I’ve previously mentioned that I’ll be giving a presentation on institutional neutrality at the Heterodox Academy Conference in Brooklyn a couple of weeks from now, Tuesday, June 24th. I have yet to write the paper up, but here’s the abstract, below. I’d be interested in/grateful for any comments, questions, objections, etc. I’ll probably be posting on material related to the paper over the next few weeks.
Kalven’s Complicit Executioners: A Critique of the Kalven Committee Report
Over the past decade or so, critics of political activism on college campuses have revived a conception of “institutional neutrality” designed to discredit and impede such activism. The locus classicus of these arguments is the so-called Kalven Committee Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action issued at the University of Chicago in November 1967. Though much has been said on the subject since 1967, the Committee’s arguments have proven remarkably durable, and contemporary arguments inevitably echo its themes. In this paper, I offer a critique of the Kalven Committee’s Report intended not just to rebut the Report as written, but to rebut those of its underlying assumptions that have found their way into contemporary discourse.
The Report argues that because “the university’s mission is teaching and research in the service of the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge,” this mission requires maximization of intellectual diversity; since the diversity in question requires neutrality, the university’s mission requires institutional neutrality.
Though vulnerable to several obvious objections, the deepest problem with the Report’s argument is an omission, namely, whether the university can be held accountable for complicity in atrocities facilitated by the university itself. Imagine that a university is complicit in serious injustices, e.g., torture or genocide. In that case, while the process of holding-accountable violates neutrality, a commitment to institutional neutrality both conceals and excuses complicity. Suppose that it’s possible to have genuine knowledge of the existence of such complicity. Then institutional neutrality demands that we commit evil while flouting our knowledge of its evil.
Ultimately, despite the ostensibly humanist rhetoric of its advocates, the Kalven Committee’s defense of institutional neutrality reduces to an Eichmann-like ethos of compartmentalization that in practice, actively encourages institutional complicity in evils of enormous magnitude and turpitude. Defenders of this ethos must either rebut this objection or accept its implications.
Policy of Truth 
Rothbard was on the right side of this in 1965, whatever his later deviations:
https://www.rothbard.it/articles/liberty-and-new-left.pdf
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I like it. I’d never read that before, but I agree with maybe 95-99% of it. Certainly agree with the basic gist.
And yet.
I certainly agree with Rothbard that the Social Democratic story exhibits an “almost stupefying naivete,” particularly about electoral politics (p. 37), but that charge cuts many ways. In my experience, every political position exhibits “stupefying naivete” about something.
I think there’s a tension between his critique of the Old Left valorization of electoral democracy, and his interpretation of the civil rights movement as a New Left phenomenon. The civil rights movement was driven in large part by the very Old Left ideal he criticizes. Freedom Summer was fundamentally about registering Southern blacks to vote, and it’s telling that the civil rights movement’s response to the Birmingham church bombing of 1963 was the voter-registration campaign that culminated in Bloody Sunday. The rationale for the emphasis on voting derived from a certain interpretation (whether right or wrong) of Reconstruction. The aim was to re-establish Reconstruction after its devolution in 1876.
I get why as an anarchist Rothbard wants to de-legitimize conventional electoral politics. I dislike it myself. But I think his rejection of it represents a stupefying naivete of its own. The regime we inhabit is based on electoral politics. In fact, the institutions we inhabit are driven by some form of electoral politics even when they’re not governmental entities. Corporations are run by electoral politics of their own variety. Boards of Trustees vote on corporate policies. Shareholders are invited to vote on the membership of Boards of Trustees. Etc.
It’s all corrupt and fucked up. I certainly prefer the ethos of the New Left to that of the Old Left or centrism or whatever. But no one cares what I prefer, and no one cares what Murray Rothbard ca. 1965 preferred. The ethos of the New Left is admirable, but it’s not a winning strategy unless it connects with electoral politics. Nothing happens in this country unless it’s translated into mass public opinion, and electoral politics is a proxy for mass public opinion. Forswear electoral politics, and you’re basically admitting political defeat. Morally, it can be legitimate to admit political defeat. But then you have to admit it. Rothbard’s valorizing the New Left in 1965 is fine. But his “later deviations” are not accidental. They’re an attempt to over-compensate for what was missing in the first place. What was missing was any sense of how New Left politics would work. The New Left wasn’t fated to work. It was fated to fail.
When it didn’t work, Rothbard then turned to the politics that seemed like it might work–the politics of the Right. Well, right wing politics has “worked.” The attack on the universities we’re now seeing is a perfect enactment of Ayn Rand’s prescriptions in “The Sanction of the Victims”: defund the Left, indoctrinate the public in “capitalism,” render them politically docile, and then proceed with the civilizational project of building a new Roman Empire. That approach has won. Meanwhile, the heirs of the New Left are in the streets of LA, or the quads of Columbia, Berkeley, or Yale–or holding strategy sessions in undisclosed locations in Princeton, New Jersey–busy getting their asses kicked to the soundtrack of “Highway to Hell.” I admire that, but I also know where it leads.
