Double Aspect

At her invaluable Substack (can we just say blog? isn’t one neologism enough for this sort of thing?) What Katy Did, Katy Barnett has posted a thought-provoking essay on “Universities and politics: The modern phenomenon of ‘official positions’“. It is worth a comment, both for what it gets right and also for what, I think, it doesn’t.

Professor Barnett argues that “it’s inappropriate for a university” ― and, I assume, an another academic organization, such a professional association of the scholars in a given field ―

to have an official position on political matters not directly related to their operation. Individual academics and students can, of course, adopt political positions, and advocate for them. … [But] it should be for them to make up their own minds what causes they support. The idea of an official position is inimical to freedom of conscience. 

I agree with Professor Barnett’s substantive position: universities should avoid making pronouncements on political or social issues ― including, I would specify in reaction to some emails I got a month or so ago as an NYU Law alumnus, controversial judicial decisions.

Professor Barnett notes that these public statements have no practical impact. They do not change the lives of those whose side they are ostensibly take: “Words are powerful—I’m a lawyer, after all, and using words is part of my stock-in-trade—but there’s a limit to how far words can change reality.” Indeed.

These statements also do not persuade those not already inclined to agree; when they concern electoral issues, they do not sway votes. On this point I would probably go even further: those who see an academic institution wading into electoral politics on the other side, whatever “other” means in this context, will not change their minds about how to vote, but they may eventually change their minds about whether their taxes should support an independent academia that is their political opponent. Anyone outraged by this should consider the level of vitriol directed at intellectual institutions that refuse to be part of the progressive consensus, such as the Federalist Society in the United States and the Runnymede Society in Canada, the legality of whose existence is apparently disturbing to some bright young things. And these are independent associations of like-minded people which do not rely on the support of those who disagree with them. Why should people feel any more magnanimous about political opponents whom they are coerced to fund?

Where I part company with Professor Barnett is in her connection of this stance to the freedom of conscience. She writes that “[h]ow one votes is a matter of conscience”, which I agree with, and that “it’s not up to any organisation to tell me what to think”. I would guess that this isn’t meant literally: some organizations, above all political parties, but also, say, the editorial boards of newspapers, exist precisely to (among other things) tell us how to vote. Professor Barnett writes that “it’s not for universities or corporations to tell me or anyone else how to vote, one way or the other”, but even so I would guess that she ― like many others who condemn corporate interventions in politics, would make an exception for the media; many would also be tempted to exempt non-profits.

To me, though, these exemptions show that any general rule against corporate, let alone organizational, political intervention is untenable. If some corporation tries to convince me to vote one way or another, I’ll probably just shrug; if I am particularly exercised about it, I’ll boycott them. (This is why, until recently, commercial interests mostly stayed out of electoral politics; as Michael Jordan famously put it, Republicans wear sneakers too.)  

That said, there is a narrower but, I think, more plausible version of Professor Barnett’s position: it’s not up to any organization to tell us how to vote if (1) it has some measure of control over us, and (2) we did not join this organization for electoral or political purposes. Professor Barnett might actually have something like this in mind when she writes that “[b]y stating an institutional position, any debate within that institution is chilled. That’s not good for democracy, and it’s not good for an educational institution which should be able to discuss contentious matters.” This is probably right so far as it goes.

But I wouldn’t connect this issue to either freedom of conscience or voting choices. In a university context, official statements are beside the point; a half-decent university won’t punish people for disagreeing with its official proclamations, and they know this. An indecent one will punish them for their politics, official statements or not. This happens (mostly, of course, in the black box of academic hiring, but sometimes more overtly too) but, I think, in ways that simply aren’t sufficiently connected to the sort of statements Professor Barnett has in mind for them to really matter.

My objection to these statements is different. They are a pretty typical example of a problem identified by public choice theory: politicians ― in this case, academic politicians ― use the resources of which they obtain control for their own ends instead of those of their constituents. The resource, in this case, is primarily reputational rather than pecuniary, but that hardly matters. The political entrepreneurs who get themselves into positions of academic authority, or sway faculty councils and university senates, privatize the university’s reputation for independent-minded expertise and spend it on their own agendas ― and their individual self-aggrandizement too. I am enough of cynic to suspect that they won’t mind any chilling effect they manage to create in the process, but I doubt this is the main consideration.

This is as objectionable as politicians building bridges to nowhere to make sure their allies get juicy contracts, their constituents re-elect them, and their name gets attached to some reinforced concrete. It is immoral, in the same way as taking something that isn’t yours and disposing of it as if it were always is. And, as discussed above, in this case, the reputational capital of universities, built up over the past 150 years or so (I’m not sure the relatively few universities that existed before mattered all that much in the public discourse, but I might be wrong) is squandered on what are, at best, quixotic quests for a better world, and at worst, vulgar political machinations. Perhaps too much of this capital has been squandered already for this to matter, but the people who believe universities should make political statements must think otherwise.

So I very much agree with Professor Barnett that statements by universities or other academic entities in support of political or social causes are useless at best, seriously damaging at worst, and morally objectionable quite apart from that. But I come to this position from a somewhat different perspective, and think we should not be too hasty to invoke freedom of conscience, even in the face of disturbing developments. This is something I might soon have occasion to return to.