We are engaged today in a struggle for the future of the university. Do universities today want to preserve — or restore — their status as institutions of teaching and learning or do they see themselves as engines of social change? It is one thing to provide students with the tools they need to become agents of social change — we all hope they will — but quite another to say that the university should seek to determine the direction of that change. Let me explain why the position of institutional neutrality is best suited to achieve this end. 

Our basic values are not only contestable, they stand in deep tension with one another. The English philosopher Isaiah Berlin was profoundly correct when he said that everything is what it is and not something else. Freedom is not justice; equality is not liberty; and diversity is not excellence. To deny these basic facts is either to indulge in wishful thinking or Orwellian double-speak.

However it might appear, issues of equality, freedom and social justice are inherently contestable. Can a university devoted to the cause of rectifying past injustices maintain its commitment to intellectual excellence? Can a university seeking to guarantee safe spaces for students maintain an atmosphere of free and open debate? 

It is our job as educators to bring out the complexity of moral and social issues, not to put our thumb on the scale in advance to determine what kind of change is deemed morally or politically acceptable. When this happens, education becomes indoctrination and teaching a form of ideology training.

It is a profound mistake for a university president or any other administrator or administrative unit to be issuing statements on “the issues of the day.” There are more issues every day than can be possibly addressed. Which ones are to be addressed, then, will in all likelihood be arbitrary and heavy-handed. On top of this, any statement on an issue like American foreign policy is likely to be either banal or will inevitably take sides in complex problems that will in turn simply create division, discord and exclusion. 

What if we, as teachers or students, have different views from those that have been institutionally sanctioned? The University now sees itself as creating an atmosphere of “belongingness” — to adopt their official jargon — where everyone is supposed to feel safe and respected. Toward this end, it has hired untold numbers of new deans and administrators whose job it is to oversee virtually every aspect of university life from admissions to hiring to tenure. Even members of hiring committees must be interviewed to determine whether they contain “implicit biases” and are instructed on means for self-correction. This is based on the condescending assumption that we all have deep racial and gender prejudices that a 30-minute interview with a university administrator will help uncover.  

The quest for belongingness is based on a false conception of a university. Rather than encouraging inclusion, it creates new categories of exclusion. How is it determined exactly who belongs? What are the standards for who is in and who is out?  What of those who fall outside this preestablished consensus or who simply resist this forced sense of community? Would there be a place for Socrates, Spinoza or Ralph Waldo Emerson on today’s campus? By encouraging an atmosphere of belongingness, it discourages non-conformists, “rugged individualists,” and those who are prepared to stand alone. The result has been the creation of a culture of conformity and groupthink.

Finally, I am far from saying that a university president needs to keep silent but rather that he or she should address those issues that universities are best suited to address. I mean by this not the issues of the day but the permanent and fundamental issues with which university education is about. These are issues like, what is the role of the university in a democratic society? What are the aims or goals of education? How does liberal education enhance the art of freedom? How does AI affect our conception of what is human? One purpose for examining these kinds of questions is to bring out the necessarily transient or superficial character of “the issues of the day.” Only in circumstances of profound national emergency — something like another 9/11 — can I imagine an exception to this rule.

Liberal education deals with the souls of students. It concerns the ability to learn by listening even to those with whom we may vehemently disagree. This means that the university must facilitate the conditions for discussion and debate but should not predetermine what are the correct institutionally approved views. If we once again seek the light — and try to avoid the limelight — we may take some small steps in living up to Yale’s mission statement: lux et veritas.

STEVEN B. SMITH is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science. He can be reached at steven.smith@yale.edu.