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I think you underestimate the successes of the bottom-up non-electoral approach. Yes, the civil rights movement worked for voter registration (and I don’t reject that as a goal at all, it was a worthwhile part of the package); but they also desegregated buses and lunch counters through direct grassroots action, sit-ins and boycotts, NOT via electoral or legislative means, which lagged after. Moreover, at the time of the civil rights movement whites were a majority in the South, so even if all blacks had had complete voting rights and had exercised them, it would likely not have been enough to change much without the bottom-up activism alongside it.
As Charles J. points out, the advantage of the bottom-up approach is that you don’t have to wait until you’ve persuaded 50%+1 of the electorate before you achieve anything; the bottom-up approach allows for incremental success where the all-or-nothing electoral approach does not. That’s why, as he likewise points out, “the practical success that the immigration reform movement has had in liberalizing immigration laws over the past thirty years or so” via electoral means has been essentially zero, contrasted with “the success that illegal immigrants, state-side family members, coyotes, good samaritan ranchers, off-the-books employers, et al. have had in getting people across the border in defiance of immigration law, while avoiding or minimizing government interference.”
I rant on a bit more about this here:
https://c4ss.org/content/51299
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You and I agree that both grassroots activism and electoral politics are both important to political action, but it’s not clear to me that Rothbard agrees with that. At the very least, his claims about electoral politics range from ambiguous to hostile (e.g., p. 42). The Old Left/New Left contrast he draws in the first ten pages associates conventional electoral politics with Old Left, and participatory democracy with the New Left. He then seems to reject the first and endorse the second to the exclusion of the first.
It’s the latter move that I contest, endorsing participatory democracy to the exclusion of effort spent on conventional electoral politics. Maybe there ought to be “ranked voting” when it comes to tactics. Participatory democracy is preferable to conventional electoral politics, but in a regime like ours, conventional electoral politics enjoys path dependency, and thus can’t be ignored. Both are important.
But that aside, you and I still have a disagreement over and above our agreement. I don’t entirely agree with your interpretation of the civil rights movement, and have misgivings about Charles’s formulations.
On civil rights, you say:
I don’t accept the “not,” and would dispute the “lagged after.”
Yes, desegregation made essential use of direct grassroots action. But grassroots action was one tactic in a larger strategy that made essential use of electoral and legislative means.
In many cases, segregation was the law, a matter of state or local ordinance. So it was insufficient simply to convince people that segregation was morally wrong (however necessary that was). The law itself had to be repealed–fully repealed, with a careful eye as to the legalities involved. That’s a direct use of legislative action right there. The legislative roll back didn’t “lag after” some prior act of desegregation. It was the last legal step of the process of desegregation itself. So I don’t really understand what Rothbard means when he says it was only when civil rights activists took to the streets that the desegregation laws “collapsed” (p. 42). Laws don’t literally collapse. They have to be repealed through a legal process. Direct action was part of the lobbying effort that led to their repeal. But ultimately, repeal itself is a legislative action.
And obvously, repeal is easier if you have leverage over the relevant elected body (including school boards). It’s true that black voters were outnumbered in the aggregate, but they were the numerical majority in certain localities. Where they were, electoral wins were a faster means of securing political gains than grassroots action.
In some cases, desegregation relied on court rulings, often Supreme Court rulings. But the appointment of Supreme Court justices is sensitive to electoral politics. So there’s an indirect connection there between electoral politics at the federal level, judicial rulings, and legislation at the state or local level.
In almost all cases, activists needed security against hostile agitators. Most of the time, they didn’t get it, but occasionally they did. When they did, the security came from the federal government, and came for PR reasons ultimately related to worries about the ballot box. Two clear examples are the Freedom Rides of 1961 after they were attacked, and Freedom Summer (1964) after the murders of Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner.
I would add that even in cases like Greensboro where desegregation was done informally, the negotiations and settlements involved were examples of the sorts of “cozy alliances” that Rothbard derides and associates with Old Left politics (p. 36). Well, there may have been something unsavory about those alliances, but subtract them from the equation, and you’re left with a huge amount of failure. If the Greensboro activists hadn’t struck a deal with the power elite of Greensboro, desegregation would never have taken place. A deal was required.
Writing in 1965, Rothbard suggests that the black uprisings of the time (meaning 1964-65) were not about issues like housing, but about police brutality, the implication being that garden-variety legislative concerns were relatively unimportant. But that’s wrong twice over. The direct catalyst of the riots was often police brutality, but ultimately, the riots were about the full range of issues. The 1967 Newark riots were clearly about housing–they were a response to a large-scale eminent domain action in Newark that threatened to destroy an entire neighborhood. The riots eventually led to legislation (including a scaling-down of the eminent domain action), and were in fact used by black activists as leverage for that legislation. Inclusionary zoning in New Jersey arose out of judicial activism leading to legislation. And once the point had been made about police brutality, a partial attempt to mitigate the problem came through consent decrees that have been historically sensitive to electoral considerations. Centrist Democrats are ambivalent about them; Republicans hate them.
