Never having been asked to comment on anything on this blog, I felt a little puzzled, but eventually thought, why not? So here, if you like, are some theses on understanding this instance of a presidential speech.

(1) A presidential speech is a balancing act, a diplomatic performance; and as such, it is almost inevitably produced under severe institutional and diplomatic constraints. One might put it like this: university presidents enjoy no right to free speech. Or at least, no free speech without the threat of retribution from any of numerous quarters. If you read Dean Dad’s wonderful blog about his life as a community college dean, the first thing you find out is that university management (call them leadership or administrators if you prefer) operates in a state of constant compromise and constraint. In a great recent post, he explains something about the constraints on what one can say in his role: “When I spoke only for myself, it didn’t really matter what I said. But as a leader in the institution, comments that once would have been merely snarky were suddenly taken as indications of larger directions.” Just think of Larry Summers. As president, one is heavily vetted to begin with, continuously accountable to multiple constituencies, and under pressure not to rock the boat. And as Dean Dad points out, “front-room talk” isn’t the same as “back-room talk”: even if presidents may be frank in private, they are seldom unguarded when acting in their ceremonial role. First thesis: presidents are not free agents. Corollary: a presidential speech on academic freedom invokes a value that it cannot practice.

(2) The presidential speech is a kind of self-instituting, self-authorizing ceremonial language that functions to assure or reassure the continued dignity of the institution. And a presidential speech is hence less an empirical report on an institution than a moment in the reproduction of an institutional self-image. As in commercial advertising or a political campaign, one puts one’s best foot forward. It’s less that what is said is false as that campus life is glossed with the veneer of an institutional fantasy. This fantasy — one can see it in Zimmer’s speech — implicitly embodies its own criteria of evaluation, which are essentially aesthetic. In such a speech, institutional reality vanishes into the self-satisfied ether of institutional desires for beautiful self-representations.

Hence one of the most striking moments in Zimmer’s speech is when he says — his speech by the way is about academic freedom and hence he talks about the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, a document which I have already examined on this blog — anyway, Zimmer, I was saying, rightly says that to understand the Kalven Report we must situate it in its institutional context. But to my eyes as an anthropologist, what Zimmer calls “contextualiz[ing] the Kalven report within institutional culture” would be better called contextualizing the Kalven report in his obligatory presidential fantasy of institutional culture. See for yourself:

…I believe it is necessary to contextualize the Kalven report within institutional culture. The commitment to maintain open, rigorous, intense inquiry in an environment of maximal intellectual freedom is not a simple one. It is difficult and to succeed demands a culture and community that will support it. The University of Chicago holds these as its highest values and we seek to reinforce them at every turn. The Kalven report is a component of this culture. Many other institutions push other values forward as legitimate competing interests, and their culture may not support such a strong position on this particular set of values. Every institution needs to come to its own conclusion as to what it is and what it wants to be. It needs to decide how much weight to give to various competing interests. Kalven only works at the University of Chicago because of these common values at the University, and can only be fully understood as a part of the realization of these values.

The University of Chicago’s “culture” here is one that is presented as having monolithically shared and uncontested values. Its community is portrayed as a heroic agent that has managed to maintain a difficult but successful “commitment to maintain open, rigorous, intense inquiry in an environment of maximal intellectual freedom.” This obviously is not an empirical description but an artfully patterned and arranged permutation of highly valorized ceremonial language. There are no real people in this description, no disciplinary or economic or political differences, none of the gritty detail of routine institutional dysfunction. Uttered by a janitor, this description would be surreal (given the class and educational connotations that lie hidden within this governing language); uttered by a student, it would be sycophantic. Uttered by a president, it is a moment that shows the empty self-referentiality of ceremonial rhetoric. (I don’t mean to completely trash these fantasies of institutional valor, and I’m certainly not saying there’s nothing good about the university, but I do want to emphasize the aesthetic fixations of this discourse.) And while presidential descriptions do vary over the years, this public affirmation of institutional virtue is clearly part of the obligations of the president’s job, and not mainly the expression of a personal or scholarly opinion. Second thesis: a presidential speech is institutional fantasy hour, an obligatory ritual pause whose ideological emptiness guarantees that its form will be more significant than its content.

