The animating principle of the draft report on institutional voice is that there needs to be greater clarity about who speaks for the University and when the University can speak. As the committee chairs have made clear, “institutional voice” only concerns speech on behalf of the University as a corporate body.
Where the report stays focused on this principle, it is generally quite strong.
For starters, the committee should be commended for using the language of restraint rather than neutrality. Restraint suggests that the University should be prudent in speaking, and should thoughtfully consider its speech acts. It also allows that at times the University must speak forcefully. By contrast, the idea of institutional neutrality has generally proven to be unclear and unhelpful. Given the University’s inevitable entanglements, entailments, and effects in the world, it can never be a neutral institution. Arguments for “neutrality” obscure what is an ongoing political choice over the set of issues upon which the University will be silent and those upon which it cannot, and wrongly imply that this choice can be determined a priori, almost mechanically.
Institutional restraint much more accurately recognizes that while a general set of principles about when the University ought to speak can be described in advance, this can only guide the decision, which will inevitably involve disagreement and so require judgement. Even if we could agree about “core values” and the “core mission” — which, despite the report’s suggestion, cannot be boxed off in a footnote — we cannot prescribe when or how these will map on to political or other controversies requiring University speech or counseling silence.
The report also usefully clarifies that only the University president and provost speak for the University as a corporate body (with some inevitable complications about the latter’s role given that we are blessed with two provosts). There is some ambiguity insofar as the report seems to suggest — but statements by the committee co-chairs in the University Assembly contradict — that the Board of Trustees also speaks for the University. That ambiguity is easily resolved by amendments clarifying that only the president and provost speak for the University as a corporate body.
The report rightly recognizes that, like much else at the University, institutional restraint is a principle that should be tightly binding at the top but loosen very quickly as you move down the organizational hierarchy. By the time it gets to units, centers and departments, individual faculty and students, it is — or ought to be, by the terms of the report — irrelevant. Speech by a department, or by a student organization, is not institutional voice, which only concerns speech on behalf of the University as a corporate body, which only the president and provosts are authorized to do.
The report, however, goes on to specify conditions under which other individuals or units below the president or provost can speak. Here the report introduces unnecessary confusion and begins to intrude on academic freedom and shared governance.
Departments and centers are recognized as having disciplinary expertise. That is appropriate, but also starts to pull the report away from its stated goal of defining who speaks for the University and when they can do so. A department expressing its collective disciplinary view on a matter is not speaking on behalf of the University nor pretending to do so. Unstated in the report, but worth emphasizing, is that it is up to the departments themselves to determine whether and how their expertise bears upon a given issue.
Also left unacknowledged is that departments, units and centers have an interest in collective speech as part of their responsibilities in faculty governance. Faculty governance cannot operate solely through individual action. That is anathema to its principle, which like academic freedom recognizes the rights and responsibilities of collectives, in this case the overlapping disciplinary communities and units that determine competence and set the curriculum. How students are being treated, how our institutions are being run, the values and interests that are being recognized or denied, are all core responsibilities of faculty governance. Departments and other units have interests and perspectives here which often should be heard.
The report recommends that departments devise procedures in advance before exercising their collective voice. This is reasonable, and in line with AAUP best practice. But this continues to pull us beyond the subject of the report, shifting the focus from clarifying who speaks and does not speak for the University to the bases upon which departments and other units can speak and the practices they should adopt to do so. If only the president and provost can speak on behalf of the University, then the report should focus only on their speech.
The report goes further to make specific and troubling recommendations about what those procedures should include. The recommendation that departments notify University leadership in advance of any speech act has no obvious relationship to institutional voice. While the stated purpose is to give central administration a heads’ up, the more likely outcome will be to initiate a conversation before the department can speak, in which University leadership is given the opportunity to push back against this and possibly even the advance notice required to prohibit it. It is more likely than not to restrict speech in practice, and should be dropped.
Worse is the recommendation that departments not publish statements on their websites. The seeming rationale is that these are the property of the University, and so introduces confusion about who is speaking. But departmental and center websites are the primary vehicle these have for defining their identity to the public and to the Cornell community. Centralizing control over websites might have administrative advantages, but it cannot become a tool for limiting departments or centers’ speech. We doubt whether most departments would even be allowed to have their own websites. Prohibiting their use as a site for collective speech is an effective bar against it.
