Anyway, halfway through the volume, I find a compendium of sexist comments made to women graduate students at the University of Chicago. I thought it would be worth reproducing here, since I haven’t seen this text before and I think it’s good to have this sort of discourse out in circulation. While the general lines of this sort of sexist thought are pathetically familiar, the horror is always in the particulars.

THE HALLS OF ACADEME

The Women’s Caucus, Political Science Department, University of Chicago

Several of our professors have made these comments—some of them in jest— without realizing how damaging comments like these are to a woman’s image of herself as a scholar:

“I know you’re competent and your thesis advisor knows you’re competent. The question in our minds is are you really serious about what you’re doing.”

“The admissions committee didn’t do their job. There’s not one good-looking girl in the entering class.”

“Have you thought about journalism? I know a lot of women journalists who do very well.”

“No pretty girls ever come to talk to me.”

“Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities is the only decent book I’ve ever read written by a woman.”

“Any girl who gets this far has got to be a kook.”

“They’ve been sending me too many women advisees. I’ve got to do something about that.”

“I hear I’m supposed to stop looking at you as a sex object.”

“We expect women who come here to be competent, good students but we don’t expect them to be brilliant or original.”

Student: “No, I wouldn’t stop teaching if I had children. I plan to work all my life.”
Professor: “But of course you’ll stop work when you have children. You’ll have to.”
Professor to student looking for a job: “You have no busi­ness looking for work with a child that age.”

Some people would say things are better now than they used to be. Well, are they?

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.

But I’m getting ahead of the textual excerpt I wanted to present. Although it doesn’t always manage to be an accurate description of the university, it compensates by being entertaining and at times outrageous. (Outrageousness being nothing to sneeze at when it comes to desanctifying institutional self-images.)

The University of Chicago is more self-absorbed—more precisely, self-obsessed—than any other institution of higher learning in America. Its animating myth was manufactured by Robert Maynard Hutchins, the institution’s pivotal president and promoter non pareil. “It’s not a very good university,” Hutchins declared, “it’s only the best there is.” Never mind Oxford or Berkeley. Harvard and Yale may fill the corridors of power, loyalists say; in the domain of ideas, Chicago rules. Nowhere else is the “Ivy League” a term of derision—the land of academic “Jay Leno-ism,” it is called, a reference to its veneration of big-name professors derided at Chicago as “dying elephants.” A passing remark made long ago by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead is recycled as if it were gospel: “I think the one place where I have been that is most like ancient Athens is the University of Chicago.”

Three-quarters of the faculty live within a mile of the campus in the enclave of Hyde Park, a hothouse of learned chatter and salacious gossip set apart, by design, from the bombed-out inner-city landscape, peopled mainly by dirt-poor blacks, which surrounds it. The fact of isolation, it is said half-jokingly, is why the university’s athletic teams are known as the Maroons. The Chicago tribe takes pleasure in furious disputations about everything from monetarism to metaphysics. While Harvard preens, Chicago navel-gazes, turning out bookshelves’-worth of histories and biographies, faculty committee reports, student newspapers, broadsheets, and websites devoted to itself. There are several hundred listings in the “introductory” bibliography of the university’s history that the campus librarians have prepared.

Seemingly everyone is an amateur historian, mining the past for ammunition that can be used in the present. “No episode was more important in shaping the outlook and expectations [of higher education in the decade following the Civil War] than the founding of the University of Chicago,” writes Frederick Rudolph in his benchmark history of American higher education. It is “one of those events in American history that brought into focus the spirit of an age.” When John D. Rockefeller launched the university with a gift of $2.3 million, he expressed the hope that an institution situated far from the tradition-bound East Coast would “strike out upon lines in full sympathy with the spirit of the age.” Although Chicago is a great school, in this respect Rockefeller would be disappointed. The dominant trope, observes Dennis Hutchinson, professors of law and longtime dean of the undergraduate college, is that “at Chicago we’ve always done ‘X,'” meaning whatever is being advocated at the moment.

There is another, less frequently acknowledged tradition in Hyde Park, a willingness on the part of the university’s leaders, including Hutchins and William Rainey Harper, the founding president, to do whatever has been necessary to raise money for a chronically cash-starved school. Among its past ventures are a junior college and the nation’s biggest correspondence school; in 1998 it attached itself to Unext.com, a for-profit business school.

(34-35)

…Only senior professors should teach the core couses, Andrew Abbott asserted, because only a widely published academic can stand as a “central authority figure who can model for the students the discipline of rethinking ideas.” What a marvelous notion: Kant or Mill interpreted by Mortimer Adler or Allan Bloom, transcendent texts in the hands of master interpreters. But you would have to go elsewhere to find it. At Chicago, the ideal of a college where intellectually obsessive undergraduates are instructed in small classes by full professors, Socrates among the genius set, collides with a shabbier reality. Science courses are delivered lecture-style, as in most universities, and few sections are led by faculty members. Even in the humanities and social sciences, points out Richard Saller, the university’s provost since 2001, nearly two-thirds of classes are taught by graduate students and non-tenure track faculty.