(3) This description of institutional culture should be taken as official self-image rather than a genuine description, but let’s say we read it naively as a description, since Zimmer does gesture towards describing a culture, even if somewhat rhetorically. Now, frankly, this description of a “culture” strains my ethnographic faculties. If Zimmer ever happens to read this blog — a moment I do not foresee — I must protest that my experience suggests that, as an empirical description, what he says is quite false. Chicago is in reality not as special as it imagines itself: it is an institution much more like institutions elsewhere: it is a university where one hears plenty of false and unrigorous claims, plenty of lazy inquiries that are neither open nor intense, plenty of situations where “intellectual freedom” is limited by prevailing disciplinary prejudice and intellectual narrow-mindedness. Zimmer states that the university has a “commitment to maintain open, rigorous, intense inquiry in an environment of maximal intellectual freedom,” but interpreted empirically, this statement is not only false but also performatively self-refuting. In other words, the very sloppiness and clearly deeply constrained nature of this presidential statement is already evidence in itself that institutional culture is neither perfectly rigorous nor perfectly free. Third thesis: read inside-out, contextually and symptomatically, presidential speech can serve as a barometer of the disingenousness of campus self-images.

(4) The rhetoric of “culture” and “community” serves to conceal all the ways in which the university is neither a settled culture nor a community of equals. Particularly disingenuously, the university administration disappears as an actor, as if the voice of the president was, unproblematically, the voice of the university. It seems, in fact, that Zimmer has a deeply autocratic view of himself as the sole authorized voice of the university:

Were [former president] Hutchins’s political activities an expression of academic freedom or were they chilling, given that he embodied the University as its president? Many today, including myself, would question this level of political engagement for a University president. While separating the University from its president in a legal sense is easy enough, it is problematic practically, and thus the potential chilling effect of a politically active president is something I and other of Hutchins’s successors have tried to avoid.

Now, indeed as I said above, it is difficult for a president not to be viewed as a spokesperson for a university, but what strikes me here is that Zimmer sees his only option as being one of retreat into his role as the practical “embodiment” of the university. He shows no interest in developing a campus process for developing a more democratic university consensus. Indeed, insofar as he ardently defends the Kalven Report — which asserts that the university (administration) must take no political positions, even ones overwhelmingly demanded by faculty and students — he asserts that the university president’s role is to resist the will of the campus majority. For Zimmer, the administration’s role appears to be to resist outside as well as inside pressures. (There is something deeply disturbing to me, frankly, about his equation of 1930s Nazi dominance of the University of Berlin with 1980s calls on the university to divest from South Africa. The idea that he would very nearly equate these as unwanted political influences is frightening.) What he doesn’t mention, of course, is that the administration is permanently obliged to bring in funds for the university and that this might be relevant to an assessment of political neutrality. “Investing” for him does not count as a political act, only “divesting,” which is suspect, apparently, because it involves imposing an outside political will on what should be a strictly internal business decision.

Thus again we are back at the nexus of institutional power and money, two major features of university life that, one might think, would be highly relevant for a theory of academic freedom. And yet are so thoroughly unexplored in Zimmer’s speech. But in the end, I almost pity this president. Even if he happened personally to agree with everything I had said here, he would, on my assessment, be incapable of saying anything so scathing in a public forum. His role, and the dignity of the institution he claims to embody, would prohibit it.

One day when I have time to write a longer article, a comparative analysis of university presidents’ discourse from both sides of the Atlantic would seem to be in order.

My objection to this question, which has been strengthening for months like steeping tea, is the following: strictly internal politics aren’t actually politics. “Academic politics” as commonly discussed is an oxymoron and a terminological error. Loosely speaking, I would draw the following distinction: politics is about social change; but “academic politics” are merely a form of internal quarreling central to the reproduction of institutional order.

Now I agree, as someone is sure to object, that the internal affairs of a department can involve scheming and bickering and back-room deals; yes, they involve structures of power and domination, (occasional) resistance and (very seldom) subversion; certainly, they have institutionalized decision-making processes, like democratic voting or dictatorial edict. And some of these structures and processes are commonly thought to be political. But to call all of this stuff “academic politics” is, in my view, a confusion of certain means used in politics, with politics itself.

