The Kalven Trap

The class was called, rather plainly, “Moderns II,” and when I enrolled in it, I had no idea that it would change my life. I was a visiting student at University College London. While I had read some of the assigned authors (W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf), I had never read them in quite that way—as propositions about how to see (or not see) the world. The professor was a bit intimidating; he had a way of developing his thoughts as he spoke, his sentences moving in seemingly different directions until he landed—with a flourish—on an insight that, after the meandering that had come before, was both unexpected and somehow brilliantly inevitable. And he challenged us to think the same way. We had been reading The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell’s 1937 plea for a kind of socialism that would take the concerns of the working class seriously, and the professor must have noticed that something was bothering me.  

The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in Higher Education
By Brian Soucek
The University of Chicago Press
240 pp.

“Yes?” he said, suddenly appearing before me.  

“I don’t think Orwell enjoys being with poor people,” I stammered, thinking of the author’s many appalled references to the workers’ bad teeth, realizing, too, that what I had just said went against the grain of our class discussions so far, in which everyone had been warmly appreciative of Orwell’s efforts at empathy. 

“More!” the professor demanded, pointing at me. In hindsight, my critique of Orwell wasn’t particularly perceptive or even accurate, but that didn’t matter. For now, at least in my academic life, the floodgates were open: I had found a way to make the texts we were reading my own. I had discovered the pleasures of being opinionated. 

That class happened over 30 years ago, but I still think about it today. Much of the climate of American college education today seems geared to drive such opinionatedness not only out of our classrooms but the academy in general. The mind-bending assault of the Trumpists on colleges, the lethal mix of fake outrage and financial coercion that the president’s minions bring to campus, will set back American higher education by decades. It will also, as Brian Soucek in The Opinionated University acknowledges, make it unforgivably dull. What started as a laughable right-wing caricature of higher education—denouncing universities as Marxist training camps, with Stalinist professors brainwashing students into accepting the wicked gospel of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion)—has now taken hold of the minds of many university administrators. Their alternative vision has “workforce-ready” students praising capitalism while joining hands with their “thought partners,” an army of compliant AI bots. The motto of higher education, if Trump and his helpers have their way, will no longer be “Sapere aude” (dare to know) but “Skill up.” Leaving aside the fact that being able to state one’s opinions clearly and coherently is an important life-skill, too, the laudable emphasis on getting students ready for life now masks a more sinister ideological impulse: to remake our universities in the outdated, nativist image of an older, mostly white America, purged of the dissidents and immigrants we don’t want.  

The Opinionated University is, as it ought to be, an unabashedly opinionated book. Soucek is a professor of constitutional law at the University of California-Davis who was trained as a philosopher. It shows: At its core, his book is a logically compelling dismantling of what has become the mantra of American educational leaders—institutional neutrality, a doctrine that essentially means that, when in doubt, a university should voice no opinion at all. As Soucek explains, that was the central recommendation of the so-called Kalven Report, issued in 1967 in response to student protests against the Vietnam War, by a University of Chicago committee chaired by the law scholar Harry Kalven Jr. In December 2023, when three flustered presidents of elite universities couldn’t tell a congressional committee whether they would penalize students on their campuses for alleged antisemitic hate speech (a “context-dependent decision,” they said), the popularity of the Kalven guidelines soared. If only those presidents had practiced institutional neutrality!  

The intent of the Kalven report was, of course, to preserve free speech against rash decisions made by university leaders. Yet, as Soucek now tells us, institutional neutrality creates more problems than it solves. He has fun labeling the adherents of institutional neutrality “Kalvenists,” a pun that hints at some deeper commonalities. The 16th-century Calvinists believed in predestination—that, in other words, God had, without letting you know, already decided whether to send you to Heaven or Hell, and that there was nothing you could do to change that. But Calvinists relaxed their grim doctrine by also allowing that there might be some signs even in your earthly life where you were headed—if your business succeeded, for example. Soucek shows that modern-day academic “Kalvenists” likewise get themselves entangled in exemptions. Even as they advise university leaders to stay out of politics, they also concede that there are situations where saying nothing is not wise—when, for example, a university’s core mission is under threat. And here’s the rub: Since there are, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 2,600 four-year colleges in the United States, many with their own slightly different missions, the list of exceptions is potentially endless.  

My own university’s administration became obsessed with the phrase “expressive activity,” a term that strikes me as both unintentionally humorous and somewhat demeaning, as if stating one’s opinion were something akin to coloring pictures or going for a morning run. 

Soucek’s antidote to the moral porousness of Kalvenism follows from that insight—an embrace of pedagogical pluralism. His book envisions, in cleverly nuanced detail, an admittedly idealistic landscape of higher education in which each institution would, after internal discussion and without interference from above, speak up whenever its mission demands it. For a university with a large medical school, for example, it would make sense to weigh in on discussions about reproductive rights, while another school with strong international ties might champion protections for its international students. 

