Jameel Jaffer
I am Jameel Jaffer and this is “War & Speech,” an exploration of the free speech fallout of the war in Israel and Gaza. The ghost of Harry Kalven has been haunting American universities. Kalven, who died in 1974, was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He coined the term heckler's veto, defended Lenny Bruce against obscenity charges and wrote influential about the meaning of the First Amendment. He also presided over a committee appointed by the University of Chicago's, then president in 1967, tasked with considering the university's role in political and social action. This was of course a time like the one we're living in now of intense political ferment. At the University of Chicago, there had been protests against the Vietnam War and against the draft and against the university's perceived complicity in South African apartheid. Kalven's committee was asked to consider how the university should engage with these momentous political and social questions, questions that had generated tumult already and that would eventually generate much more, including at Columbia the following year.
The committee's recommendation was that the university adopt a posture of institutional neutrality. "The university should avoid expressing opinions on the social and political issues of the day," the committee said, "because the university best serves its role in society by sustaining an environment in which freedom of inquiry can flourish. That kind of environment can't be sustained," the committee reasoned, "if the university is itself a participant in political and social debate. If the university is going to be the home and sponsor of critics, it can't be the critic itself," or so the Kalven committee said. The University of Chicago adopted the committee's recommendation, but few other institutions followed. This may change. Many universities, including Harvard and Columbia, issued statements in response to the October 7th attacks. These statements satisfied no one. They alienated and aggravated students, faculty, alumni, donors, and legislators. They pulled university administrators away from the work of the university and into the political fray.
So perhaps Harry Kalven was right, perhaps universities should say less. My guest today is Noah Feldman, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. And our topic today is the role of the university in political and social action. Noah has already devoted a great deal of attention to this topic because since April he's been co-chairing Harvard's working group on institutional voice, which was established to determine whether and when the university should issue official statements on publicly salient issues. The working group issued its final report just a few days ago, and Harvard's administration quickly adopted its recommendations. It's an eloquent, concise and persuasive document very much worth reading, and as we'll discuss, it diverges from Kalven's report in really interesting ways.
Noah, thanks so much for being here.
Noah Feldman
Jameel, thank you so much for having me.
Jameel Jaffer
Why did Harvard form this working group and why did you agree to serve as its co-chair?
Noah Feldman
Harvard created this working group because the events of the fall of 2023 at Harvard, which culminated in the resignation of the president, brought to light a new reality, which is that Harvard did not have a policy at all on when the institution should make official statements and when it shouldn't. And like most universities, unlike Chicago, it thought it really didn't need one. And to be fair, for most of the last 57 years since the Kalven Report came out, it really didn't need a definitive policy.
But we now realize that in an era of social media and intense political polarization, not having a policy was just not workable. And so the university wanted a policy. And it wasn't just the senior leaders in the university who wanted a policy, it was a very strongly felt sense throughout the faculty, and also amongst students, that we needed a policy. And so I guess I would say that it was in a sense in awareness of what had happened that the committee was founded, but it was in the recognition that this was not a one-off and that we needed to have a thought through policy with reasons that would guide us in the future.
Jameel Jaffer
And how big was the working group and who else was on it?
Noah Feldman
There were eight faculty members on the working group spanning academic disciplines from medicine to national security studies to classics and philosophy. My co-chair, Alison Simmons is a very distinguished philosopher. And that's not even all. There was also a professor of education who knows a lot about how you run a university. The former dean of the Divinity School. It was about as diverse from a disciplinary perspective as a university committee could be. It was also very diverse in terms of people's substantive political views. One of my colleagues on the committee, Meghan O'Sullivan, was Deputy National Security Advisor for George W. Bush. Others would identify as strongly left-wing on the full range of political issues and there were people in the middle as well. So there were eight of us and we came from very different perspectives. And it's striking that we converged on a policy even though we disagree on so much else.
Jameel Jaffer
All faculty members, some of them former administrators. Is that a fair characterization?