What is politics, then? — one might reasonably ask at this point. Or less grandiosely, what do I mean by politics here in this post? The term politics is obviously used to refer to a bunch of semi-overlapping things: for one thing, there’s the official “political sphere” (the thing one discovers in the politics section of the newspaper with its speeches and pundits); for another thing, there’s everything that people do to interfere with and alter social reproduction, which only seldom overlaps with the “political sphere”; for another thing, the term “politics” can be applied to anything — it becomes a traveling metaphor that can be used in whatever other contexts one likes. I guess my view, not terribly well formed but sufficient for this argument, is that politics (in those modern worlds that have it as such) is the key secular boundary zone between the sacred and the profane, a space filled with both utopian projections of nonactual, future (and presumably “better”) worlds and with bitter and inevitably compromising struggles to implement some fractions of these utopian projections.

The important term here is world: what’s purely personal or interpersonal is not politics, on this account, except insofar as it reshapes the world and not just the individual circumstance within that world. The suffering of the oppressed, for example, is not political until it is explicitly politicized. Hiring a new person in a department is not a political act, unless it happens to be part of a reworlding project. I read “the personal is political” as saying not that everything is political always and everywhere, but that issues arising in personal life are potentially open to being politicized, and are themselves the outcome of past political struggles whose outcomes have become sedimented as social order. This means, as a corollary, that a lot of life, for those of us who are unable to be politically active at every moment, goes on in some comparatively nonpolitical space of the ordinary grind, what Lauren would call ongoingness or Robert Desjarlais would have called struggling along.

Now, in academia, especially in the loosely postmodern social sciences or humanities, there are plenty of people who do hold that everything is more or less political, or more precisely perhaps that everything related to the workings of power is political, or anyway that everything related to disagreement and contestation is political. But is every fight a political fight? And is every social practice that involves power therefore political? Not necessarily, it seems to me. To clarify the last paragraph: true enough, any social practice is always potentially political, but it seems to me the passage from something being potentially political to being actually politicized is itself a social process. If we think everything is always already political, then we are likely to overlook the intricate processes of politicization and depoliticization, of breakage and reintegration in ordinary life, at work around us.

I admit that part of the urge to argue that everything is political comes from a perfectly valid intuition that the boundaries of what’s politicized are themselves sometimes politically organized. For example, if in the face of feminist critique traditional gender roles are cast as a matter of sheer human nature, that can amount to a political meta-argument that gender roles are not something that should be open to political struggle. In this case, we might say that the boundaries of politics are themselves unfairly politically constricted. (I am in a sense trying to constrict the boundaries of politics here in this post, though only in a conceptual sense and not in a way that would inhibit any concrete issue from being politicized.)

But the converse case can occur, too, which is where the boundaries of politics are outlandishly extended, not for any properly political reason but simply because politics can become a word that’s fetishized and appropriated as part of the academic ascription of value. Take the old canard that academic politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low. This appears to have been codified as Sayre’s Law, and it claims that “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.” This is an idiotic claim, I have to say: I defy any reader to produce a contested tenure case that rises to the intensity of sheer collective sentiment felt, for example, by pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian activists. But at any rate, what I think is happening in talk about “academic politics” and its bitterness is that the banality of maintaining the institutional status quo is simply being dramatized and over-valued by calling it politics. What better way to glorify the administrative tasks of inefficient and indecisive faculty governance, than by sanctifying them as politics and raising them metaphorically into the historic sphere of revolutions, empires, fundamental social transformations? The boundaries of politics in this case are not wrongly constricted but hyperbolically ballooned. And the concealed politics of the status quo are, if anything, masked and misrecognized by the illusion that one is doing politics through one’s involvement in minor strife about institutional operation.

I should say that sometimes academic life actually is involved in politics. Hiring certain professors is politically controversial — anarchists, for example — and can indeed pose the spectre of a different institutional world than was previously known. And the political significance and implications of academia are in fact really complicated to analyze. (Good thing for me, because my research project would be too easy otherwise.) But the important thing is that academia’s political entanglements are not given, are not always already instituted in every academic scene, are somewhat contingent and for that very reason need to be shown rather than presumed.

