New Book Aims to Help College Presidents Pick Their Battles

In his new book, The University’s Voice: Principled Silence and Purposeful Speech (Johns Hopkins University Press), Steven Poskanzer draws on his 20 years as a college president—first at SUNY New Paltz and then Carleton College—to offer guidelines for when university leaders should issue public statements on behalf of their institution and when they should remain quiet. A lawyer by training, Poskanzer is a firm proponent of First Amendment protections for free speech, but also believes that in general, higher education and society both benefit when top administrators practice reticence—except in a few key situations.

He spoke with Inside Higher Ed over Zoom about slippery slopes, moral culpability and the limits of academic freedom.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: How did your experience as a president at a public institution and a small private one lead you to write this book?

A: In the 2010s, I started seeing more demands as a president for stances, including more letters circulated by my peers, saying, “Sign on to this.” Social media added to it a lot. I also saw more ad hoc decisions being made in the heat of the moment—“Let’s solve this particular problem by taking a stance on it”—with perhaps less thought about what the repercussions or the precedence of that would be. I’m a lawyer, so I think in terms of precedent and long-term consequences. So the combination of those two things really made me worry. The amount of time I spent responding to demands was clearly growing, as was the intensity with which the demands were coming. And this definitely got worse during the first Trump administration, but I could see it coming even before then.

Q: You write that leaders should primarily consider “fidelity and focus” in determining whether and when to speak with an institutional voice. What do you mean by that?

A: I start with two basic concepts. The first is that colleges and universities exist for particular reasons. There’s something that we’re put on earth to do, and different schools have different missions, but you really should use as your touchstone, what is the fundamental purpose of this place? That’s a good starting point, but you also have to stay faithful to the mission. That’s the fidelity part.

But the second step is being mindful that all colleges and universities exist in this weird, interlocking dynamic relationship with broader society. In some ways, we are a very troublesome, discordant, disruptive enterprise in that society, right? I mean, we’re the place that comes up with the ideas that destroy entire industries and disrupt the economy. So we do that, and at the same time, we take young people and we teach them very consciously to question every verity that their parents have taught them. So at some level, it’s kind of surprising and yet brave of society to encourage the existence of these entities that create so much trouble and so much disruption.

Q: Aren’t you selling higher ed a little short? I mean, what about all the medical cures and discoveries and inventions …

A: Of course! And that’s why the bargain is the right bargain, OK? The benefit that we bring is wildly greater than the disruption. The best thing you could ever want for your town is a college or university. But knowing that there is this delicate dynamic, you should not tear more at that social compact than you need to to do your job. Your mission requires you often to be out of step, off kilter with the rest of society, and that’s great. That’s what we’re here to do; we should embrace that. But you don’t pick fights you don’t need to pick, because you are going to have to pick some fights sometimes to be faithful and true to your mission.

Q: That gets into your “general rule of reticence” for university leaders in weighing whether to take a stance—which is not the same as institutional neutrality. Can you talk about the difference?

A: I debated a lot about what word best captured what I think of as the default position universities should take. I don’t think it’s neutrality, because we aren’t neutral about our core principles or our core values and mission; we are bold partisans and brave defenders of those values. Some people talk about restraint, and I think that’s a plausible choice. But to my mind, reticence reflects a conscious decision whether or when to speak.

The reasons for choosing to be reticent are both philosophical and pragmatic. They are philosophical to the extent that … [when you take a stand], you are blithely assuming you got the right answer—which in higher education, we’ve never got the right answer! We don’t know what truth is; there’s always a better theory out there. There are philosophical reasons why you should be intellectually modest about taking stances.

There are also utterly pragmatic reasons. Once you start taking stances, where does it end? And how do you decide? You have a vote; do faculty views get to count more because they’re there longer? Do trustees get to count more because they have a fiduciary responsibility? There’s no good way to do this. I am discomfited, and always have been, by the notion of slippery slopes. It’s one thing to say, “Well, this issue is necessary to take a stance on.” Why isn’t another issue? Ukraine, yes, Gaza, no? And you’re going to draw distinctions between moral culpability. This actor is terrible; this actor is bad, but not terrible enough. That’s a problem … if you’re going to be consistent, and if it’s necessary to really step back, then you should truly step back—not on one little thing.

Q: Since you started this book three or so years ago, a lot has happened in higher ed that nobody foresaw—the Oct. 7 protests and campus responses, not to mention the rampant attacks on DEI and Charlie Kirk’s murder. Has anything made you rethink your framework in any way?

A: I feel like, for once in my scholarly career, I absolutely caught a wave that I didn’t see coming. And this topic has become incredibly important and timely. I talk in the book about the first Trump administration and how I felt that definitely, along with COVID, was a contributing factor to what I was seeing in 2022 as pressure. It’s gotten considerably worse. And, you know, an interesting question right now is whether or not what we are facing with the current demands against Harvard and Columbia and other places, does that fit into one of my categories of taking stances?

Q: Right. One of the few situations that you say absolutely requires an institutional response is when a college or university faces an existential threat.

A: It’s impossible to read [the Trump administration’s] Harvard and Columbia demand letters without coming to a conclusion that this is fundamentally an existential threat. The demands that are being made about who can be on your faculty and who should control what students [you admit] and curricular decisions … those types of attacks coming from the federal government, we have not seen before. Even in the McCarthy era, it was not quite as orchestrated and organized as this. That is a moment where I think it is appropriate for colleges and universities to take stances.

Q: Can you talk about the other instances when you think it makes sense for institutions to take a stance?

