In short, the report says that university leaders can and should speak out publicly to promote and protect the core function of universities, which is to create an environment suitable for the pursuit of excellence. management through research, scholarship and teaching. For example, if Donald Trump continues to push announced plan to take “trillions and billions of dollars” from major university endowments to establish “The American Academy” – a free online school that could provide an “alternative” to existing institutions – Harvard’s leadership can and should express its opposition to this terrible idea.
It makes sense for university leaders to speak out on issues related to the core functions of their institutions: That is their area of expertise as presidents, provosts, and deans. But the report said they should not take an official position on other issues. They should not, for example, issue statements of solidarity with Ukraine after the Russian invasion, no matter how morally appealing or even right such sentiments may be.
Additionally, the report said, university leaders should make clear to the public that when students and faculty exercise academic free speech, they are not speaking on behalf of the entire university. learn. There is no need for the president to repeat this point for every statement made by thousands of members of the university. But the university should make it clear repeatedly, as long as it can prove the point, that only the university’s leadership can officially speak on behalf of the university.
This policy may remind some readers of Kalven ReportA prominent statement on the value of “institutional neutrality” in academia was issued in 1967 by a University of Chicago committee chaired by First Amendment scholar Harry Kalven Jr. But although our policy has some important points in common with the Kalven Report, which emphasized that the university remains quietly neutral on political and social issues, our university relies on different principles and have a number of different implications.
The principle behind our policy is not neutrality. Rather, our policy commits the university to a set of important values that promote the intellectual pursuit of truth: open inquiry, reasoned debate, diverse perspectives and expertise . An organization committed to these values is not neutral and should not be. It must fight for its values, especially when they are under attack as they are now. Public speaking is one of the tools universities can use in that fight.