But someone reading this far will still say: in the end, every action and habit is always reshaping a world, one cannot arbitrarily decide that some such actions “count” as transformative politics while others don’t. To which I respond: it is the height of feeble megalomania to fantasize that everything we do matters to the world, which is beyond us and not easily changed.

Consider the following case. A few years ago there were efforts to get the University of Chicago to divest from Darfur. They failed. At the time, the president Zimmer justified the decision by referring to the Kalven Report, a 1967 document explaining that, in short, the university should be the forum for individuals to formulate their own political positions, but should not itself take political positions. Importantly, there were multiple arguments for what the authors called a “heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day, or modifying its corporate activities to foster social or political values, however compelling and appealing they may be.” The Kalven Report justifies its conclusions with three arguments:

1. An argument that the university has no method for reaching political consensus, because it is obligated to respect dissenting opinions, and not overrule them by majority vote. Hence, any institutional politics would fail to respect minority rights. This is an argument about the ethics of representation and decision-making.
2. An argument that any institutional involvement in politics could undercut the university’s “prestige and influence.” Supposedly, a university can “[endanger] the conditions for its existence and effectiveness” by becoming politically involved. This seems to be a pragmatic argument about the university’s conditions of institutional stability, which are thought to decline as it takes sides on salient social issues.
3. An argument that the university’s “mission,” which is (predictably) described as the “discovery, improvement and dissemination of knowledge,” simply does not include short-term political involvement. “It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby,” says the report. This is a rather Platonic argument about the university’s apparently eternal social essence. (As Paul Horwitz pointed out last year in commenting on the report, there is of course no reason why every university must have the same mission. Moreover, as the French university historian Jacques Verger would have put it, universities change with the times, including in their missions and concepts. So this argument is, on the face of it, the most fallacious of the three.)

The report, of course, leaves room for an exception to the policy of institutional noninvolvement in politics, or rather two exceptions:

1. When political conflict threatens the university’s existence or of “the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.”
2. When the university is involved with money and property, or otherwise acts in a corporate role.

According to the reminiscences of Jamie Kalven, the son of the report’s author (Harry Kalven Jr.), the committee could have put more stress on the exceptions, but chose instead to emphasize the guiding principles.

Now, in evaluating the Kalven Report we have to examine not just its logical structure but also its contexts of use. Although I am no historian of the document, a few initial points are clear. According to Geoffrey Stone, it was written in the late sixties as a means of allowing the university to avoid having to take an official position against the Vietnam War, in spite of what must have been massive student opposition. The document has since been invoked in at least three instances: the campaign to divest from South Africa in the eighties (failed), the campaign to divest from Darfur (failed, as mentioned already), and the campaign against the Milton Friedman Institute this fall (not terribly successful so far). Interestingly enough, this last instance was the only time when the Kalven Report has been used as ammunition against the administration. Faculty critics cited the report in order to argue that the $200-million proposed endowment for the MFI was a (conservative) political statement on the administration’s part.

This last citation of the Report is interesting because it cuts against the apparent trend of the document’s use: as a policy document serving as a shield for whatever decision the administration has already decided. I am generally inclined to agree with the judgment of an alumnus, Bob, who opined that “The Chicago Board of Trustees, with the complicity of the Administration, has used the Kalven Report to justify doing whatever it wished to do anyway, ignoring the Report whenever what it wished to do was fundamentally political (and of course chosing to do nothing is also to take a political position), and invoking it whenever it didn’t wish to be constrained in its activities.”

This points to a very important institutional facet of the Kalven Report, which went mostly overlooked in the otherwise good critical discussion among law professors last year (Geoffrey Stone, Rick Garnett, Paul Horwitz, plus comments). In short: a university, and most certainly the University of Chicago, is not simply a complicated intellectual community; it is also, and sometimes above all, a hierarchical quasi-corporate bureaucracy. The Kalven Report tells us itself that there is no means for the whole university to reach agreement as a collective. That holds for the document itself: the Kalven Report was not written democratically. Rather, it was written by a committee of seven professors appointed directly by the university president. Here is a key paradox of the document: purporting to speak on behalf of the university as a collective, it is in fact only the statement of a small minority masquerading as the will of the people. Or perhaps, the will of the administration masquerading as the will of the university.

