiling point on campus, where some students feel that it is the obligation of the university to stand up against (what they perceive as) bigotry and a violation of civil rights, while other students are aghast that the university might take a public stand on such a controversial issue which would go against the beliefs of a non-negligible minority of the campus population. While I oppose prop 8, my personal belief is that its not appropriate for the university to take a position on this issue – its not related to education, its not even in the same state, and the university simply has no stake. That said, I wish the university had taken a stand on torture and the interrogation tactics that were used in Guantanamo which is also not related to education or in the same state. And I can’t rightly figure out the distinction behind my competing intuitions.
My tendency would be to recommend that universities err on the side of caution. When in doubt, let your students and faculty take stands, but remain neutral as an institution. But I can’t say I’m terribly confident that’s the right way to go about things…
I think the rubric you lay out here is very reasonable: let educational institutions, as institutions, get involved in the financial, educational, and research issues that directly involve the institution itself. Otherwise, an institution ought to remain neutral–even as it actively encourages that its students (and to a more cautious extent, faculty) to involve themselves in whatever issues that drives those students to care.
If the university wants to help, it can help. It can offer space to hold rallies; it can organize seminars in civil disobedience and grass-roots political organization; it can encourage lively debate (even if it means shipping in token conservatives) on controversial topics to hone the counter-arguments of the students. Universities can, and should, be doing all of these things anyway.
But I think it’s unwise from the university’s point of view to involve itself in current political debates that are meaningless to the institution’s direct interests. Doing so potentially damages the reputation of the school among a certain subsection of potential applicants and donors (not to mention faculty, students, and alumni, even if those groups are in a small minority) at no direct benefit to the university as an institution. Moreover, I think it can even interfere with the student activism that the school ought to be promoting; in other words, the university’s response to calls that it get involved ought to be “what do you need us for; go do it yourself”.
History has shown that several hundred motivates students can impact society much more strongly than an academic institution taking a symbolic stand on a controversial issue. For better or worse, we remember the anti-Vietnam War protests at Berkeley, the student bus rides to the South to register black voters, and the thousands of students involved in the protests at the 1968 DNC. Forty years from now, is anyone going to remember, or care, that Princeton issued a statement of disapproval for the actions of California voters on Prop 8? I strongly doubt it. But if hundreds of Princeton students organized a grass-roots campaign to raise money for groups in CA fighting Prop 8, traveled around CA in the Summer of 2009 to circulate a petition to force another ballot initiative to repeal Prop 8, if they wrote letters, made phone calls, and helped change the law? I guarantee that history would remember that.