At Chicago, faculty devotion to the core isn’t bred in the bone. It’s a historical accident resulting from the university’s peculiar division into two separate faculties. Until the 1960s, the graduate faculty, based in the disciplines, taught Ph.D. candidates, while the college faculty, hired separately, instructed undergraduates. Although the intention was to build a university that rewarded teaching as well as research, the result was a rancorous split between the discipline-based professors, who regarded themselves as the “real faculty,” and the “have-not” college instructors, dismissed as glorified high school teachers. “There were people teaching economics who didn’t know Milton Friedman was a professor here,” Saller says, shaking his head at the oddity of it all.

This division of labor was abolished in the 1960s. Since those who have subsequently been hired, like faculty everywhere, have more specialized interests, when the college instructors retired there was no one to fill the classroom void. At the same time, in order to compete with leading universities, Chicago has cut the teaching load from six to four quarter courses, and many professors teach only one undergraduate course.

These fact on the ground make for decidedly odd bedfellows. Donald Levine, a sociology professor and the former dean of the college, for whom the common core is a passion, found himself in rare agreement with anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, whose enthusiasm for a substantial diet of required courses was premised on his fear that if undergraduate had more opportunities to take electives, people like himself would have to teach them. “I’m not a college type,” Sahlins says. That’s an understatement, since he refers to himself as a member of the graduate department of anthropology and rarely sees undergraduates.

“What we’re doing has intellectual integrity!” was the rallying cry of the traditionalists. But “you can only go so far,” observes one professor, “before you have to point at the faculty and ask, ‘Why aren’t you teaching?'”

“The contradiction we’re trying to resolve,” says Richard Saller, “is that we don’t want to be Harvard or Yale, and use the large lecture format. We want to do as much as possible in small classes—but we can’t do this with tenured faculty.” The irony is palpable. At a university where devotion to general education is the watchword, until a few years ago professors were not expected to teach any undergraduates.

(39-40).

The Kirp chapter centers on the tale of 1990s conflicts with then-President Sonnenschein, which had everything to do with money, professorial labor, and the university’s self-image. It’s somewhat amazing if you read that link (to the official website) how thoroughly the nationally-publicized conflicts during Sonnenschein’s watch have been effaced from his official biography.

The university is planning to renovate it all, they say, but what with the economic crisis, that might not happen next year. So some of the space has been borrowed.

A rack of costumes, a blue and green striped bag, a pink scarf, a green towel, a striped coat, a bit of floral decoration on the floor. Juxtaposed on the abandoned horizon of a decrepit sink, old metal taps greening at the base, a tap for distilled water, an electrical supply strip above the sink, lines of salts in the basin like geological strata, green and grey, a decayed piece of clear tape.

The local Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Co. have taken up residence in this basement, needing space for set & costume construction. This, as you can see, is the chemistry lab-cum-costume-shop.

Frilled dress the color of a desiccated lemon, cratered with shadows, dangles beneath the criscrossed pipes and the circular air exchange and the perpendicular fluorescent strips.

The lines of the clothes paralleling their coat hangers, the coat hangers paralleling the pipes, the ceiling all painted white as if to reflect as much light as possible.

A poster “Costumes of the 18th Century” was taped up on top of a graph of the vapor pressure of liquid helium, but it is falling down.

Little spools of thread in a grid of color in a monochromatic space.

My friend Soule was designing the costumes. She reputedly owns more sewing machines than she has teeth.

In the corner behind the sewing machines, study-looking electrical controls were waiting for someone to press STOP.

There’s something surreal about this juxtaposition of things we see here, the texture of chemical dust crossed with the texture of gauzy lace, chromatic color slapped across white piping, abandoned lab benches masked by temporary theatre workshops. When I was writing about campus borders back in December, I had this idea that academic space was this enclosed single thing, fairly homogeneous, closed off from the outside world by police and custom, structured according to uniquely academic criteria. Here we have the opposite: academic space seems like a polyphonous thing, where old spaces are abandoned to decay while new totally different spaces emerge on top of them, where radically different kinds of cultural worlds overlap – the theatre and the laboratory. Here, academic space looks less like a sacred vessel for self-conscious scholastic profundities, or even any kind of unique thing at all; it looks more like the heteroglossic novel described by Bakhtin, where a single genre incorporates all kinds of disparate, even incompatible subgenres within it.

I have a lot of other pictures of this show whose costumes are being assembled in these photos, and of the university theatre, Mandel Hall, where it was produced, and I hope soon I’ll have time to think more carefully about what it means for academic space that it can incorporate theatre and all the very non-academic, even anti-academic, worlds of show business. (I could call it “performing arts,” but that makes it sound too dignified.)

Incidentally, if you count, this comes to 18 males (prof included) and 23 females (TA included), i.e., 44% male and 56% female. The “Me” is yours truly, and the “?” is someone who may or may not have been sitting across from me, but was masked, in any event, by someone else’s head. In any event, the “objective” gender balance isn’t that far from even.

We see here, first and foremost, a striking emergence of same-sex spatial blocs (colored lavender): a large male block is in the bottom right corner, while a large female bloc is in the upper left. Elsewhere in the room, the seating was more mixed by gender.