Also, the document itself serves as an exemplar of codified, entextualized institutional norms, of objectified authority. The Kalven Report, after all, need not have been written – I suspect that many universities do not have an analogous document. All these problematic cases of divestment and wars could have been resolved ad hoc, without a guiding document. Nonetheless, the Report has managed to set the terms of future debate about institutional responsibility, accruing symbolic value over time simply by existing as an institutionally authorized text. The politics of putting policies down in official documents would be worth analyzing here, in much more detail.

What then, in the end, are the tacit politics of the Kalven Report itself? What kind of politics are implicit in its claim to steer clear of politics? (Not that everything is political, but claims of political neutrality are often deeply political gestures.) We know that it has served to save the institution from having to condemn Vietnam, to divest from Darfur or from South Africa. In the case of Darfur, according to one comment on Stone’s post, there was no morally neutral option available. The Kalven Report, it seems to me, can create situations in which, far from remaining institutionally neutral, the university administration can assert its own minority politics and thwart the will of the campus majority. Of course, since a central duty of the administration is making money, administrative politics can easily tend towards a cynical pragmatism in which positive ROI compensates for any negative considerations. Money and investment and economic action are not free of political presuppositions or implications, as the Kalven Report authors only grudgingly acknowledged, and it seems to me that exception (2), above, should cover an enormous amount of ground.

Of course, as I’ve observed elsewhere, business influence at the University of Chicago is immense. But I’m not sure that we can ascribe administrators’ false hopes of “staying out of politics” to business culture or economic necessity alone. Nor is it true, contrary to the pablum about timeless missions, that the university will cease to be a real university, or lose its public respect, if it takes sides on political issues. The proof of this is obvious: some 155 U.S. universities divested, at least in part, from South Africa, including prestigious institutions like Harvard, Cornell, and the University of California. It would, of course, be stupid to say that these universities have ceased to be universities in consequence.

I would hypothesize that in the last analysis, the Kalven Report serves none of the noble functions it proclaims: it does not make the university politically neutral or avoid controversy; it does not necessarily enhance the university’s prestige (since political inaction can well be popularly interpreted as a reactionary statement); it does not promote the individual’s right to dissent on campus, which is full of all sorts of semi-official orthodoxies; it does not help the university to live up to its timeless mission (since there is no such thing). As far as its content goes, it is a minor ideological document that serves to promote various convenient but false beliefs about the nature of academic institutions. Perhaps on the whole, Bob is right: the Kalven Report serves primarily to prevent the majority of teachers and students from having input into the administrative decision-making process.

“That’s the burden of the job: knowing all the things that others don’t know or would rather not know. Much that I know I can’t talk about, and I have had to get used to being the object of (usually) undeserved suspicion. Because I know so much, my actions are not fully intelligible to those who observe them. The hardest part of being provost has been learning that it’s right and proper that I be suspected — that such vigilance is part of what keeps our institution healthy.

In the end, the burden of knowledge is worth it. The pleasures of the job are many, not least of which is understanding this marvelous institution so well — a Rube Goldberg creation that really does work, and very well indeed. And the opportunity to kibitz on the intellectual lives of more than 500 keenly intelligent and resourceful faculty members is an immense privilege. Even cleaning up their messes and fixing their leaky roofs gives me great satisfaction.”

Consider some counterintuitive features of this argument. 1. The Provost is cast as knowledgeable in contrast to the ignorant faculty. 2. Knowledge is viewed as a burden. 3. The Provost is apparently omniscient: a paradox, in light of his acknowledged noninvolvement with the ostensibly central activities of the institution, research and teaching. 4. Knowledge must be kept secret (he does not quite say why, but we imagine that too much transparency would be somehow lethal to smooth institutional operations). In this discourse, knowledge is turned on its head. Rather than being an open public good, whose transmission and development is for the benefit of society at large, in this case knowledge (particularly financial knowledge) becomes a threat to the university if it’s disseminated. The knowledge of the provost makes him, paradoxically, unknowable to others; his actions become inscrutable as his privileged knowledge is kept secret.

