Academic Autonomy and Institutional Integrity — The BDS Test
Let me open with a background story about an event at Rice University a long, long time ago, in 2019. The Computer Science Department, of which I am a member, celebrated its 35th anniversary. We had a day-long program to which we have invited all of our current students and all of our alumni. For the opening evening reception, we invited alums who work in industry to have recruiting tables, where current students can come to learn about their companies. When the program was announced, it became evident that we have alums from Palantir, who were also going to recruit. Undergraduate students approached the department and asked that Palantir be removed from the list, because of its shady data practices. They also approached me because of my well-known advocacy for ethics in computing. My response to them was that I share their distaste for Palantir, and I will have nothing to do with this company. But the Department of Computer Science cannot play politics and maintain its own private blacklist. We must treat all of our alums equally. The Department accepted my position.
Why bring up this old story? Read on!
More than six months into the Israel-Hamas War, US campuses are roiled by pro-Palestinian protests. Campus leaders are being tested by conflicting demands of freedom of expression and campus safety. BDS (boycott-divest-sanction) resolutions aimed at Israel are among the latest frontier in the current upheaval. Forty-seven students were recently detained at Yale University for trespassing. The students, who were calling on the university to divest its endowment holdings in military-weapons manufacturers, established an encampment on campus, and negotiations between protesters and the university broke down.
On my own campus, the Student Association (SA) had to table a resolution to boycott and divest SA funds from Israel-aligned companies after a student filed a discrimination complaint with the Office of Access, Equity and Equal Opportunity (AEEO) . According to Rice Thresher, a student newspaper, the director of Rice’s Office of Access, Equity and Equal Opportunity notified the SA of the complaint. The complainant had requested that the SA’s Senate withhold voting on the resolution, which AEOO granted while the complaint was being investigated. The resolution’s authors claimed the administration’s response was an “overstep of power,” according to the Thresher. “We believe this is a direct violation of our freedom of expression,” they wrote in a statement to the Thresher. “We view this as an overstep of power by the administration on Student Association proceedings.”
Rice’s Office of AEEO is in charge of implementing Rice’s Policy on Discrimination and Harassment. But, while I find the proposed BDS resolution deeply distasteful, I am not convinced that the proper lens to view it is that of discrimination and harassment. Suppose that Rice’s AEEO determines that the proposed resolution does not constitute discrimination and/or harassment. What then? Would it be ok for the SA to pass that resolution? And what if the SA had ignored AEEO and proceeded to approve the resolution?
I believe that the proper lens to view the resolution is that of academic autonomy and institutional integrity. It is first important to observe that the proposed resolution is not merely declaratory. As explained by the Thresher, the SA manages about $400,000 in funds from Rice’s student activity fee, known as the Blanket Tax. Some large student groups — such as Rice Program Council and the student media organizations — get annual budgets from the Blanket Tax, and other student organizations can request one-time allocations through the Initiative Fund. The crucial sentence of the resolution is “No Blanket Tax funds shall be dedicated to the purchase or services of any corporation identified on the BDS List as determined by the Ethical Spending Policy”. That is, the proposed resolution is budgetary, rather than declaratory. For declaratory resolutions, the SA could argue that insisting on their tabling of the resolution is prior restraint on free expression. Can the same argument be applied to a budgetary resolution?
Here is where my opening story becomes relevant. The punchline of that story was “the Department of Computer Science cannot play politics”. The Department of Computer Science is an organ of Rice University, with a tremendous amount of local autonomy; it determines its own curricular requirements, it admits graduate students, and so on, and so forth. The Department is granted this level of autonomy, under the shared-governance principle, due to its perceived expertise in computer science. For example, the computer-science faculty know best what degree requirements are best for the BS Degree in Computer Science. There are several internationally leading Israeli computer scientists, including two Turing-Award laureates. (The Turing Award is considered to be the Nobel Prize in computing.) Several courses in computer science build on the works of these scientists. Suppose now that the Department decides as a matter of departmental policy not to teach the works of these scientists. Such a decision would force the dean and/or provost to intervene and nullify the decision, arguing that it is a political decision, and the Department has exceeded its autonomy, which is restricted to academic matters, even though this restriction is implicit rather than explicit, as it is not written anywhere in Rice’s policies.
Just as the Computer Science Department is an organ of Rice University, the SA is also an organ of Rice University. It received a significant amount of autonomy from the University, due to their perceived expertise in student-welfare issues. But the proposed BDS resolution aims at budgetary allocations based on political considerations. This breaches the implicit bounds of their autonomy. If every organ of Rice University can make operational decisions based on political decisions, chaos would ensue. Institutional integrity requires that if political decisions are made at all, they should be made at the level of the President Office, with governing board’s approval, as the President is the only person at the university who does have to interact with the political world outside of the university. Of course, politics is a subject of study in the university, for example, at Rice, in the Department of Political Science and the Baker Institute for Public Policy, but the locus for operational decisions motivated by political considerations should be at the President Office.
I believe that the decision by Rice to demand that SA table the proposed BDS resolution on grounds of harassment and discrimination was mistaken. Rather, Rice should have informed SA that the resolution exceeded the autonomy granted to them by Rice. If they insist on passing it, the University should declare it null and void, and then remove SA’s control of the Blanket-Tax Fund.
Fareed Zakaria recently asked: How did America’s elite universities go from being “the kinds of assets the world looks at with admiration and envy” just eight years ago, to becoming objects of ridicule today?” An obvious answer is that we have let politics infiltrate academia. As Tyler Austin Harper argued, “Elite schools are floundering in their attempts to navigate the Israel-Palestine conflict because they have passed the better part of a decade making themselves political.”
It is time for academia to go back to academics!
