When I taught philosophy at Felician University (2008-2020), I was first Assistant and then Associate Professor of Philosophy, but I was also Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Coordinator of the Pre-Law Program, and Director of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs. The first two were specifically academic titles, the last three administrative or quasi-administrative ones.

When George Abaunza, a professor of philosophy, became the Dean of Arts and Sciences, he insisted on retaining a 1:0 teaching load in philosophy, “just to keep his hand in the teaching game.” That request was granted, so he was, during his tenure as Dean, both an administrator and a member of the faculty. He also led the University’s General Education overhaul, which led to the complete overhaul of the Gen Ed curriculum as well as the University’s curriculum as such–just one of several quasi-administrative positions he held.  

Leland McGee, a member of Felician’s Board of Trustees, drew on his professional expertise as an Administrative Law Judge for the State of New Jersey to teach a social science class on inequality. So the same was true of him: he was a high-ranking member of the administration and also a member of the faculty. 

HRH Prince Adnan El-Hashemite, a member of the Royal House of Iraq, was Executive Director of Global Academic Initiatives as well as the University’s representative to the United Nations Department of Global Communications, but also an ordinary faculty member teaching classes on the Rutherford campus.  Something similar was true of his predecessor, the charismatic Mary E. Norton; like Adnan, Mary was an outgoing Executive Director of Global Academic Initiatives and an ordinary member of the faculty. 

When I left the university in 2020, the University’s new President, James Crawford III, a former naval admiral, also became a professor of Foreign Relations in Felician’s fledging “department” (it was barely that) of Political Science, where I assume he taught some classes to justify his having that title. 

What each of these examples illustrates is the dual- or triple-role phenomenon that exists at many colleges and universities.  In other words, the same individual may be a member of the institution’s faculty, of its formal administration, of its informal administrative apparatus, and a prominent member of the community beyond the university.

I’ve given six examples at a very small “university” (really a small liberal arts college with delusions of grandeur) that I happened to recall after a few minutes’ reflection on the issue. I remember them because of my proximity to them as a member of the School of Arts and Sciences; each example is in some way connected to that School. But the same phenomenon prevailed elsewhere at the University, in the Schools of Nursing, Business, and Education, etc. Each had its share of faculty, administrative, and quasi-administrative cross-overs. And what’s true of Felician was and is true to greater or lesser degree at other institutions. Another example off the top of my head: my friend Suzanne Schneider is both Interim Director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and a faculty member there.

This dual/triple role phenomenon is a topic of avid discussion in higher education circles. What’s not much discussed (but ought to be) is how it relates to institutional neutrality. According to institutional neutrality, the administration of a university must be neutral on matters of public controversy, but its faculty have the freedom to speak out. If administrators spoke out, their doing so would “chill” speech, but if faculty didn’t have the freedom to speak out, their academic freedom would be violated. As the Kalven Committee Report puts it:

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.

Since administrators presumptively speak for the university (or are subordinate to those who do), they represent the university. So they are the sponsors of critics, not themselves critics. Put more clearly, unlike faculty, they are held to the strictures of institutional neutrality and not permitted to make public pronouncements on matters of public controversy.

The thing to see here is that the canonical conception of institutional neutrality depends on the assumption that the administration/faculty distinction is mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. Both parties occupy distinct roles with distinct responsibilities. If one party appropriates the opposing role, his or her doing so undermines the core function of the university. For that reason, it must be the case, for any individual at a university, that they either formally fall into the one role or the other, or if they don’t, they should be treated as though they did. If I’m a professor, I’m a member of the faculty, and not an administrator. Whereas if I’m an administrator, then I’m an administrator, and not a member of the faculty. If I’m neither (or not clearly either), then I have to be assigned a specific, formal, institutionalized role that tells me whether I should be treated as a member of the faculty or as an administrator. What’s clear is that I can’t be treated as both, and must be treated as one or the other. 

It should be apparent to anyone who has spent any time in higher education that this taxonomy, though required by the demands of institutional neutrality, flouts the everyday fact of academic life. Many people within a university setting are either faculty who play an administrative role, or administrators who teach as faculty. 

