Vanderbilt’s Board Declares War Against Academic Freedom

On July 29, Vanderbilt University’s board of trustees announced the release of “The University And Its Purpose: A Declaration of First Principles.” Under the guidance of Chancellor Daniel Diermeier, this declaration marks an alarming threat to free expression and represents the worst attack yet by a Board of Trustees against academic values.

Last month, I warned that the so-called Vanderbilt Report on scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences seemed to embrace the “first steps” toward authoritarian answers to its (badly) alleged crimes against academic standards. Little could I imagine that the explicit march toward censorship would come so quickly at Vanderbilt.

The Vanderbilt board goes far beyond mere criticism of faculty with views they dislike, to claiming that professors with views they deem “political” are violating their professional duties: “Faculty have a corresponding duty to act in accordance with and actively maintain scholarly standards. Faculty fail to live up to this duty if they individually or collectively (e.g., in academic units or scholarly associations) subordinate scholarly standards to a political and social agenda.”

This standard is extraordinarily dangerous to academic freedom because it endorses punishing faculty if they are deemed to have a “political and social agenda,” whatever that means.

The Vanderbilt board expands this threat against any faculty deemed to promote evil political ideas in class discussions: “Faculty—individually and through academic units—fail in their responsibility if course offerings, syllabi, or class discussions suppress or promote ideas and perspectives that are rooted in political or personal commitments as opposed to academic merit.” There is nothing wrong with promoting perspectives that have political commitments; in fact, intellectual diversity requires this, because some viewpoints include political commitments.

Yet, the alleged evil of a political opinion is seen by the Vanderbilt board to justify extreme repression of academic norms and standards: “When academic units deviate from these commitments, academic leaders need to address such dysfunction through standard academic processes such as replacement of leadership; reorganization of units, including receivership and closure; the creation of new units; or focused hiring and educational initiatives.”

My answer to these proposals is: No, no, no, no, and no.

Absolutely none of these extraordinary measures are “standard academic processes.” They are clear attacks on shared governance and academic freedom, and they are direct violations of institutional neutrality because the administration is favoring one ideological side in academic disputes over another.

Let’s take them in order:

• “Replacement of leadership”: Department chairs should be elected by the members of a department. A department chair can be removed via due process if they commit misconduct, but taking a political position is not misconduct, and the administration should not get to determine any replacements because departments should elect their leaders.

• “Reorganization of units”: This term is unclear, but it seems to indicate rearranging departments in order to destroy one that allows views the administration opposes. Reorganizations of units rarely serve any useful purpose, and should only be done with faculty consultation and approval.
• “Receivership and closure”: Receivership typically refers to a situation where internal conflicts within a department are so extreme that temporary outside leadership is needed to ensure the functioning of the program. Closure is an extreme action justified only by financial crisis or purely academic standards. Receivership and closure should never be a response to complaints about political agendas, and any action of this kind should require university-wide faculty approval.

• “Creation of new units”: Universities can create new academic units with faculty approval based on important academic goals. However, colleges should never create duplicate departments for ideological reasons designed to replicate and then replace departments.

• “Focused hiring and educational initiatives”: Hiring that is “focused” seems to mean giving preference to conservatives, perhaps by focusing on subfields perceived to have more right-leaning members. This is highly inappropriate and such politically motivated hiring should never be imposed on departments. (Voluntary educational initiatives, on the other hand, can legitimately aim at widening the diversity of viewpoints as part of legitimate academic goals.)

An institution must remain neutral with regard to the ideological beliefs of its faculty. A college does not hire based on ideology, and an administration must not manipulate the ideological composition of its departments, even when it dislikes the ideology of some professors.

The Vanderbilt board claims that it is implementing its devotion to institutional neutrality, and compels it to an extraordinary degree: “the university will implement a policy of institutional neutrality that requires university leaders at all levels to abstain from actions or speech relating to political and social matters that are not directly connected to its core purpose.”

This means that all university leaders—including program heads and department chairs—will be banned from any speech at any time discussing any political matters that the board deems to stray from the core purpose.

Institutional neutrality does not require silencing university leaders at all levels; in fact, such silencing is a violation of institutional neutrality, since it requires the institution to intervene and censor speech deemed too political by the powers that be.

Faculty in the classroom and department chairs speaking anywhere about anything are not the only ones at Vanderbilt who will have to watch what they say. Some of the worst proposals for repression by the Vanderbilt board are aimed at foreign scholars.

One alarming part of the Vanderbilt board’s declaration is its stark xenophobia. According to Vanderbilt, “Universities will endeavor to expand access and opportunity for American students, consistent with their academic standards and institutional mission.” But giving preference to American students is directly contrary to principles of academic merit.

But much worse is how Vanderbilt plans to treat foreign students or scholars: “Upon learning that a foreign entity or individual is operating with malign intent or counter to American interests, institutions have an obligation to act swiftly and transparently in severing that relationship.”

The Trump administration’s attacks on international students and scholars have caused devastating destruction to American universities. But this marks the first time a research university has deliberately harmed itself by adopting anti-foreigner rules even more repressive than the Trump regime.

These undefined terms mean that almost anything—including political opinions—could be deemed “malign” in some way or “counter to American interests.” Vanderbilt’s standards are even vaguer than the similar excuses invoked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio (“undermine the foreign policy objectives or compromise the national security interests of the United States”) to ban international students for their political opinions. At least the Trump administration only claimed that “national security interests” could justify banning a foreigner; Vanderbilt expands that to any “American interests.” Vanderbilt’s declaration creates a segregated code of conduct, where a university openly announces that foreign students and staff have far fewer rights to free speech on campus than Americans do.

The attack on a “foreign entity” is also alarming because there’s a term for this: academic boycotts. In fact, no other board at an American college has ever openly espoused such a clear standard for boycotting Israel as this statement. All you have to do is argue that Israel’s government has a “malign intent” in killing thousands of people in Gaza, or that the war Israel instigated with Iran is “counter to American interests”—which a strong majority of Americans now believe—and this statement requires Vanderbilt to completely sever any relationship they have with Israel—which would mean divestment from Israel, ending Vanderbilt’s relationship with the Israel Antiquities Authority, and the deplatforming of high-level Israeli officials who often speak at Vanderbilt.

As a critic of all academic boycotts, I completely oppose the tactics of the boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) movement (while strongly supporting people’s rights to advocate them), but even the worst proposal by BDS advocates has never gone so far as the Vanderbilt plan in its potential repression.

No university board has ever done more to undermine its status as a global entity than the Vanderbilt board in this declaration. Why would any foreign citizen work or study at Vanderbilt knowing that they can be dismissed for saying anything “counter to American interests”?

The idea that anyone would celebrate this xenophobic assault by a university on the free speech rights of foreign students and faculty and attack on everyone’s academic freedom is baffling to me. Yet Heterodox Academy praised the Vanderbilt Declaration for “its continuing efforts to steer the sector in principled leadership.”

Stanford Alumni for Free Speech and Critical Thinking declared that the Vanderbilt declaration is “an extraordinarily well written statement of everything we and others have long been urging for Stanford and other colleges and universities throughout the country. We suggest that Stanford’s senior administration and Trustees shouldn’t waste time writing their own statement but should just adopt this statement exactly as written.”

On August 3, Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent a letter to all colleges, demanding that they take action to implement the Trump regime’s attacks on higher education. The Vanderbilt declaration goes far beyond what the Trump administration dreamed of proposing for colleges, imposing an extreme attack on academic freedom, shared governance, international scholars, and free speech that may be unmatched in the history of statements by American college boards.