Brown faculty must reject or revise the recent “Draft Statement on University Values” to ensure that it includes strong, explicit protections for shared community governance in every aspect of University operations.
In response to the Brown community’s push to divest from companies directly profiting from Israel’s apartheid policies and genocidal war in Gaza, President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 and the Corporation made an effectively unilateral decision to never divest from any company on moral grounds. Acknowledging community concern over this unexpected loss of a time-honored means of expressing collective values, Paxson charged a new faculty committee to come up with new institutional values. Her committee has now duly delivered a draft statement, subject to a period of community feedback and then a vote by the faculty.
The core logic of the values statement lies in its clear distinction between “institutional” and “community values.” The statement deifies the former while disparaging the latter. It paints the ideal university as a socially aloof institution dedicated to an individualistic conception of academic freedom and the pursuit of knowledge. Most concerning, its ideal governance structure poses as value-neutral while in fact being merely unaccountable to community values. However pleasant the platitudes offered by the values statement, the authors obscure that universities continually confront value-laden decisions in every aspect of their operation. By divorcing community values from guiding institutional ones, the statement denies the right of community members to determine how and why these important decisions are made.
In some sections, the drafting committee relies on the existence of supposedly self-evident values and norms without requiring any deliberative, democratic procedure for establishing or applying these norms. In a key loophole that undercuts the statement’s flowery odes to academic freedom, the committee’s “Respect for Others” value requires that any protected academic engagement be “constructive, transparent and consistent with standards of conduct.” This requirement effectively imposes a respectability standard on discourse within the University beyond traditional limits on the First Amendment. By leaving unaddressed inevitable thorny questions about what forms of speech are merely “strong disagreement” and what constitute unlawful harassment or discrimination, the statement paves the way for the administration to have tremendous power over the norms and content of campus speech.
These are not abstract concerns. The Trump administration recently successfully demanded that Columbia adopt a definition of antisemitism following the lines of the “IHRA” definition, which effectively defines any questioning of the Israeli state’s legitimacy as hate speech. To enforce this draconian limit on free speech and inquiry, the federal government also demanded Columbia consolidate its disciplinary process solely within the office of the university president. And so while the draft statement might quote former University President Ruth J. Simmons’s strong words exhorting the pedagogical value of encountering difficult, even offensive ideas, the statement offers no structural accountability to ensure President Simmons’s vision will be respected by future administrators who may wish to follow Columbia’s example.
In other recently controversial areas of University operations, the committee more explicitly defends the right of Brown administrators to carry out “routine” activities, including business decisions such as stewarding the endowment’s investments, without accountability to community values. According to the draft values statement, Brown cannot divest stock to make a “social, political or moral statement,” but can if divestiture is a good financial decision. Similarly, the statement argues that respect for academic freedom requires Brown to limit its refusal of controversial gifts to cases where “the risk of legal action conditioned on gift acceptance” is severe.
Such a framing ignores that what counts as a “routine” business practice is hardly value-neutral, as the recent heated debates over divestment and institutional neutrality have made abundantly clear. Was Brown not committing a moral wrong when it accepted gifts from merchants who made their fortune on the slave trade, even if it was legal “business-as-usual” at the time? Is treating a weapons company cashing in on the genocide in Gaza as a “normal” stock just like a toilet paper company or solar panel manufacturer a “neutral,” “apolitical” decision?
The report itself acknowledges that on difficult questions, from balancing academic freedom and inclusivity commitments to determining when a business practice is no longer defensibly routine, “there will be judgments about which members of the Brown community disagree.” But tellingly, precisely who makes these judgments and with what authority literally drops out of the sentence, as the authors again avoid addressing the essential question of who actually makes these critical ethical decisions for our community and how such disagreements ought to be adjudicated.
Ideally, these “judgments” should be made in a liberal democratic manner, with the majority consensus prevailing and the minority right to dissent and initiate future re-evaluation strictly protected.
But as Brown’s recent experience with divestment has underscored, these final decisions are made unilaterally by the Corporation, a body accountable only to themselves. And so the “values statement,” despite its lip service to liberal values, legitimizes the fact that the staff, professors, graduate workers and students who spend their lives working, teaching and learning at Brown have little say in the basic operations of the institution that structures their community. They do not elect Paxson or the Corporation, nor do they have any real power when it comes to many key decision-making processes.
Brown now faces extraordinary external threats to our collective autonomy from the federal government. Hoping that her leadership will stave off the depredations of the Trump administration, faculty may be tempted to acquiesce to Paxson’s latest attempt to consolidate decision-making power in her office. Unfortunately, giving up even more power to an administration only accountable to the Brown Corporation will not sustainably protect academic freedom.
To their credit, Paxson and members of the Corporation — from Xochitl Gonzalez ’99 to Brian Moynihan ’81 P’14 P’19 — have thus far demonstrated a stiffer backbone than their counterparts at Columbia. The Brown community should support Paxson and the Corporation insofar as they defend Brown from federal intimidation tactics. However, we should also question why we are completely at the mercy of their decisions at this pivotal junction in our institution’s history. The collapse of academic freedom at Columbia and the installment of a trustee as president has already dramatically demonstrated the profound threat that such concentrated and unaccountable decision-making power poses to academic freedom in any educational institution.
The Brown professoriate of the 1970s and 1980s found the courage to cancel classes in solidarity with Vietnam protestors, embrace the democratic spirit of the Open Curriculum and take a stand against apartheid South Africa. The values that these professors held — a democratic, accessible institution accountable to its community and dedicated to fostering critical inquiry and free thought in the service of all humanity — remain worth fighting for. Contrary to the extraordinary claim in the draft values statement that “academic freedom is an individual, not collective right,” these professors understood that academic freedom is also a collective right which entails community responsibilities to self-governance and self-determination.
Faced with an upcoming vote on this statement draft, the Brown faculty must not rubber-stamp the further decline of community control over our institution. Brown will face tough, value-laden decisions about the very soul of our university in the coming months, and it is critical that these decision-making processes are accountable to every part of Brown’s diverse intellectual community.
Community self-governance should be an institutional value as important as “pursuit of knowledge,”“respect for others,” “openness and diversity” and “academic freedom” – indeed, it undergirds them all.
Eli Grossman ’24 can be reached at eli_grossman@alumni.brown.edu. Please send responses to this op-ed to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com