A: There are four general categories, and I always have to note different schools are going to reach different conclusions, because their mission and circumstances are going to be different. The first is when it is a fundamentally educational issue that colleges and universities have institutional knowledge that would be useful to illuminate the public debate. I’m entirely comfortable with—and indeed think it’s necessary for—individual faculty and students to take stances on everything under the sun. But if you take something like affirmative action or DACA, colleges and universities have tons of institutional experience—they know the educational impact of having Dreamers on campus, or whether or not we were in fact achieving educational goals by having a more diverse student body. I have no problem with the institution taking a stance on something that’s fundamentally educational.

Second, you’re allowed to talk about and defend your mission. So is it entirely appropriate for Penn to go in and argue that there should be more federal funding for graduate medical education? Yes. Is it appropriate for colleges to go in and try and get tax exemptions for land that they’re going to build a new academic building on? Of course it is. When you do this, you will undoubtedly be attacked for being self-interested. And the answer is, yeah, we are. It’s our mission; it’s what we’re here to do, and we should stand up bravely and forthrightly for it.

The third category are things that impact the environment necessary for faculty and students to do their work. Institutions need to stand up and defend academic freedom, for instance. Can Florida universities take a stance against the law in Florida that says you can’t teach certain subjects? I believe you can. And to defend science, fact-based, replicable research, the importance of libraries, the role of tenure. None of these are the purpose of the university, but they are essential preconditions.

And the fourth is the existential threat category, which I don’t put things into lightly. If you start treating everything like an existential threat, you’re going to end up taking stances on all kinds of things you probably shouldn’t. But if you ignore the existential threat, you don’t have a college or university to defend at the end of the day. Somewhere in there there’s a tipping point.

Q: You write that universities need to think about their compact with society in determining whether or when to speak out. But that social compact is really frayed right now, given the lack of confidence in higher ed, questions about the return on investment, declining public trust. I mean, how does that frayed compact impact the calculation of whether universities should speak or not?

A: It’s got to affect it, but universities have to play for the really long haul, and this is something that I learned from my years in the public sector. A public university should never be too closely affiliated with any particular political configuration, because it’s going to change. To succeed in the centuries-long mission of these places, you’ve got to transcend any particular political alignment.

If you look at the history of how American higher education has worked, it is absolutely strained right now. I think there’s serious work to be done by both parties to that compact, to reinvigorate it, to re-demonstrate to the public why it is such a successful enterprise. And a lot of that is stopping colleges and universities being used unfairly as political whipping boys. But a lot of it is also colleges and universities sticking to their knitting and doing what’s right consistently over the long term, making the case for why what they’re doing is extraordinarily valuable. Sometimes, if you’re taking stances on things that aren’t really related to your mission, you’re expending political capital. You’re diverting the university from its mission, or, even worse, you’re undercutting its mission by not staying true to the things that are most important. Because you’re going to need every bit of that political capital and every bit of the strength of what you do eventually, in the long run.

Q: So are you saying that in deciding when and whether to speak out, university leaders can play a role in repairing that compact with society?

A: Yes, absolutely. By taking smart stances when it is necessary, and choosing reticence in situations where you shouldn’t take a stance. If we do that consistently over time, we strengthen our hand, we strengthen that compact. We help reinforce the primacy of our mission and the importance of what we do. And I think that’s really important for higher ed right now.

Q: Under the current Trump administration, a lot of institutions have capitulated, or, in your terms maybe, shifted in their mission to appease the federal government. Where do you draw the line between capitulation and pragmatism or preservation?

A: The line is always murky, but you should be really worried about compromising on principle. When you start handing over control over what the intellectual agenda of a field should be, which belongs to the faculty or what you honestly believe students should learn, you’re in trouble.

The duty of care goes both ways. Society should be careful about battering institutions that play such a delicate and important role, and universities, in turn, need to be careful that we are upholding the absolute highest academic standards, that we are not using our classrooms as a way to indoctrinate students, that we are not politicizing the university. That’s the care that we owe back. But it’s a two-way street, and in a moment where the political powers that be are not demonstrating the level of care and respect that is owed to colleges and universities, it gets even harder on the other side of that bargain to say, “Well, we need to be careful, we need to be respectful.” But you do, even as you need to be brave when you have to take a stance.

Q: Does being bound by the First Amendment make it easier or harder for public university leaders to do their job?

A: On the one hand, [the First Amendment] gives you something to point to. And it is not entirely within your control, as opposed to, “This is just my policy that I’m setting up.” On the other hand, the First Amendment exists to serve very different purposes from what academic freedom is meant to serve. If I were drawing a Venn diagram, there’s definitely overlap, but the First Amendment is really fundamentally about political discourse. And political discourse is meant to be more fractious and outrageous and freewheeling. Academic discourse is mostly meant to arrive at a better understanding of the truth, to develop knowledge. It is by its own ground rules more reflective, more evidence-driven, less visceral, less emotional. Those two things do not always mesh perfectly. To the extent you can on a college campus, I think often you will succeed by intellectualizing and bringing more of that academic purpose to the discourse that takes place.

Q: You say institutions should hew to their individual missions. What’s an example of an issue that some institutions would be totally justified in speaking out about, but others wouldn’t?

A: A Catholic institution that as part of its mission views its responsibility as propagating and supporting the faith is going to take a very different position on abortion than a purely secular institution. I can imagine circumstances under which a particular Catholic institution, based on its mission and history, would be entirely legitimate in taking a stance that the Dobbs decision is the right decision, whereas a secular institution shouldn’t say anything.

Q: You stepped down as president of Carleton in 2021. Now that you’re back on the faculty, do you have more freedom to say what you want?

A: I have more freedom, though I’m not quite as free because I also feel a personal and institutional obligation to help my colleagues succeed. I’m not going to take positions on what Carleton is doing. But, yeah, I’ve got free speech now as a faculty member that I did not as president.