Most concerning is the recommendation that Departments publish the vote breakdown for any use of their collective voice. This has been justified as allowing the fact of internal disagreement to be acknowledged. Whatever the intent, it is bad institutional design that will lead to more pressure to vote a certain way rather than less. By requiring a vote breakdown, the safe anonymity of a collective majority is broken, and unanimity or the size of the majority gains a moral force. Knowing that the vote tallies will be published will lead to pressure on those in the minority to vote with the majority, profoundly compromising academic freedom and faculty governance. It will be ineffective in addressing the stated concern, and have negative unintended consequences. Departments and centers, unlike the Faculty Senate or University Assembly, are not representative bodies where voting and the breakdown should be public. A much more effective mechanism would be a link to departmental policy describing the voting procedures, making it clear that any statement could have minority dissent.
Guidance on how other units speak is only relevant to the report so far as it concerns clarifying that these individuals or units do not speak for the University. The recommendations at the level of centers or departments, like those for student organizations, pursues this clarity by sacrificing their collective academic freedom, their ability to engage in faculty governance, and greatly raising the likelihood of coercing individual members who might dissent from a majority position.
Is “clarity” at this level really worth it? The draft report seems geared towards two sources of confusion. One is when an external actor confuses, for example, a departmental statement with the University’s position. A second is when a member of a department claims that collective speech implies their individual support for a statement. Sincere confusion about the first can be easily resolved by pointing to a policy stating that only the president speaks for the University as a corporate body.
Will the complainant be satisfied? In most cases, it seems doubtful. They are upset by a statement but not actually confused about who said it or on whose behalf. They can be reasonably expected to know that a department is not the University, that a student organization or individual faculty member is speaking on their own behalf. The report’s recommendations are that we should take measures that would substantially curtail speech and invite coercion in order to prevent what will often be bad-faith arguments.
The same is true regarding internal complaints. We might be upset that our colleagues have voted for a mission statement with which we disagree. We claim to be wronged because they are speaking on our behalf. But they aren’t speaking on our behalf — the collective body, as constituted by whatever procedures the body has in place for deciding how to act, is speaking on its own behalf. It is unreasonable to attribute this to any individual within. We are all familiar with this distinction, which is fundamental to social life. The president of the United States speaks. Is it reasonable to think I am speaking? The CEO of a corporation speaks. Is it reasonable to think an accountant working for the company agrees? Some collective organizations speak in a democratic fashion; others, in a command fashion. But unless unanimity is announced no one reasonably believes an individual attribution can be made. Requiring a publication of the vote breakdown perversely gives unanimity a public weight, and so makes it more likely that dissenters will be pressured into agreement.
Departments and centers can reasonably be encouraged to come up with procedures for when they speak as a collective. They might be encouraged to devise their own guidelines for restraint, balancing the responsibility to speak on issues of disciplinary expertise or university governance with other goals and doing so in a way that is responsive to disciplinary diversity and other contexts.
But such a recommendation can only be advisory, and should not in any way be a requirement. And since it goes beyond what the report defines as institutional voice, it is unclear whether such a recommendation is appropriate at all within the report.
These requirements would be to dampen speech at the University. One consequence is that they will impair the inevitable judgment required by the president and provost when deciding when the University should speak or stay silent. To exercise this judgment wisely, they will need to be listening. The University is more than a corporate body. It is a community, and the diverse individuals, departments and organizations that constitute this community must be able to speak, in their multiple and overlapping and discordant voices, through governing assemblies, through departments and centers, through student organizations, through faculty organizations and associations, etc. A proliferation of speech at these levels should be encouraged, because it is through this alone that a community can undertake its responsibility to define its values and interests, to map issues onto those values, and to inform decisions about what — if anything — the University as a corporate body should say or do.
The report's clarification that only the president and provost speak for the University as a corporate body, and recommendation that they do so with restraint, guided by core values and mission, is very reasonable. Its suggestions about how to clarify this at the departmental or center level, or clarify when and how departments should exercise their own voice, go beyond the report’s definition of institutional voice and threaten to dampen or limit speech among the constitutive units of the University community. Their adoption would be a violation of academic freedom and shared governance, but would also limit the ability of central leadership to be fully informed in exercising their judgment about institutional voice.
David A. Bateman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government. His research focuses broadly on democratic institutions; he is an expert in the American legislative branch. He can be reached at dab465@cornell.edu.
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