Why might we see this pattern? Is it because certain academics simply prefer to sit beside people of the same sex? Surely many academics are conscious of gender and sexuality in public settings, and in choosing who to associate with among strangers. This was the first day of class, after all.

Or we could consider a more plausible hypothesis: does this pattern emerge because academics sit near people they know or are friends with? Certainly, when I enter a public space, I try to sit with my friends, and in this case I actually came in with friends. On this hypothesis, we might observe gendered spatial arrangement as a result of certain academics preferentially developing same-sex friendships. Such a pattern has been around in anthro grad school since the 60s and 70s, according to Susan Philips, and I think it continues today, insofar as many academic friendships are shaped by long-lasting sexual competition or collaboration, difference or solidarity, sexual desire or disinterest…

Also, we have to consider the extent to which gender is merely the expression of other forms of social organization. In this room there was a very salient, collectively recognized difference between the Anthropology Department doctoral students and the Social Science Master’s students (MAPSS). For instance, the bloc of males in the bottom right was all doctoral students, if I recall correctly. We can’t really analyze this here, for lack of knowledge of prior relationships in the room, but it’s interesting that space gets structured into blocs without anyone having a conscious will to create such structures. That a general spatial organization can emerge from a number of little personal decisions about who to be proximate with.

Gender in this space did not seem difficult to decode, on a crude level. I read it off from footware, from hats, from coats, from the length and shape of their hair, the tone and pitch of their voices. People seemed content to perform their genders in unambiguous fashion. I should emphasize: I’m not saying that “M” or “F” exhausts what there is to say about gender; it’s a crude and simplistic categorization and it needs to be generally resisted. But the sad fact is: this crude binary categorization captures real patterns in the social world.

For instance: the symbolically central space, of course, was occupied by the male professor, the “head” of the table (colored green). In an odd visual reflection of this spatialization of male authority, the foot of the table was occupied by a male student too. That guy happens to be a friend of mine, and he has long had a habit of sitting in that seat in this particular room. I don’t know if gender has much to do with that habit.

Perhaps, then, there’s no gendered pattern to read in this reflection, just contingency into which observers can project their own predetermined symbolic structures; perhaps it’s a mistake to read symbolic structure directly out of the empirical circumstances, as I’m doing; perhaps the real gendered dynamics of the room have little to do with the seating chart. Perhaps I’m ascribing structure that is meaningless to the participants (except me). Certainly, it would be hard to detect a direct link between participants’ genders and the academic conversation that subsequently took place.

The problem with analyzing gender in academia is an inescapable tension between gender as a hermeneutic that one uses to ascribe order to an indeterminate social situation, and gender as a deep structure that brings prior order to the world in unconscious and unnoticeable ways. Gender is a thing one invokes contingently, perhaps wrongly, in making sense of the social world; but it’s simultaneously what determines and regulates that world prior to anyone’s perception or action.

Feeling silly and reflexive, I said at the beginning of class when we went around: “I work on anthropology of universities. This week I’m especially interested in the gendered organization of academic discourse.”

People laughed.

Apparently the thought of social determination and gender provokes laughter. The only question is: is it the laughter of recognition or the laughter of disavowal?

Inside the window is a large bank of cubicles, just like an office, lit from above by an array of fluorescent lights like the grid dangling over a hockey rink. The ceiling rises high up above the cubicles, supported by rows of pillars and exaggerated wooden beams. At the far end of the room, the north end, there is another gothic window. Perhaps it is the twin of the one we are looking in through.

These monumental windows face almost nothing whatsoever. The south window borders on the glum wall of the Social Sciences Research Building; the north one adjoins the south wall of Rosenwald. They are windows onto walls. They admit light but not sky, shadows but not landscapes.

About a hundred years ago, Thorstein Veblen commented that this architecture was, in a word, phony, being utterly unsuited to modern academic activity, and architecturally jumbled. It “may suggest reflections on the fitness of housing the quest of truth in an edifice of false pretences,” he said grumpily. Here, the gothic windows conceal the cheap monotony of grey cubicles, managing to be impressive from the outside only on the assumption that no one will see the inside.

But is this nothing but a lie built in stone? It strikes me also that this is wasted space, mundane space, lost space, space that doesn’t live up to the fantasy its premises embody, a sort of sad space, where if you showed up with a fairytale fantasy about the life of the mind you would probably be disappointed (unless you gazed out through the gothic windows happily and ignored the fact that there wasn’t much to see through them). Where you hurry to find your book or your desk, huddle together under the fluorescence, dive into your book… if the gothic architecture offers a fantasy experience too unsatisfying to be really livable, does that mean that you are left even more alone to develop your own daydreams about your surroundings? or does academic space just fade into the background, becoming a precondition of work that you come to ignore?

What a dismal allegory for academic life: monumental windows that open onto almost nothing, displaying only an idle group of cubicles for voyeuristic assessment from the back staircase of the next building. If academic life is gothic, does that mean it has both an element of the fantastic and an element of the horrid?

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.