Contrary to appearances, and contrary to any attempts to fudge or finesse the issue, there’s no way to accommodate institutional neutrality to this obvious, prevalent fact. Administrators speak for the university. Faculty speak for themselves. If you speak for the university, then by institutional neutrality, you must be institutionally neutral. If you speak for yourself, you have no duty to be neutral on behalf of the institution. Being neutral and being non-neutral are logical contraries and practically incompatible activities. You can’t do both.

And it’s not just that you can’t do both “at the same time” or “under one description rather than another.” You can’t do both as long as you’re employed by a neutralist institution, regardless of when you make the attempt, or how you verbally preface your statements. The fact remains that you’re one and the same person at all times and across all institutional descriptions. If you occupy both faculty and administrative positions at once, then if you assert non-neutral claim p under as a faculty member, that assertion will follow you to your administrative position precisely because you’re the one who said it. You can’t then refuse to address p a minute later because you’re now “speaking as an administrator.”

You can’t, for instance, say “I regard Israel’s actions in Gaza as justified self-defense, and reject as anti-Semitic any call to divest from Israel,” and then take a “neutral” posture on divestment as an administrator where you just “happen” to reject the overtures of divestment activists out of “institutional neutrality” rather than anything to do with your substantive views on Israel, genocide, or divestment. That’s not cleverness or logical precision. It’s just bullshit artistry.

As an individual employee at an institutionally neutral university, then, you’re obliged to adhere either to the demands of neutrality or those of non-neutrality, but not both. 

There are three lessons here. One is that institutional neutrality flouts academic practice even at the institutions that profess to follow it. Institutions that adopt institutional neutrality do not typically demand that administrators give up their faculty positions, or that faculty relinquish all administrative or quasi-administrative roles. They simply make loud declarations about the imperatives of neutrality, then lapse into a posture of make-believe on all the contradictions involved, and move on. There is a loud movement to induce universities to sign pledges of institutional neutrality, but no comparable movement to ensure that every member of the administration has relinquished every last credit of teaching he might have, and (even less plausibly) that every member of the faculty has relinquished every last administrative responsibility she holds.

That, in fact, is an understatement, at least as far as faculty holding lower-level administrative positions are concerned. At Felician (as elsewhere), the administration was only too eager to cut costs by saddling faculty with low-level administrative responsibilities. And that imperative hasn’t changed since I left the field. Notice that doing so doesn’t just cut costs, but potentially puts a gag order on the faculty involved. Suppose that I’m a highly opinionated faculty member at an institutionally neutral institution. I’m now tasked with the chairmanship of my department. Suppose that this turns me into an “administrator.”  If so, I lose my faculty-based right to be an “instruments of criticism,” and simply become a neutral, evasive lackey of admin.

Many faculty are only too happy to accept this corrupt bargain. Since faculty often get teaching reductions for taking on administrative duties, the corrupt bargain becomes clear: take on administrative duties; get a teaching reduction; use the extra free time to do your beloved research; but when it comes to controversial issues, shut the fuck up. Justice has been trashed, but the two parties to the transaction come out happy.  This is how a neutral institution ends up neutering its faculty.

The second lesson is that despite how obvious the contradiction is, it’s mostly gone undiscussed. This should be an indication of just how unreflectively institutional neutrality has gained prominence in American higher education. If a doctrine gains prominence, but no one wants to discuss the most obvious problems with it, that itself is an obvious problem with it. What we’re dealing with is a dogma adopted for reasons that have less to do with the smooth running of academic life than for reasons extrinsic to academic life.

This sounds conspiratorial, but it’s really just a belaboring of the obvious and explicit.  Institutional neutrality is not and has never been about improving self-governance within higher education. It’s always been about suppressing or neutralizing activist dissent by administrative dictat. What institutional neturality facilitates is precisely a non-responsive and unaccountable university administration. If you confront a university administration with any controversial topic today, it now feels entitled to cite “institutional neutrality” as its excuse to clam up, ignore you, or (if you persist) to reprimand you, suspend you, expel you, terminate you, declare you persona non grata, and/or arrest you or have you arrested, often on grounds of some “neutral” rules dreamed up just in time to do the trick.  This posture is obvious from the Kalven Committee’s Report and activities, and it’s obvious today. To deny this is to be in denial. But denial–evasion, self-delusion–is what the advocates of institutional neutrality demand of all of us.