Noah Feldman
Correct. It was all faculty members. And of course there are other ways to make a working group and some of the other working groups that Harvard has right now have different kinds of composition. It's probably above my pay grade to say why the senior administration asked us to be a faculty group, but I think the reason is that they understood that faculty cares a lot about its own academic freedom and that faculty also cares a lot about the university continuing to flourish. And many, many faculty, and I'll just speak for myself here, were really upset by the way we lost a president. I don't think maybe every faculty member felt that way, but I think the great majority certainly did. So it made sense to go to the faculty on this. But we consulted way beyond the faculty. We did 35 listening sessions with alums, current students, faculty, staff from lots of different backgrounds all over the university. We ended up hearing from more than 1000 people. And so in that sense we took input across the full range of what I would think of as stakeholders in the university.
Jameel Jaffer
Now you have issued your report. What does the report say?
Noah Feldman
I'll start with the bottom line. The report says that the university has a core function, and that core function is to provide an environment for the pursuit of truth through teaching, learning, research and debate. And so when those core values of debate and reasoning and open inquiry that are necessary for the running of a university are threatened, the university can and should take a strong values-based approach to speaking out about it. But when the university is pressured to or asked to speak on matters that are outside of the core function of the university and therefore outside the institutional expertise of its leaders, the leaders should not speak officially and formally and the university should not have official positions. So the university should not have a foreign policy. The university should not have a domestic policy. And in that sense, the university should say less.
So those are the bottom line outcomes and they have a lot of overlap with the Kalven Report outcomes, though not perfect overlap. Where we really differed from the Kalven Report is in the rationale that we offered for why this is the case and in the way we characterized the policy.
Jameel Jaffer
Say more about that. How is the foundation, the philosophical foundation of your report different from that of the Kalven Report? And when you get down to brass tacks and what kinds of statements are going to be issued, when, what difference is it going to make that you approach these issues in a different way?
Noah Feldman
The first key difference is that the Kalven Report's core reason for why the university shouldn't speak out was that the university can't speak out without undermining the academic freedom of the members of the faculty. Because it appears if the university speaks, says the Kalven Report, that it's speaking for everybody, but we don't all agree. We did not follow that approach. Maybe that approach was valid in 1967. I don't know. I wasn't there. But today it's very clear to me that if the president of the university expresses a point of view, including an official point of view, that I really disagree with, that on its own doesn't undermine my academic freedom. Our rationale was about institutional expertise. So this starts with the idea of why does anyone ever care what anyone at a university says? Well, if they listen to us, it should be because we know what we're talking about because we have relevant expertise.
And so when the university as a whole in its official capacity speaks, it should only speak about things where in its institutional capacity, its leaders have domain specific expertise. And they have amazing expertise in how to run a university and what it takes to run a university and what needs to be preserved to run a university, so they should speak about that. But the university's leaders don't have institutional expertise about the war in Ukraine or about the second law of thermodynamics, for that matter. You want to hear about that, go talk to the physicists and the chemists. They know what they're talking about to someone who is a dean. So that's our core rationale and it's a really different rationale. So that's the first question you ask. How does the rationale differ?
Second, how do we talk about it? Well, the Kalven Report used the phrase institutional neutrality. And in fact, I think it contributed to making that phrase a well-known phrase among this handful of people who ever cared about this issue in the past. Our report does not say that we're proposing neutrality. And in fact, it says the opposite. We say that the university isn't neutral, it isn't value neutral, it can't be value neutral and it shouldn't be value neutral. The university stands for certain things among them, that the way you get to the truth best is by research, evidence gathering, experimentation, and above all, rigorous debate. And when those values are threatened, and they are threatened very much today as you, Jameel, know better than anybody because you do a great job of standing up for those things against the threats. So when those are threatened, the university has to speak out on them, it has to take a stance. And that's not neutral and we shouldn't pretend that it's neutral.
The last point you were asking is where the rubber meets the road, is this different from the Kalven approach? And there I think the answer is yes, but I think reasonable people could also argue about this. So let me give a concrete example. Starting in the 1970s, Harvard University took a public aggressive advocacy stance in favor of affirmative action for admissions in higher education. So when that issue was before the US Supreme Court and Harvard was not a party to the case in 1978, they went out of their way to file a friend of the court brief, which then was relied on by one of the justices. And that opinion turned out to be the controlling opinion. And then the word diversity got into the account of when it was appropriate for colleges to use affirmative action in their admissions. And it stayed there for almost 50 years.