Now, a rather different take on knowledge and higher education comes across in William Deresiewicz’ nifty essay “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” The essay is an attack on the elite education you get at Yale, where Deresiewicz teaches. He lists five main disadvantages:

1. It “makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you.”
2. It “inculcates a false sense of self-worth.”
3. It nurtures ‘entitled mediocrity.’
4. It “gives you the chance to be rich… but it takes away the chance not to be.”
5. “It is profoundly anti-intellectual.”

I’m moderately sympathetic to these claims, and they certainly describe well-known deformities of elite education, although there are also plenty of people who get elite educations without suffering these maladies. It reminds me of Pierre Bourdieu’s argument in “Rites of Institution” that a rite of passage serves, not only to transform those who undergo it, but also to decisively separate the initiates from those who will never pass through the rite. We might argue that an elite education is not only, perhaps not even primarily, a process of internal transformation for the elite themselves; it is also a means of creating social distinction and privilege, of marking the elite as superior to the rest.

From this perspective, a critique of Deresiewicz’s article offered by Marty Nemko, called “In Praise of Elitism,” leaves much to be desired. Nemko’s response, basically, is that elites are of “above-average value to society,” and should be praised in order to help them achieve their best. “It is in society’s best interest… that the best and brightest be the ones given the extra opportunities, so as to maximize their greater potential for improving society,” he says. His only qualm is that elites need to be taught to value “pro-social rather than narcissistic ends.” While Nemko believes that the elites are naturally and unproblematically selected as the best and brightest, Bourdieu would suggest that the elites only become elites through their consecration by the educational system. Nemko, in fact, dodges the entire issue raised by Deresiewicz to begin with, which is that not all smart people are elites and not all elites are smart – certainly not in all respects. The arbitrary organization of elite groups massively betrays its ostensible meritocratic values.

On the whole, I find Deresiewicz rather persuasive in his indictment of elite education, much as Jeffrey Williams’ wonderful critical analysis of “smart” made me want to rethink how I judge my academic colleagues. There’s nothing wrong with recognizing people’s accomplishments, as Nemko advocates, but recognizing a success is not the same as bowing down before a fetishized caste of the successful, as if success inhered in their persons and not their actions. And Deresiewicz is quite right to criticize the fantasy that elite education is all good. He observes perceptively: “While some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled… while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is.” In the economist’s terms, elitism has its opportunity costs for individual and society alike.

Unfortunately, Deresiewicz’ alternative to elite education involves a fetishism of its own. “The true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers,” he argues; the aim is to create intellectuals who are “passionate about ideas,” “independent,” ready to go “into spiritual exile,” “thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power.”

What’s troublesome is not so much the claim that education should produce intellectuals, but the kind of intellectuals Deresiewicz envisions. They derive their intellectual sanctity from “solitude,” from isolated “introspection” — in essence from a fantasy of the intellectual, recognizable in Plato and Descartes and Nietzsche, who retreats from society to penetrate alone to its secret truths, only to return with the claim that his/her unique truth affords a unique “vision” for social reform. Such an intellectual seeks the sanctity of social withdrawal along with the virtuous life of social engagement.

At times, this view of the intellectual (which I’ve examined provisionally in this short essay) has struck me as dangerously contradictory, an effort to seize and yet disavow political power. We might, more sympathetically, view it as a progressive dialectic between thinking and action. But I wonder: do intellectuals really need to be, at heart, solitary autonomous thinkers? What about organic intellectuals, who do their thinking as part of the broader social group they’re part of? What about intellectuals forming collectives who work together, collaboratively? Such modes of intellectual action deserve further examination.

Come to think of it, O’Donnell’s description of the solitary Provost amounts to one more fantasy of this isolated intellectual, whose exceptional power is justified by the uniqueness of his knowledge. One wonders whether universities would be more fair, if provosts were more open with their precious budgetary knowledge, more open to distributing institutional power across intellectual collectives, less inclined to create sham committees whose recommendations are ignored… Yet again, the intellectual organization of the university seems incapable of living up to its own ostensible intellectual virtues.