Finally, no one can pretend that institutional neutrality is neutral about the institutional structure of higher education. Ultimately, there’s only one clean way to resolve the contradiction between n-role arrangements and institutional neutrality consistently with neutrality: eliminate all dual- or triple- (or n-role) arrangements within higher education, full stop.

On this view, higher education must be re-conceived according to the conception of justice in Book IV of Plato’s Republic: everybody is given a distinct role within the university, and everybody strictly minds their own business within that role, being careful never to step out of it. Faculty function as faculty, never as administrators or quasi-administrators. Administrators administrate; they don’t teach. If you’re a professor, you’re not a Chair, not a Dean, not a Coordinator, not a Director, and not anything else; you’re a Lecturer, or an Assistant Professor, or an Associate Professor, or full Professor, and that’s it. Likewise, if you’re a Chair, or Director, or Dean, or Provost, or  VP, or President, or member of the Board, you can’t teach a single credit of any class on any subject whatsoever, no matter how dear to your heart or good at it you might be. You have to go back to your spreadsheets and your org charts and your Visio workflow diagrams and stay there. Strong medicine, but unavoidable. 

One loose end here concerns the many members of the average university community that are staff without being either faculty or administrators. Think for instance of the Director of the Writing Center (plus its staff) or the Director of Academic Support Services (plus staff) or the person in charge of transfer credit decisions (plus staff), or of academic advising (plus staff), or disability accommodations (plus staff), or athletics (plus staff), or Campus Ministry, or whatever. It’s nowadays a very long list. These people are neither faculty nor administrators, but are a bit like both. Some of them teach, and some direct things, and some serve as staff under people who do one or both.

Strictly speaking, Kalven-style doctrine says nothing about them. Does that mean that they have carte blanche to say whatever they want? Can the Director of the Writing Center or Academic Advising or Academic Support services come out in favor of divestment? Can she call Israeli actions in Gaza a “genocide” during an on-campus protest on her lunch hour? What about their staff? Can they wear watermelon hoodies or hoodies with Star of David flags on them to work? There’s a good case for treating such staff on par with faculty (they tend to do more teaching than faculty) and giving them the academic freedom that faculty have, but that’s not the way things actually work in the contemporary university.

I think it’s obvious what happens to these people. Since by definition they run things, or work for people who do, they’re regarded as “representing the institution.” This means that they’re forced to shut their mouths about anything controversial–forced, in Rousseuan fashion, to be academically free by the “neutral” definitions imposed on them by the advocates of institutional neutrality. The paradoxical result is that whole swatches of the university are to be disenfranchised and censored in the name of refusing to chill speech. Speech must be chilled that unchilled speech may come. 

All of this may seem a stupid, pointlessly expensive, arbitrarily rigid way of running a university. But it’s what institutional neutrality demands. Sorry! 

As contradictions go, this particular contradiction within the commitments of institutional neutrality may not be the worst. In principle, at least, the contradiction has a solution, and in practice it can probably be ignored. Ignoring things, after all, is the whole point and greatest forte of institutional neutrality. It’s basically a doctrine designed to ignore the substantive by invoking the procedural.

But the contradiction testifies to the fundamental unseriousness of its advocates about improving the internal workings of higher education. Institutional neutrality is a legalistic doctrine modeled on the workings of the for-profit corporation, applied unreflectively to the workings of higher education. It ignores the fact that the ideal university is a kind of polis that works, if it works at all, through active self-governance. Self-governance requires open lines of active communication. But a university that shuts down on controversial issues is one that by definition is averse to the very idea of open lines of active communication. It’s an autocratic entity that issues dictats from above, often dictats that have their origins in the whims of trustees uninterested in academic values, uninterested in justice, and uninterested even in the legitimate desires or aspirations of the university’s faculty.

Institutional neutrality is a doctrine that allows these people to call the shots with zero accountability. They need to give lip service, of course, to academic freedom, but they have an overriding incentive in limiting its scope. The more top-heavy the institution, the more of it falls under the gag-order demands of neutrality. Cynical as it sounds, I think the advocates of institutional neutrality know this and want it. They want to neutralize faculty self-governance, and with it, the conception of the university as one of the only exemplifications in our society of the Aristotelian ideal of the Greek polis. This is why, despite their truth-seeking pretensions, I think it’s fair to regard them as enemies of higher education, and think it fair to hold every contradiction of theirs against them. This one is just one in a long and growing list. There will be more.