And during that period of time, it underwent attacks and Harvard repeatedly participated as a friend of the court and as a public advocate standing up for this point of view all the way through the most recent iteration where Harvard was actually a party to a case which it lost, in which the Supreme Court flipped and said, okay, we no longer believe that affirmative action and race-based diversity should be used. Now according to the Kalven Report, a university should not take a position on a controversial matter of social policy. And the very textbook example of a controversial issue of social policy over the last 50 years has been affirmative action. So on the Kalven Report, at least on my reading of it, a university like Harvard shouldn't have actively engaged in that kind of social policy advocacy. On our principles, Harvard was right to do that because admitting students is part of the core function of the university, and the university should speak out on the core function of the university. And so seen from that perspective, it's a big difference between our approach and the Kalven approach.
Jameel Jaffer
So your report, as you say, concludes that the university should generally not issue official statements about public matters, but it also says that the university has a responsibility to speak out and protect and promote its core function. I want a quote from your report, "The university's leaders must communicate the value of the university's central activities. They must defend the university's autonomy and academic freedom when threatened. And they must speak out on issues directly relevant to the university's operation." So one question I have about those exceptions is whether they can be cabined.
Noah Feldman
Before I answer that, Jameel, can I just say quickly, I don't think those are exceptions. To me, that's actually the core of the report. The report is when should the university speak and when shouldn't it speak? So I do not think of this as we have a general rule that university shouldn't speak, but on certain days of the week on these certain things they should speak. No, the university affirmatively needs to speak on these things and at affirmatively needs not to speak about the other things. So that's how I conceptualize it.
Jameel Jaffer
That's a very good point, and I think it's a big difference between your report and the Kalven Report because the presumptions are flipped, right?
Noah Feldman
I think that's right. Our presumption is that there's a bunch of things that really matter. And by the way, again, this is nothing against the Kalven Report. We're just living in a different time where academic freedom is genuinely under attack in Congress and among presidential candidates and so forth. Now, will this set of principles actually be followed in practice? I think at least at first, the university has a very big practical incentive to follow them. And I think this is the reason that we had big consensus among faculty and students that we spoke to after we were done a poll came out in the Harvard Crimson that we didn't have the benefit of when we were doing our work that suggested somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the faculty would've supported something similar, even described in different terms. So we've got a pretty good consensus.
There's a practical reason though for the university to listen. Think of what the job of a university president is like. You wake up every morning, you've got all kinds of problems around the university and you've got to work on that. You have to try to make the things that don't work work better. You have to preserve the things that work well. What you don't want to have to do is read the newspaper, figure out what global events affected some people on your campus, then figure out what statement to make that will satisfy a significant number of constituents but will not alienate other people on campus or off of campus who will then call for your head. And since this happened, I can say it, sometimes get your head. Deans and administrators were among the people happiest to hear a recommendation like this. And it's because they become accustomed to being lobbied all the time by people from inside and outside the university who say, "Look on this issue, every reasonable person agrees. So make a statement." And the deans and the presidents are like, "I know you think that every reasonable person agrees with you, but in half an hour, I'm seeing the next group of people who thinks that your view is completely unreasonable."
My general approach to these matters is that you should have really strong good principles that you believe in and you should use those to guide your action. And then you should rest heavily on hardcore, pragmatic self-interest to effectuate your very good ideal principles. And so that's why the answer I'm giving to you is not, oh, our theory is so great that people will follow it. No, what I'm saying is I think our theory is pretty good, but I think the reason that the institutions will follow it and that a lot of other institutions seem really interested in doing something analogous or similar is that it's in the interests of university administrators to follow this policy now. Now, will that change someday? Very possibly. Maybe we'll be in a world where universities are safe and secure and everyone thinks that they're terrific things and no one's trying to lobby them and then the move back in this direction will start again. And if that happens, fair enough, university policies are not written in stone, they can evolve.
