University trustees seldom do much good, but the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill Board of Trustees has just passed two strong resolutions, available here.
One states that funds collected from mandatory student fees are to be distributed in a viewpoint-neutral fashion. That is to say, without favoritism for “progressive” organizations or hostility toward conservative and libertarian ones. University administrators have often played favorites and it’s a good thing that school policy now forbids it.
The second resolution affirms the university’s commitment to the Chicago Principles and UNC’s 1967 Kalven Committee Report. Both uphold academic freedom and the role of the university as a place for debate and scholarship rather than activism.
I particularly like this paragraph from the Kalven Committee Report:
The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.
Too many of today’s academic leaders fail to appreciate that wisdom.