Gina’s post on Indiana’s DEI-related law came at a fortuitous time for me, because last week I participated in a panel about State Legislatures, Academic Freedom and Public Universities. The panelists were given about 6 minutes to present some prepared remarks’ and discussion ensued. As far as I could tell there was just one state legislator present, and one administrator; otherwise the audience was students, faculty, and members of the public.

I did write out my remarks, but then I didn’t say exactly what I wrote, so below the fold is an attempt at a rough transcription of what I actually said:

The event that prompted this discussion is the deal that the UW-Madison and Universities of Wisconsin leadership did with the legislature back in December. The legislature took the unusual step of withholding additional funding unless the universities met certain conditions: including capping DEI programming and moving some DEI roles to student success roles [1].

In fact, the deal doesn’t really involve academic freedom as it is usually understood.[2] We normally understand academic freedom fairly minimally, as protecting the ability of researchers to pursue research through their disciplines; and to protect the authority of faculty and instructional staff over curricular and instructional matters. And even then; academic freedom only protects instructional and curricular practices that fall within a certain range: an instructor who gratuitously insults the religious or cultural background of their student cannot usually claim academic freedom as a protection, let alone as a justification. Anyway, non-academic programming is not usually covered.

Step back a moment from the particulars that the legislature was trying to get us to do and stop doing. Should the legislature have any say over how we conduct ourselves?

It inevitably does. We’re a public institution. And the legislature holds some of the purse strings. So it is free to decide not to increase, or even to decrease, our funding, without offering any reasons at all, and without offering us deals.

Being a public institution we should welcome some degree of public accountability. That’s what makes us different from private institutions. And UW-Madison (like other state flagships) is a peculiar kind of public institution. We accept public funding that comes from taxation, and yet we also charge residents substantial tuition fees, and we routinely reject residents who want to attend (and many residents who would like to attend don’t even apply, because they either see tuition as too much of a barrier or because they know they’ll be rejected anyway). Most residents of the state are ineligible for any direct benefits from the university.

An institution like that has a particular duty to be accountable to the public; the public has to be assured that we are fulfilling a mission to serve the whole state, even though we manifestly refuse directly to serve some residents.

So what does accountability to the public mean? The most legitimate representatives of the public are the people they elect to office. As I said, they hold the purse strings, so in a sense we just are accountable to them, whether we like it or not. I do agree with people who would prefer that the legislature wouldn’t meddle too much. And we already have an appointed Board of Regents that (rightly) plays a role in holding us accountable. But public institutions work best when public servants are inclined to, and skilled at, holding themselves accountable to the public: when they are alert to the possibility of public complaint and distrust, conscientious about identifying when complaints and distrust have real grounds, and addressing those grounds. We have to think about what that means for us in a world in which the legislature – and, frankly, the public – is often at odds with us.

There are two ways of seeing last year’s dispute, and I see it both ways.

First there’s a degree of unseriousness from the legislators. Like politicians generally they are not always acting fully in good faith, but are thinking, (as all politicians do) about how their moves play to their base and the people who fund their campaigns. Not all of them are always thinking about the good of the university or even about the good of the public.

The second way of seeing it is that there is a genuine problem of trust in very polarized political conditions and in which the political composition of a public institution is so different from the political composition of the people who live in the state. Its easy to pretend to ourselves that there is no problem because, as we know, the exceptional level of gerrymandering that the legislature has engaged in means that the legislature is not, actually, as representative of the public as it would be in a more sensible – dare I say a more democratic – electoral system. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves. Personally I’m pretty convinced by Kathy Cramer’s work, as well as the survey data that Russ already presented, and from numerous conversations with numerous students, that there really is a pretty serious trust problem with the public, and not just with the legislature.[2] Having a faculty is so politically homogeneous in such a politically diverse, and polarized, state is intrinsically risky. It’s intellectually risky just because the more homogeneous faculty are on any given dimension the more likely it is that they will have collective blind spots about both good and bad ideas. It’s politically risky because it is too easy for us to be complacent about our practice, and too easy for the public (and our students) to distrust us.

Personally what I’d most like to get out of this discussion are ideas about how to mitigate the lack of trust – if you like, how to undercut the position of political entrepreneurs like Robin Voss – and, more abstractly, ideas about what it really means for us to be accountable to the public.

[1] Because some of what falls under DEI used to be considered ‘student success’, the latter part effectively meant renaming some roles.
[2] There is one part of the deal that might pertain to academic freedom – the agreement that the University should seek funding for a position for which it would hire a scholar who studies conservative thought, but this was not the focus of the panel.
[3] Russ, the moderator, had reported various data including evidence from the Pew surveys showing the precipitous drop in public trust in higher education over the past several years, especially among Republicans.