Jameel Jaffer
So I want to be even clearer than we have been about what this means in practice. Claudine Gay, who is then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, issued a statement on May 31st, 2020 about the death of George Floyd and about the protests that were sweeping across the nation. One thing she did in that statement is remind faculty and students that the university's mission entails tracing the roots of inequality and its pernicious effects and equipping our students with the understanding and insight needed to create a better world. She also called on faculty and students to lean into the university's mission with resolve and a new sense of urgency. So I imagine that many people would say that that statement was meant to protect and promote the university's core function, to use a phrase from your report. How would you respond to that argument?
Noah Feldman
The two hard questions we always got as a committee were, what about George Floyd? And also what about 9/11? Can you really imagine that 9/11 happens in the president of an American university that's not Columbia or NYU, that's not right in New York doesn't make a statement. So the first thing I always say in response is we have to be honest. We have to admit that even the most high-flown principles don't always survive the circumstances of reality. However, it does seem to me that under the policy and the principles that we've articulated, presidents should bend over backwards. We actually said this, in close cases, don't issue a statement. Should bend over backwards not to issue a statement that essentially says this important global event has taken place and I want you all to see me acknowledging it publicly. I'm on the right side of history, I'm making my stand. Oh, and by the way, here's how I justify that by connecting it to the university's mission.
So to my mind, the reason that's important is otherwise, this goes back to your earlier question, we'd never be able to toe the line. I mean the invasion of Ukraine by Russia shuttered Ukrainian universities. As a student signed said in Harvard yard during the recent encampment, there are no universities functioning in Gaza. That's true. So it would follow then that any global event that affected any university would be within the university's core of function to comment on. And then to be honest, there goes the policy because you just make your positioning statement and you throw in a mention of the university. So the hard truth is that these principles are meant to say, don't do that, hold back. And hold back until you've built up the strength to be able to hold back in the really big cases as well.
If it happened tomorrow, it would be really implausible for me to think that a university that had newly adopted this policy would be able to really do it. But if it happened in three or four years and there'd been a bunch of medium-sized events where the university had made it clear that it wasn't commenting, then you build up the muscle of self-restraint. And that's the goal.
And I would add, by the way, it's not only an internal muscle, it's also about what the rest of the world thinks. For this policy to work in the real world, it's not enough for Harvard students and Harvard's leadership to know we have this policy. The whole world has to know so that they don't post on social media, "Where is Harvard? Why is it not making a comment? And so among other things, Harvard's going to have to say a lot of times, and often very uncomfortably, "We're not issuing a statement." And if someone says, "Well, you should denounce your students," they have to say, "We're not denouncing our students. But you should understand no one speaks for the university. These students do not speak for the university. And neither does anyone else except for us, the senior leadership at the university. And we don't make statements when it's not about our core function."
And then they're going to have to take the heat and will that be easy? No. But we now see what the alternative is like. The alternative is like they call you in front of Congress and after a series of other events, which I admit are quite complicated, you lose your job.
Jameel Jaffer
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act requires universities to address harassment and discrimination on their campuses, and universities have sometimes interpreted Title VI to require them to respond to student speech that might contribute to a hostile environment. Do you see any tension between what you've recommended in this report and what title VI requires universities to do?
Noah Feldman
I really don't, and let me say why. The university's obligation to stand in the way of bullying and harassment, presumably both by having a system in place to try to prevent it in the first place and then addressing it actively and in a remedial way when it happens is about making sure that students aren't subject to bullying and harassment. It is not about pretending to solve that problem through costless and often anodyne public statements like we condemn hate. If you are actually subject to harassment and bullying, I doubt very much if it really is going to make you feel better that some public statement is made saying, "We're so sorry there was harassment and bullying." What you want is not to be harassed, not to be bullied, and if someone does harass you or bully, you want them to be sanctioned in such a way that it won't continue.
And so to me, there isn't really any significant tension there at all, because this is about what the university says now, what the university does. And honestly, one of the dangers of universities making lots of statements is it absolves the university often of doing anything.
