The war between Israel and Hamas has led some university administrations to realize the virtues of institutional neutrality, as advocated by the famous Kalven Report. Accustomed to pontificating on current events, they have suddenly discovered that they couldn’t say anything without making somebody angry.
Worse, having established that practice, they found that even silence sent a nasty message, apparently signifying invidious comparative judgments about which deaths mattered. (More likely it signified comparative judgments about which groups to pander to.)
It turns out — who
knew? — that it is politic for officials to avoid taking sides on contentious
issues. But there is another reason why administrators ought to remain silent
on such matters: anything they say is almost certainly bullshit, and the
mission of the university is antithetical to the production of bullshit.
I elaborate in a new column at The Hill.