The archenemy of Soucek’s “opinionated university” is conformity. When I decided to become a professor, I didn’t realize how much paperwork would attach itself to my career, the way barnacles latch on to an aging boat: faculty reports, compliance certificates, lists of learning outcomes, conflict-of-interest disclosures, and effort allocations. (Making such documents digital has only increased their number.) In his first chapter, Soucek turns to one such document that gets conservatives’ blood boiling—the notorious diversity statement, an essay outlining a faculty member’s commitment to creating an inclusive environment, which used to be a staple of the academic application process before DEI became the acronym from hell. Soucek admits that such required assertions of pedagogical bona fides may become insincere—who wouldn’t want to teach a class that lifts all students, regardless of their background? But what if we decided to reimagine diversity statements as opportunities to express not abstract beliefs but as concrete plans for meaningful action? As Soucek points out, critics of such declarations don’t object to statements of a candidate’s teaching philosophy. Why not ask an applicant, then, how their work as a whole (including their research) would enrich, in its own unique and non-conformist way, the overall vision of the university they are hoping to join? 

Ironically, the most effective tools for enforcing educational conformity, also known as teaching evaluations, generally get a free pass. Treated as reliable data by university administrators, they are often skewed. As Soucek makes clear, evaluations tend to reward those who pander and grade-inflate. And they routinely yield lower ratings for women of color. Where “non-experts”—to wit, our students—sit in judgment on our teaching, charismatic slickness often wins out over disciplinary aptitude. (Soucek doesn’t mention the frequently abysmally low participation rate in an exercise many students view as a waste of time.) Anecdotally, this critique seems right to me. While I belong to a demographic that statistically fares well in evaluations, I am always surprised by how many of my students’ responses pertain to things other than class content: “Instructor looks rumpled,” one student commented on what I would describe as the result of having little time between classes. “Instructor is ok,” observed another student, before criticizing my high-energy classroom delivery: “But he should lay off the coffee.” 

The mind-bending assault of the Trumpists on colleges, its lethal mix of fake outrage and financial coercion, will set back American higher education by decades. It will also, as The Opinionated University acknowledges, make it unforgivably dull. 

If instructors, to improve their ratings, are tempted to ingratiate themselves with their students, some universities cozy up to the fine folks at U.S. News & World Report for better rankings as well. Soucek favors those colleges that don’t forget their mission and are not afraid to say “No! in thunder” (to use Herman Melville’s feisty phrase) when silence would harm their faculty and students. My colleagues at Indiana University were hoping for such support when an assistant professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, was castigated by Indiana’s own attorney general after performing an abortion on a very young rape victim. Instead, Indiana University’s president only volunteered that Bernard was a “well-respected doctor.” 

As university leaders like to remind us, academic freedom has its limits. My own university’s administration became obsessed with the phrase “expressive activity,” a term that strikes me as both unintentionally humorous and somewhat demeaning, as if stating one’s opinion were something akin to coloring pictures or going for a morning run. That Indiana University’s administrators didn’t view their faculty’s expressive activities as all that harmless became clear when they banished them from campus grounds between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. (a restriction later blocked by the courts). But even Soucek believes that some frameworks should exist. Academic departments, for example, should issue public statements only about subjects in which they can claim some disciplinary expertise. And when a colleague’s research takes a turn that conflicts with a university’s stated mission, said university should leave the reprimands to that colleague’s academic peers.  

In a chapter on “institutional counterspeech,” occasions where a university feels compelled to criticize its own actions, Soucek grants that colleges often face hard choices. In a moving aside, he recalls how excluded he felt back in 2018 when UC Davis held a campuswide blood drive, complete with prizes, in which he, as a gay man, could not participate. (The FDA has since amended its guidelines.) Recognizing the importance of blood drives, Soucek appreciated a statement from his chancellor, who expressed his profound regret over the unnecessary and discriminatory federal restrictions. In a similar vein, a university leader might choose to condemn the views of an invited campus speaker as hurtful to some members of the campus community, while still allowing the event to proceed for the sake of academic freedom. In 2017, Lauren Robel, the provost of Indiana University Bloomington, declined to disinvite Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, a widely debunked 1994 book that attempted to correlate race and intelligence. “Our academic community,” Robel insisted, “depends, distinctively, on more than mere tolerance. It depends on engagement with ideas, perhaps especially with ideas we believe are wrong or flawed.” At the same time, as you debate ideas you dislike, you should always feel protected, as Soucek makes clear in his final chapter on “Regulating Campus Speech.” 

But that last example also makes me wonder how much of The Opinionated University rests on an assumption that we can no longer take for granted—that American universities, and specifically their leaders, always have the best interests of their students and faculty in mind. One of the most noxious effects of the ongoing MAGA makeover of American universities has been the extent to which politicians have deputized college administrators, inciting them, for example, to prosecute and punish those whose teaching falls short of the required “viewpoint diversity”—in translation: whose classes make conservative students uncomfortable. To which I would respond: No one, whether you are right or left or middle-of-the-road or nothing at all, whether you are faculty or a student, should ever feel overly comfortable in college. Or, as Soucek puts it: “The point of education, and of rational argument more generally, is to change what people think.” (Note that the mind that is being changed here could also be the professor’s … Has happened to me plenty of times!) Here’s hoping that generations hence will still be able to feel the rush of excitement I experienced decades ago when my professor stood before me, sensing I had an idea different from everyone else’s: “Yes?”  

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