When it Comes to Being “Great and Good,” Does Institutional Neutrality Have a Role at UVA?
Excerpt
Places of higher education exist to serve as sanctuaries for the exchange of ideas. With diverse student populations, a plethora of ethnic backgrounds and a variety of lived experiences, college campuses are enriched by the students that inhabit them.
However, with substantially sized student bodies, there will undoubtedly be a wide range of opinions regarding the highly contentious political and social issues of our time, with the Israel-Hamas war being one of them. This then presents the question of how higher institutions ought to react. When current events concern the students of these universities, are administrators obligated to issue a statement that demonstrates an ambiguously neutral stance, pacifying the anger of one half of the cohort while only enraging the other?
The Kalven Report, a document stipulating the University of Chicago’s role on institutional neutrality, arose as the creation of a committee by then-University President George Beadle. The purpose of the seven-person committee was to better understand how the University should approach “political and social action.” The committee’s efforts were prompted by the various protests over the social issues of the 1960s, including opposition to the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.
Led by famous legal scholar Harry Kalven Jr., the committee published a report in November 1967 in which they firmly adopted a position of neutrality in order to best preserve the university’s goal of being a haven for “the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.”
“The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic,” the Kalven committee expressed in their statement.
Lauren Horan is fourth year Government and Spanish student from Manakin Sabot, Virginia, and serves on The Jefferson Council Board of Advisors.