The point of all of that is, much as I value grassroots action, it doesn’t go anywhere unless the gains made through it are consolidated through conventional legislative action. Rothbard’s valorization of participatory politics is like advising a runner on how to run race while ignoring the need to cross the finish line.
That’s my response to Charles as well. The advantage of bottom-up politics is that you don’t have to wait to persuade 51% of the electorate of anything. But that’s the disadvantage, too. Everything you accomplish then becomes hostage to the people you haven’t persuaded. If they control the political system, then every gain you make is hostage to that system.
Immigration is the perfect example. I agree that “the practical success that the immigration reform movement has had in liberalizing immigration laws over the past thirty years or so” via electoral means has been essentially zero. And I agree that the grassroots actions Charles lists are all to be praised. But all those successes are now vulnerable to subversion by the elites who control electoral politics. Millions of migrants got here by the methods he describes, but we’re now in the power of an elected presidential administration that wants to deport them all back. That’s one step forward in the process of taking one step back .
On Thursday, I’m testifying before the Union County Board of County Commissioners–testifying against their putting a local jail, vacant for the past few years, on auction. Given state law, it’s an open secret that the jail will go to ICE as a detention facility.
https://newjerseymonitor.com/2025/03/27/activists-fear-union-county-jail-could-become-new-migrant-detention-center/
I resent the fact that these slick, disingenuous people control our lives in this way, that they’re paving the way for dictatorship, that they’re only too willing to destroy migrants’ lives and herd them into concentration camps. We stage a direct action in front of their building every month, but unless we position ourselves as part of the formal legislative process, we have no hope of prevailing. Both elements are necessary, bottom-up and otherwise. A bottom-up approach on its own can’t succeed.
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I briefly wanted to re-visit this conversation, because by coincidence, I happened to have found the perfect case study for your “bottom up” approach–a civil rights example, in an extended sense. So I wouldn’t deny that a bottom-up approach can work, though I doubt it can be sustained or be made scalable.
Have you ever heard of the Banana Kelly community development project in the South Bronx, in the late 1970s? In its early stages, it seems to have been almost entirely a bottom-up endeavor. Here’s a nice account of it:
https://citylimits.org/the-fall-and-rise-of-the-south-bronx/
One interesting thing of note, apropos of institutional neutrality, is that like the traditional civil rights movement–e.g., the Freedom Schools, the historically black colleges, and the colleges involved in the movement as such–the Banana Kelly project involved school-aged children, who were brought into the project as a sort of Thoreauvian venture in hands-on education. That approach to pedagogy contradicts institutional neutrality, but if so, it’s unclear why institutional neutrality is to be preferred. So the example ends up doing double duty, both as an example of bottom-up politics, and of institutional non-neutrality in education.
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My previous comment probably sounds more critical than I want to be. My main criticism is that I agree with the basic thrust of the article, but find the last section, “What Vision of the Future?” totally unconvincing. The diagnosis as a whole is right, but not the prescription, or at least not the roadmap to its implementation. That said, I haven’t read much Rothbard of mid-60s vintage, so there’s probably more to be said. It’s probably a good question to ask myself why I’ve read so little of it. The answer, I think, is that I was for a long time captive to the Old Left shibboleths Rothbard attacks, made worse by a coating of youthful Randianism.
Having said all that, I do think that Rothbard’s analysis is head-and-shoulders above what has now become the standard account of the New Left in libertarian and centrist circles. There is no comparison between Rothbard’s analysis, and say, Rand’s in The New Left, or Hicks’s in Explaining Postmodernism, or Haidt and Lukianoff in Coddling of the American Mind, or even Allan Bloom in Closing of the American Mind. It’s kind of sad that there hasn’t been a more overt confrontation of the one set of views and the others, but as far as I know, there hasn’t. There ought to be.
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Perfect timing:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/us/white-supremacist-university-of-florida-paper.html
We’re somehow supposed to believe that university presidents, presiding over the repositories of the collective knowledge and wisdom of our society, are unable to decide whether white supremacism is worthy of condemnation. Meanwhile, the avatars of “merit” can’t explain why this paper has the merit attributed to it by its receipt of a formal award. And the dean of the law school so lacking in curiosity that she can’t read or evaluate what students at the law school are reading, writing, or thinking. This is the cutting edge of academic wisdom. And people think I’m exaggerating when I bring up Auschwitz or Dr Mengele in connection with “institutional neutrality.”
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