So to move it to a slightly different context, take statements of empathy when a bad thing happens in the world, a tsunami, let's say, it's actually really important for the university in its pastoral function to help out people who actually are affected and are genuinely suffering. And we've said in our report, the university should do more of that, it should train people to do it and it should have resources to do it. But the university doesn't actually make people feel better by issuing a generic statement. It just thinks it does. It just thinks it's fulfilled its obligations by issuing some statement. And people who really are affected told us that again and again. They're like, "The statement didn't make me feel better." My favorite sort of poignant quotation that students said to us was, "When something bad happens, we get the emails and then we all feel worse."
And so our advice was you don't need those emails. What you need is genuine outreach from people who genuinely care about you and genuinely know you and those people are in a position to actually help you out. And we have that in universities, in residential housing and in degree programs. We have people whose job it is to look out for your well-being. I mean I'm not sure they had that when you and I were in college to the same extent, but one of the features of higher ed over the last 20 years is most universities try a lot harder than they used to look out for the full person, for the well-being of the student. And although I'm an old fogey and I sometimes look back nostalgically to a world where the university didn't do that, I realize that that's ridiculous and it's much better for the university to be an empathetic institution, but it should be empathetic through what it does and not through empty statements.
Jameel Jaffer
So among the most controversial statements that universities make these days are investment decisions, but your report doesn't address the question of when universities should divest from particular sectors. Is that a question that your committee considered?
Noah Feldman
Well, in a way we did, in a way we didn't. Our charge said to us we want a policy about political statements and other statements, words that are spoken. And of course we started with the Kalven Report and the Kalven Report, as you mentioned when written in 1967, was primarily written to explain why the university should never ever divest from anything. And its theory, which to my mind is completely unconvincing, is that you should never divest because divestment is a statement. But it seems pretty obvious to me that investment is also a statement and that there's no neutral investment strategy no matter what the University of Chicago economists might've believed then or still believe now.
So we considered it in the sense that we thought to ourselves, should we make some claim around this and concluded that the answer is no because we think there's no escape from the university either investing in something or divesting itself from that thing. You can't have a policy of say less in that context or invest less in that context. You have to be on one side of that issue or the other side of the issue. What we did say is when the university invests or doesn't invest or divests, it should explain why and it's totally appropriate for it to explain why in words.
The thing I just want to say is I think it's also obvious to any thinking person that it can't be that the university should never divest from anything, right? That can't be right. I mean Harvard eventually announced it was going to back away from fossil fuel investments. To use an example, we all think that if the university was an investor in some company that was making the poison gas for a death camp, that it would be morally appropriate to divest. I think everybody believes that. So it's always a debate just about how bad is this particular thing or how direct is the investment or how much money is involved in it. Those are hard, hard, hard questions and you're not going to be able to answer them with an absolute policy that says either always divest or never divest. Neither makes a lot of sense.
Jameel Jaffer
Can a university explain why it's investing in Raytheon or Caterpillar without entering into exactly the political fray that you think it needs to avoid? I mean, once you have said the university should explain its investment decisions, isn't the university now an actor in that political space in the way that your whole report says it shouldn't be?
Noah Feldman
No, because we didn't say the university shouldn't be an actor in that space because that would be a policy of neutrality. And we didn't embrace a policy of neutrality. What we said, the university is not neutral. When it holds investments, it's not neutral. I mean, the fact that my university has a nearly $50 billion endowment is not neutral on capitalism. When I see students waving signs saying Harvard is the essence of capitalism, I'm like fair point. I mean if we took our endowment and handed it out to everybody, that would be maybe a radically anti-capitalist act in some sense. We're not doing that. So by our actions, we in the university are doing things in the world and we are taking stands in the world all the time and there's no escaping that. The question is about words and official positions that purport to represent the official view of the university.
