Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey respond to a major southern university’s recent attempt to remove politics from its operations.
“The University and Its Purpose” identifies three “core purposes” of the university: “Pathbreaking Research,” “Transformative Education,” and “the Covenant Between Universities and Society.” …
… It is official university policy, adopted by the Board. And its drafters were clearly thinking about enforcement. Should an academic unit “subordinate scholarly standards to a political and social agenda,” it stipulates that “academic leaders need to address such dysfunctionalities 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.” In other words, if Vanderbilt’s sociology or anthropology department were to violate the university’s principles by subordinating academics to activism, it might find itself with a chair from political science, subsumed into an interdisciplinary social science unit, or facing competition for students from a new academic unit in a similar area of the curriculum. Or it might simply cease to exist. …
… All this and much else in “The University and Its Purpose” offer important examples to other universities as they seek to rebuild public trust. We do, however, see the central problem the statement addresses—the relationship between academics and politics—in different terms, and therefore think about effective reform somewhat differently. This is in part because we see the growing distortion of the academic disciplines as a much longer story than the arguments of “The University and Its Purpose” imply. …
… A deeper problem thus underlies what Vanderbilt calls “politicization:” the ideological skew of faculty and administrators, as Andrew Perrin has described it. Because of that skew, when contested cultural questions such as sex or race or the Israeli-Arab conflict come up on campus, there are few people willing and able to articulate, in scholarly terms, arguments that many Americans hold which are associated with conservatism or the political right.
That is why we are concerned that the Vanderbilt strategy may not be effective.
