Institutional Modesty

Feb. 10, 2025

About a decade ago, universities began issuing a steadily increasing number of statements about topics of all sorts – from natural disasters to mass shootings to political controversies. This behavior was not unique to universities. Corporations, nonprofits, and organizations of all kinds engaged in the same escalating pattern. In the beginning, each individual statement felt innocuous or even helpful. Those advocating for the statements justified their requests in terms of the emotional comfort they would provide to community members who felt impacted by the underlying issues or events. But each statement created a precedent that justified demands for the next one, and universities found themselves on an accelerating treadmill of statement writing. 

The statements had a broadly progressive orientation, but the balance of opinion among most students and faculty meant that they tended to enjoy majority support, at least on campus. The path of least resistance was to issue statements. Last spring’s student protests over the conflict in Gaza, however, split many campus communities. Faced with calls to take sides on an issue that divided students, faculty and alumni, university leaders paused. The experience led many universities to reflect for the first time on the costs of weighing in on issues that are not directly related to the university community. 

At Seattle University, we were ahead of this emerging trend. Having worked as a university administrator for over a decade, for seven years as a law school dean and for the past four years as a university president, I have had a front row seat to this evolving “statement culture.” Although I initially went along with the desire for statements, over time I experienced growing discomfort with the direction we were heading. About a year before the Gaza protests erupted, I sent out to our campus community a “statement on statements.” I outlined a more restrained approach to issuing statements, reserving them for situations or issues that have a direct bearing on our academic community.  Over the past six months, dozens of university presidents have issued similar statements.

This broad retreat from “statement culture” is a welcome development. University statements regarding issues over which university leadership has no special expertise or influence tend to be empty and performative gestures. Even worse, by establishing a campus “orthodoxy” on issues about which there can be reasonable disagreement, they tend to silence those on campus who disagree, defining them as outsiders. 

Perhaps less intuitively, excessive university statement-making also harms those who agree with the statements. When the university weighs in with an official position on an issue or event, it crowds out student and faculty speech, depriving those communities of valuable opportunities to exercise and enhance their own agency as advocates. As institutions whose principal mission is to educate effective leaders, excessive statement-making is therefore perniciously counterproductive.

While I welcome the new and more restrained approaches to issuing statements, one unfortunate aspect of the recent shift has been a widespread tendency to explain the reticence using of the logic of “institutional neutrality.”  Pervasive resort to the language of neutrality reflects the influence of an approach to campus speech that has been forcefully articulated by the University of Chicago over a period of several decades. 

This Chicago approach was clearly spelled out in the 1967 report by the so-called Kalven Committee.  The University of Chicago’s president established that committee at the height of the campus controversies of the 1960s, charging it to assess what the university’s role should be with regard to those heated debates. The Committee recommended a default stance of institutional neutrality on contentious social issues. A university, it contended, is a distinctive kind of community dedicated to the production and dissemination of knowledge. To carry out these functions well, universities must foster a culture of skepticism and robust debate in which there are no unquestioned orthodoxies. As such, a university is a “community which cannot take collective action on issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness.”

While there is a great deal of truth in the Kalven Committee’s observations, there are also several problems with this logic.  First, it is important to observe that the very concept of the “issues of the day” is inherently unstable. Where a topic is not contentious, there is no “issue” and the quest for “neutrality” therefore becomes meaningless. For example, if the University of Chicago were to affirm that the Earth is round, there would be no violation of the Kalven principles because the shape of the Earth is uncontroversial – it is not an “issue[] of the day.” If, however, some large percentage of people – no matter how poorly informed or unreasonably motivated – suddenly began to assert that the Earth is flat, the shape of the Earth would become an “issue.”  The Kalven committee’s insistence on neutrality would suddenly become relevant, counseling the university to embrace institutional neutrality on the matter. 

The unstable boundaries of the appropriate domain of neutrality becomes a problem for the university when issues closer to the heart of the university’s operations themselves become the subject of public controversy. An institutional aspiration towards “neutrality” is impossible to maintain when the matter of controversy are the values that inform the university’s operational decisions. While the Kalven committee report acknowledged that the university is entitled to defend its values in circumstances in which “society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry,” it understands these circumstances in very narrow terms. 

But universities must act in domains that can be (and, in our polarized times, have become) contentious. Two examples are university efforts to achieve zero carbon emissions and their embrace of learning environments that are diverse and inclusive. In our contemporary political context, a university that adopts policies of zero carbon or that expressly seeks to create a diverse academic community has rejected the Kalven committee’s insistence on institutional neutrality by rejecting – in practice – one side of contentious social debates. But so would a university that continued emitting carbon or that took no efforts to build a more diverse and inclusive academic community.

Instead of the impossible goal of institutional neutrality, universities should embrace the virtue of institutional “modesty.”  A culture of modesty does not compel the university to refuse to take sides on issues that happen to become controversial. Rather, it counsels them to take sides only when – and as far as – necessary to operate in a manner consistent with their institutional values. For example, a university committed to doing its part to build a sustainable future would be justified in implementing a policy of zero carbon emissions or solid waste reduction. When it does need to take sides, the intellectually modest university will be sure to couch its actions in an affirmation of the right of students and faculty to dissent from – and even to criticize – the university’s position. Although adopting a zero-carbon policy suggests an institutional point of view on the reality of climate change and effective ways to address it, doing so does not require the university to suppress dissenting points of view among students or faculty. 

A commitment to institutional modesty – as opposed to neutrality – affords the university the freedom to operate in ways that are consistent with a thicker set of values than the Kalven committee would allow. But it requires the university to do so in ways that are respectful of the rights of community members to dissent from the institution’s decisions or even the values themselves without fear of institutional retribution. A university that embraces institutional modesty therefore leaves ample room for reasoned debate and disagreement, even about its institutional values. 

Finally, a commitment to institutional modesty commits the university to operating in a manner consistent with the academic virtues it hopes to instill in its students and faculty.  The specific implementation of practices that reflect a set of institutional values should always be somewhat provisional.  Setting aside the evolving legal landscape, a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, for example, might reasonably be interpreted to justify race-conscious policies in some contexts but race-neutral policies in others.  When and where those are appropriate is an empirical question that is susceptible to revision in light of evidence of the effectiveness of those practices at achieving the goals identified in light of those values. Consequently, the precise boundaries of the content of those policies might shift over time in response to new knowledge or understanding about the results they are achieving (or failing to achieve). In approaching its own decision-making with a kind of intellectual humility and openness to changing course, the institutionally modest university models the same habits of curiosity and self-reflection that we hope our students and faculty will also embrace in their academic work.

The University of Chicago deserves credit for its consistent defense of the importance of academic freedom and robust debate to the enterprise of higher education. Recent shifts away from empty and performative university statements have been a step in the right direction. But modesty, and not neutrality, provides a better framework for thinking about the university’s responsibility for sustaining a campus culture that fosters a fearless search for the truth even while affirming its own institutional values.