I mean look, back in the day, President Derek Bok, who many people think of as the most successful Harvard president maybe ever, and certainly in the last roughly half century, he issued a lengthy statement explaining why he wasn't going to divest the university from South Africa, in the course of which he denounced apartheid, said he thought it was fundamentally morally wrong. And then he set out to explain why in his view the use of investments in this way was ineffective, unwise, fake symbolism and so forth and so on. And you could ask him whether he thinks that report stands the test of time. And I saw him recently, man is going strong well into his nineties and it was pretty clear, I think I can say this, he thinks his report was correct. He recently published a book that he actually wrote himself where he defends that decision pretty eloquently. Do I agree? Not totally sure I do. But that's an example to me of how he was able to weigh in on that without seeming to put the university into a terribly impossible situation.
So my bottom line is you can't avoid what you can't avoid. You can't avoid taking realistic stands on things because your conduct will always be construed as a statement and it's cowardly to avoid explaining why you're doing what you're doing and it's also what you're doing as part of your core function, so you should be able to speak about it and probably should speak about it under the right set of circumstances.
Jameel Jaffer
I don't want to belabor this, but it seems to me that this means that universities will, under your proposed regime, say all sorts of things about world affairs and foreign wars. It'll just happen in the context of debates about investment strategy. When the university is responding to students who say, you need to divest from industrial agriculture or you need to divest from fossil fuels, or you need to divest from companies that are supplying weapons to this terrible regime, the university will explain why it thinks it shouldn't divest or explain why it is going to divest. And in that context, the university will be in the political fray.
Noah Feldman
Not impossible at all, but also not necessarily going to happen. So remember what I said about the incentives of the universities, which is not to do this. The university could say if they get many, many divestment movements, "Look, here's our stock policy. We are only going to divest..." I'm just giving you an example, "... We're only going to divest when we think that an issue is of the greatest moral clarity and where we believe that our act of divestment will genuinely contribute to a transformational result and actually matter because we don't want to trivialize it." And then 99% of the time when the students protest, they will just point to that policy. And I don't think it will follow from that, that everyone will say, "Look, they've taken a stand." No, they're just following their usual policy.
You're right that when a university does decide to divest from something, like Harvard decided to step back from its fossil fuel investments, that will look like a statement and they'll be involved. My guess is that'll be pretty far and few between. Whereas in contrast, what we have now prior to our policy is increasingly on every major news story of the day, the university is under pressure to do this. And I'm not exaggerating, this is not some rhetorical flourish. When you talk to deans, they say, "Yeah, my job increasingly has come to include literally reading the newspaper every morning to see what I'm supposed to be making a statement about so that people don't yell at me at lunchtime for the fact that I haven't made a statement. And then I spend the rest of the morning trying to figure out what I'm supposed to say about this issue, about which I have no substantive expertise."
So we really are in that world and they have an incentive not to be in that world. So although you're describing something that could in theory happen, you're right, Jameel, it could in theory happen under our policy, I don't think it's going to happen.
Jameel Jaffer
Yeah, yeah. I mean I know you're right that that's the situation that administrators are in and I'm very sympathetic. I know that this is pulling them away from the work that we need that to do and they don't want to be in this position. They don't want to be spending their days figuring out what the statement on Ukraine should look like or what the statement on Gaza should look like or what the statement on fossil fuels should look like.
Noah Feldman
And Jameel, can I just add something there? They're also bad at it, which they'll admit themselves. And think about it this way, think about what it does for the incentives of the people who pick those folks for those jobs. And this is something that really goes very much to civil libertarian concerns that I know both you and I share really deeply. In a world where the job entails basically political judgment every day we're going to see the deans and presidents chosen for their political points of view, and that means we're also going to see them fired when they express the wrong points of view. And that thrusts the university into a place that it worked very hard to get out of, namely being an environment in which various anti-liberal voices try to use the university as a punching bag to promote their preferred social values with the result that everyone's capacity to speak freely is limited. I mean, it really does lend itself to a kind of McCarthyism.
And so we don't want our university leadership to be chosen based on their politics. It needs to be possible that a person with very conservative politics or very progressive politics should be able to be in these jobs in order for independent freedom of thought to persist in the university, at least that's what I think.
