At the Chicago Center For Contemporary Theory (3CT)’s second discussion in a sequence of talks called “On University Values,” panelists debated what they viewed as contradictions between the University’s values—stated in documents like the Kalven Report—and its material and economic activity as an employer, educator, investor, and public body.
The discussion took place on November 13 and is part of a broader 3CT series on “The Corporate University,” a program kicked off by professor Clifford Ando’s paper “West Virginia Chicago Is Happening to You: The Fight for the Modern University” in November of last year, which discusses University actions in the context of the University’s budget crisis.
Jonathan Levy, a 3CT fellow and the James Westfall Thompson Professor of U.S. History, Fundamentals, Social Thought, and the College, moderated the conversation between professors Eman Abdelhadi, Gabriel Winant, and Robert Vargas.
Abdelhadi began the conversation with a list of occasions when university administrations across the United States have ended up on the “wrong side of history,” including Columbia University’s ties to the early Nazi party, UChicago’s opposition to pro–civil rights and anti–Vietnam War protests in the ’60s, and the arrests of 28 pro-Palestinian students and faculty members during a sit-in at Rosenwald Hall last November.
“Today, history repeats itself as both tragedy and farce,” Abdelhadi said. “All through last year, we saw a wave of new violent crackdowns on student and faculty protesters across universities in the U.S. and across the western world.”
As examples of these crackdowns, Abdelhadi referenced the temporary suspension of a pro-Palestine professor at Indiana University for “misrepresenting” the purpose of a room reservation and the firing of Maura Finkelstein, a pro-Palestine tenured professor at Muhlenberg College, for “bias-related conduct.” Finkelstein, who is Jewish, had reposted an Instagram post by a Palestinian-American poet that said in part: “Don’t normalize Zionism. Don’t normalize Zionists taking up space.”
Abdelhadi sees these and many other events as part of a crisis in an academia increasingly dominated by financial rather than academic interests.
“The university has become a corporation and a hedge fund, a tax haven for billionaires, and a playground for the children of the upper middle and upper classes,” she said. “Faculty are weaker than ever before and are facing increasing austerity.”
Abdelhadi suggested that people should view the university through a “materialist” lens, one in which students, faculty, and staff members see themselves primarily as workers and see university administrators as “bosses driven by concrete material interests.”
“We could let go of the idea that the university exists as a suspended reality outside of capitalism,” she said. “We can do what workers who want to protect themselves have always done: build power, recognize leverage where it exists, and exercise it to improve our working conditions and our students’ learning conditions.”
Winant spoke after Abdelhadi, highlighting the roles that the modern university has taken on in addition to being an institution of higher education—property ownership, law enforcement, and medical treatment—and the social conditions that led to that transformation.
“An increasingly unequal society elevates the role of institutions like this one and puts particular kinds of demands and pressures on them and on the people within them,” Winant said. “There’s more pressure and demand on higher education systems in general, and then at each rung of it there’s a kind of scrambling to get to the next rung up that grows more and more intense. Hence the transition of University of Chicago over not very long—within my lifetime—from admitting half of the people who applied to whatever it is now, 4 percent or something like that.” Recently published University data shows that the acceptance rate for the Class of 2028 was 4.48 percent.
According to Winant, this elevation in the societal importance of private universities occurred alongside a major disinvestment from public university systems, driving an increase in tuition costs at both public and private universities and colleges. He argued that universities have also found additional ways of generating revenue, namely by expanding their functions beyond providing an education.
“Universities are fixed in place and have to generate for themselves economic benefit from the place in which they sit. And the University of Chicago does that, like many institutions do, and in that process its social functions expand,” he said, arguing that the University acts in the role of a commercial and residential landlord, law enforcement agency, and hospital for the neighborhood.
Because of these social functions that the University has taken on, Winant believes that “the University is mediating the citizenship of the people who live within its umbrella in various forms.”
“In the United States, healthcare is not a function of government; education is often not a function of government. But these are functions of citizenship in that they are collective experiences,” he said.
Like Abdelhadi, he suggested that the University in its current form can serve as a site of solidarity-generating struggle, where all the people impacted by the University—students, staff, faculty, and neighborhood residents—can come together to improve their situation.
“That’s not that dissimilar from the role that a factory once had in a company town. The kind of assembly of different kinds of people into a common situation and a potential set of common interests and a potential common cause,” Winant said. “And I do think that the ability, the possibility of doing that beyond the narrow bands of student or teacher or neighbor or whatever it might be, is one of the most generative possibilities of this kind of situation.”
Vargas spoke last, critiquing the University’s professed commitment to freedom of speech as a form of what Yale University professor Jason Stanley calls “masking propaganda.”
“[Stanley] defines [‘masking propaganda’] as the use of liberal democratic ideals to obscure the gap between stated principles and reality. And with all due respect to my colleagues who value the University’s emphasis on free speech, I view the University’s emphasis on free speech as a masking propaganda,” Vargas said. “The University brandishes the banner of free speech for genuine reasons—and to mask its financial and political interests.”
Vargas cited the example of Benchmark Analytics, a private police workforce management company that according to its website “in partnership with the University of Chicago, offers a line-up of evidence-based personnel management solutions that are grounded in research and powered by data science,” as an example of the University violating the Kalven Report.
The Kalven Report, first published in 1967, is a document widely considered to be the foundation of the University’s stance of institutional neutrality and to prevent the University from engaging in institutional promotion of social or political positions.
“In a world and marketplace with multiple competing ideas for how to prevent something like police misconduct, the University’s investment and profiting from technology claiming to prevent police misconduct is a political stance,” Vargas said.
“Faculty and the wider public can unmask the University’s material interests and illuminate how it contradicts its alleged values,” he continued. “By exposing these contradictions, we can move beyond the tautological debates over ideas that the administration prefers and toward debates over redistributing decision-making power.”
Vargas also suggested legal and entrepreneurial avenues as bargaining tools to “force the University’s hand” into demonstrating the disparity between its stated values and its material actions. He proposed faculty development of products that address “real world problem[s],” which he thinks will force the University to take a stance on which ideas are worth investing in.
The professors then took questions from Levy, expanding on their earlier points and offering potential solutions to the problems they raised.
In response to a question about whether the principles of knowledge development and curiosity within the university context are worth fighting for or potentially need to be created for the first time, Abdelhadi expressed concern that those aspects of the University are becoming “disposable” in comparison to the other social functions it has taken on.
“I think if there’s anything that we learn over and over in these moments where the contradictions come to a head, like they have over the past year, we realize just how disposable this part of the University has become,” Abdelhadi said. “And I think only by recognizing that can we actually defend it.”
Although the panel was in agreement about what they perceived as problems with the University’s management and operations, they believe that most faculty members disagree with them.
“When you’re on the faculty senate, you realize that the vast majority of faculty at the University don’t agree with us. They actually think we’re not right. ‘I’m here to cure cancer.’ ‘I’m here to teach at a business school.’ ‘Democracy, what are you talking about?’” Levy said. He argued that because faculty members primarily see their role as educators and researchers rather than changemakers, University administrators might be more “scared” of students than they are of faculty members.
Abdelhadi partially disagreed, instead arguing that administration is less scared of the students themselves than what students might represent about changes taking place in society.
“I don’t think the administration is actually scared of the students. I think the administration is very much afraid of what the students represent in terms of a shift in opinion, a shift in how the University can function,” Abdelhadi said. “I think people know the role that campus activism has played in American history, in shifting public opinion and also spearheading social movements.”
