The Shils Report and Academic Merit

Hundreds of colleges have adopted the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven report and the 2014 Chicago principles as part of national campaigns led by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Academic Freedom Alliance, and Heterodox Academy. But the largely ignored part of the so-called Chicago Trifecta, the 1970 Shils report, has never been copied by another university.

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education essay, Dean Saitta points to the Shils report as “especially germane in the current moment of disciplinary self-reflection and soul-searching.” Germane, yes. A desirable model, not so much. The Shils report actually represents the betrayal of academic merit in order to get rid of troublesome left-wing faculty—so it’s no surprise that it is increasingly invoked by conservatives today when this political purge is the explicit goal of too many politicians and leaders.

Some admirers of the Shils report seem to imagine that its lead author, sociologist Edward Shils, invented the concept of academic merit. In reality, academic merit was already always and everywhere the presumed norm for academic hiring, albeit often violated in practice. So the statements about academic merit in the Shils report were just standard university blather. The primary innovation of the Shils report was to identify an exception to academic merit for leftist political activists in order to purge progressives from the University of Chicago.

In addition to teaching and research, the Shils report invents a new third aspect of academic evaluation: “contribution to intellectual community.” And the report explicitly downplays service on academic committees as having any importance. Instead, this criterion included vague standards about “conversation in informal situations,” designed to favor the men who discussed ideas over lunch at the Quadrangle Club. But the key part of the “intellectual community” standard is what deserved a negative evaluation that seemed designed to be absolute and disqualifying: “They will abstain from deliberate disruption of the regular operations of the University.” These disruptive protests, according to the Shils report, “cannot claim the protection of academic freedom” and therefore justify purging leftist faculty who embrace them.

(The Shils report does include a fourth criterion, “services,” which mostly applies to medical professors, but it otherwise dismisses the idea of service except for the positive value of editing an academic journal.)

As Saitta points out, the primary motivation for the appointment of the committee that delivered the Shils report was the controversy over sociology professor Marlene Dixon being denied reappointment shortly after she defiantly stood with student protesters against the university administration. The campus protests and sit-in against Dixon’s firing led to one of the largest mass expulsions of student protesters on an American campus and were followed by a dramatic decline in student enrollment that took decades for the University of Chicago to recover from.

But Dixon was not the only leftist sociology professor denied tenure by Shils and his colleagues. A few months after Dixon’s tenure denial roiled the Chicago campus, antiwar professor Richard Flacks (who had already been denied tenure the year before and was serving out his terminal year) was almost beaten to death in his office on May 5, 1969, by an unknown assailant posing as a reporter who wanted to talk with him about his activism. The FBI later denied any involvement in the attack—which may seem like a strange thing for the FBI to do, until you find out that the FBI had launched a covert campaign to have Flacks fired by having an agent pose as a concerned parent writing to the trustees to ask them to remove Flacks. This FBI subterfuge seems like an almost comical misunderstanding of university affairs, where the trustees would never intervene and faculty like Shils would make sure they never needed to, by getting rid of the leftist professors themselves.

Cases like Flacks and Dixon alarmed Shils. He could easily dismiss Marxist academic work, and did so in a report he wrote for the committee that examined Dixon’s case. Denying tenure or reappointment to leftist radicals was easy enough to do, but the protests that resulted could tear apart the campus. Shils wanted to solve this problem by making participation in left-wing protests and sit-ins a reason to ban faculty from being appointed in the first place. There would be no campus protests against tenure denials of faculty like Dixon because the left-wing activists would never get hired.

The murky waters of hiring decisions make it hard to determine to what extent the Shils report has influenced academic appointments at the University of Chicago. Did the “deliberate disruption” rule actually cause any faculty committee to reject hiring a leftist professor? We will probably never know.

Many times, the Shils report violates norms of academic merit and seeks special preferences for traditional, conservative viewpoints: “Great caution must be exercised by appointive committees themselves to prevent their being ‘stampeded’ by the prestige or influence of contemporaneity.” The delusion that there was a “stampede” to embrace new ideas at the University of Chicago is rather laughable.

The Shils report warned of “an increasing tendency for universities to concern themselves in their teaching and research with contemporary events—especially in the social sciences and Humanities.” Shils wanted the university to have an explicit bias against current events, regardless of the academic merit of that research, because he correctly perceived it as a path for more liberal ideas to enter academia.

The Shils report was guilty of what it warns against: “contemporaneity.” It was an overreaction to a contentious moment in campus history when people feared that the core of the University of Chicago was being torn apart from within. And in response, conservatives like Shils made the mistake of straying from academic merit in order to provide an opportunity to get rid of leftists who might engage in “deliberate disruption.”

In the years since it was written, everyone has assumed that the Shils report must be a tribute to academic merit. A 2022 statement by Stanford-affiliated faculty on “Restoring Academic Freedom” called for all universities to adopt the Chicago Trifecta, including “the Shils report making academic contribution the sole basis for hiring and promotion.“ University of Chicago professor Dorian Abbot wrote, “The Shils report requires that faculty hiring and promotion be done solely on the basis of research and teaching merit, with nothing else taken into consideration.” But the Shils report did precisely the opposite of making research and teaching merit the “sole basis” for academic appointments by including the third criterion of “intellectual community” and making anything deemed “deliberate disruption” justification for discrimination.

Some advocates of the Shils report imagine that colleges reject it because of the provision prohibiting considerations of race, gender or other irrelevant characteristics. In reality, nondiscrimination statements were commonplace by the time of the Shils report, and they were completely compatible with calls for affirmative action and diversity. The question of whether you best achieve nondiscrimination by pretending to ignore race or by being aware of its potential biases is still hotly contested, but both approaches work with the words of the Shils report.

Ironically, it’s likely that the Shils report (unlike the Kalven report and the Chicago principles) will never be adopted by any university (and probably is ignored in practice even at the University of Chicago) because it is too left-wing.

The real reason why the Shils report won’t be adopted by universities is because of an academic value much more fundamental than diversity: money. While those largely symbolic and ignored diversity statements are on the wane, colleges increasingly focus on a more important faculty attribute: the ability to lure funding. Candidates for hiring and tenure alike have demands placed on them to display a strong record of attracting external grants, and these profitability statements have become entrenched in academia.

Shils’s old-fashioned conservatism included resentment at the growing corporatization of universities in the 1960s, where government funding of science had fueled a new wave of investment. The Shils report declared that “the capacity or incapacity of a candidate to attract financial resources or to ‘bring them with him’ should not be a criterion for appointment” and warned, “If this rule is not observed, the University will be in danger of becoming an aggregate of affluent mediocrities “ That’s a bold principle—one far too dangerous for universities devoted to the pursuit of affluence.

The Shils report is not a terrible document. The wise warning about “affluent mediocrities” is extraordinary, and most of its routine details about academic merit are quite thoughtful. A few elements positively reflect the progressive impulses of the time, such as “inviting and considering the assessments of candidates for appointment made in a consultative capacity by students.” But its beneficial elements are almost certain to be ignored, while its dangerous willingness to amend academic merit in order to remove “disruptive” professors might be its primary appeal today (along with the mistaken belief that its standard ban on racial discrimination would prohibit affirmative action).

The Shils report is not a triumphant monument to academic merit that needs to be imitated by other universities; it is an attack on academic merit that seeks to purge leftist faculty for their protests.