Jameel Jaffer
I agree with you about the incentives for administrators. I see why administrators would jump at the chance to put this kind of policy in place and why they would want this policy to succeed. My worry is that the incentives here that matter are not just the ones on administrators. There are donors and alumni and trustees and legislators, there are advocacy groups, all sorts of other actors that have different incentives than administrators do, and they want the administrators in some cases to issue these statements and they will want them to issue those statements tomorrow and next week and next month. And the question is really whether the administrators can stand up to that kind of pressure. And this is a question I wanted to ask you. What kinds of structures or institutions do we need to ensure that the lines you've drawn and that Harvard has now accepted are actually honored?
Noah Feldman
Well, I agree with you, I do share that fear very much. And my co-committee members thought that part of our job was to help the university to resist, and one way to resist is to get up and say, "We have a policy." So the congressman says, "But what's your university's stance on Ukraine?" And you say, "Congressman, we have a policy proposed by our faculty and embraced by our board of directors and adopted by the administration that we do not have the position on that." Then the congressman says, "Well, tell me your personal position." And then the president should be able to say, "Because I'm the president, anything I say will be construed as my public position, so I'm going to tell you that I do not have an answer to you." Now that will take some guts and some grit, and that's the beginning of how you stand up to Congress.
At some point someone begins to say, "Sir, at long last have you no decency?" And honestly, we're due for that to begin, I saw that Mike Schill, who's the president of Northwestern, was starting to go down that road the other day in front of a congressional committee, and I was pleased to see him starting that path. There's safety in numbers. Universities have to band together to stand up for their collective interests because any individual university president or any individual university is going to be vulnerable relative to pressures from alums and from Congress. But collectively, universities are an important sector of our economy, they play a crucial role in our society and they have interests in common that are the core interests of the core function of the university. That's what we share amongst ourselves. And so I also hope that if versions of this policy come to be adopted in multiple places, there will be a, at least loose coalition and maybe a real coalition of universities who stand by this, who will stand up for each other and protect those universities that are put in a vulnerable position.
Now, will that protect you from your donors? No, because unlike Congress, which is out to bully you, the donors can say something really simple. They can say, "If you want my money, these are the conditions that I place on my giving you your money." And there universities have an answer. We've historically been able to say to donors, here's what you don't get for your money. You don't get control over the academic programs that you've donated your money for. You don't get to pick and choose who our professors are. And there too, the universities are going to have to say to donors, "Look, we respect you. If you won't donate money to us unless we adopt your position, you should donate your money to some other worthy institution that isn't a university or other institution of higher education." It's a painful thing to say, but if you say it collectively, then I think the donors will get the picture and they'll have to make a hard choice.
I mean, for the most part, donors, including some of the donors who have publicly said, "Now oh, I'm not giving a dollar to Harvard until," those folks have been great, incredibly loyal, almost unimaginably generous donors to the university without having any power at all over what was taught there. Ken Griffin's a good example. It's not like he has a history as someone who was trying to bully the university. To the contrary, the guy gave more than $200 million to the university in exchange for them naming the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences after him, and he understood perfectly well that he had exactly zero influence over anything taught in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences or on the views of the faculty or the students. That's genuinely selfless donation.
And so I'm hoping that the donors will eventually come round full circle to remember that they didn't give the money in the past on the theory that they could control what was going to happen, and they shouldn't think of it in those terms now either. And if not, okay, don't donate the money to the university. There's plenty of other ways to spend a few hundred million dollars.
Jameel Jaffer
Noah, thank you so much. Always a pleasure to talk with you.
Noah Feldman
Thank you so much, Jameel, it's a pleasure to be here.
Jameel Jaffer
Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-chair of Harvard's Committee on Institutional Voice. Views on First is produced by Ann Marie Awad with production assistance and fact-checking by Isabel Adler. Research and fact-checking by Hannah Vester. Candace White is our executive producer. The art for our show is designed by Astrid Da Silva. Views on First is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Please subscribe and leave a review. We'd love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website knightcolumbia.org and follow us on social media. I'm Jameel Jaffer, thanks for listening.