Proposed Viewpoint Neutrality Standards at the Laboratory School: University of Chicago Faculty & Staff Response
This month, after weeks of rising community concern, the UChicago administration promulgated a new governing policy for its Laboratory Schools, concretized in the Standards for Viewpoint-Neutral Education in Support of Student-Centered Open Inquiry" and accompanying "Frequently Asked Questions. The stated aim of these changes is to bring Lab into alignment with the broader policies of the University of Chicago, especially with respect to "viewpoint neutrality." These standards represent unprecedented intrusion into the classroom and will stifle the teachers’ ability to cultivate critical, independent thinking among their students. The standards also raise a set of issues for University faculty, which is the subject of this petition.
Dear President Alivisatos, Provost Baicker, and Dean Bueno de Mesquita,
We write as members of the University of Chicago faculty and staff concerned about recent policy changes to the Lab Schools. Our concerns encompass not only questions of school climate and curriculum but also university governance. By moving to integrate Lab more fully into the wider life and institutional structures of the University, the administration has bound these dimensions together and made the governance of Lab a pressing issue across campus.
At the core of the new proposals, we observe the effort to apply to Lab a standard of viewpoint neutrality that is presented as deriving from the Kalven Report—yet which at the same time introduces an approach to institutional neutrality, academic freedom, and faculty governance that is radically at odds with current commitments and practices in other units of the University. The new Standards draw a distinction between “contested issues” and “settled judgments” for purposes of determining where viewpoint neutrality must be exercised. This distinction, however, cannot be drawn in terms of the values of scholarly inquiry. It rests ultimately on judgments based on political convenience. Contrary to its express rationale, the new policy opens the door to vast possibilities of extra-academic political and economic influence on academic inquiry.
The new Standards subordinate the pedagogical and subject-area expertise of the Lab faculty to the fiat of the University administration and impose levels of centralized oversight and restriction on both core curricular decisions and individual conduct and self-presentation that would be, by current norms, unacceptable in any other unit of the University. The logic by which these changes are supposed to be confined to Lab is ad hoc and incoherent, and they therefore represent a danger to the wider campus as well. Indeed, they appear to represent an effort to reengineer the academic culture of a unit of the university in a way that parallels ideologically-driven crackdowns on academic freedom carried out around the country, also conducted in the name of “viewpoint neutrality.” In an environment of intense economic and political pressure on the university, we are concerned that the administration is engaged in an act of compliance with implicit or explicit pressure from powerful and wealthy actors—an act of compliance dressed in the guise of neutrality. We especially fear the consequences of this approach for students from marginalized backgrounds, given recent and past challenges already faced by such students at Lab.
There exist fundamental questions of values on which it is simply not possible for the administration to remain neutral; where neutrality itself becomes a position. Do all students belong equally, in spite of the inequalities of the wider society—inequalities which we can rigorously comprehend through our scholarly disciplines? Are academic expertise and judgment to be respected, regardless of economic and political pressures? Implementation of neutrality with respect to these and similarly fundamental questions does not represent an act of restraint on the part of the administration, but rather an unacceptable intrusion with immediate and transparent chilling effects for students, faculty, and staff. While a school should always study and debate the most innovative and effective approaches to education, we view the current proposals as a misguided undertaking on several grounds. We urge the immediate pause of the proposed changes to Lab and a process of deliberation across campus and in the elective bodies of the College and University about how best to move forward.
The longer document below details our criticism of this new approach.
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What Is a “Contested Issue”?
The proposed Standards circulated by Dean Bueno de Mesquita mandate that Lab faculty must follow a standard of viewpoint neutrality with respect to any “contested issue” that represents “topics about which reasonable, informed people disagree in contemporary public debate.” Faculty at Lab must now “engage contested issues in instructional settings only when pedagogically justified.” Conversely, any viewpoint to which instructors give preferential weight must represent one of the “widely settled historical judgments” that enjoy a “deep convergence across scholarship, law, and democratic practice.”
While framed as a move toward closer “alignment” between Lab and University as a whole, this new “contested issues” standard is alien to both research and teaching practices across UChicago’s other units. More fundamentally, it should be anathema to the most basic operations of an academic institution at any level.
In truth, few if any issues are ever really “historically settled”; indeed, the boundless, inter-disciplinary enterprise of academic research and discovery presupposes that they are not. What may appear well established from one perspective might, from another, invite entirely new questions. This is just one of the many reasons why the kinds of institutional commitments to diversity now under threat at Lab, at the University, and across the United States were, until recently, understood as vital to the ongoing project of academic research and teaching. In a similar vein, precisely such a change has happened to the status of transgender people over the past decade, and we note that Lab now allows parents to select and exclude children’s roommates on overnight field trips based on sex assigned at birth, effectively institutionalizing what would have been seen as a form of discrimination only a few years ago.
Our own moment is characterized by new controversies surrounding issues widely seen as settled until quite recently, revealing the difficulty of relying on the procedure proposed by the Standards. For instance, the Standards describe the wrong of “racial caste” systems and other forms of systemic disenfranchisement as a settled consensus. Yet this reassurance does not rest on a secure basis. Only this month, the New York Times ran a story about the recent growth of opposition to women’s suffrage, and a current piece of proposed legislation at the center of the national Republican agenda, the SAVE Act, would likely disenfranchise millions of women. Similarly, powerful political figures and prominent public intellectuals are engaged in efforts to roll back elements of 1960s civil rights law at the present, including the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
By contrast, the Standards characterize immigration policy and enforcement as a contested issue, as though it can be separated from settled questions of racial caste and discrimination. Yet current high officials in the U.S. government aim to reinstate the expressly racist and eugenicist immigration regime that preceded the 1965 Hart-Celler Act (a bill which ended formal racial discrimination in immigration law, and without which many current students would not be at Lab). Would a teacher be obliged to remain neutral on the question of whether a current student, say, of African or Asian origin, belongs in the country, since immigration policy has been separated out from racial discrimination by the Standards and classified as “contested”? The way the Standards draw this distinction clearly follows from an attempt to gauge current political debates and avoid overly controversial positions, rather than any scholarly expertise or intellectual coherence.
Indeed the definition of a “contested issue” in the Standards gives preponderance to the weight of “reasonable” opinion in “public debate.” There are, of course, academic subfields that seek to quantify, measure, and explain distributions of opinion in public debate. But there exists no academic discipline that renders scholarly judgment on the basis of such opinion or, as the Standards dictate, abrogates judgment altogether when public opinion is not entirely uniform. To do so would be as absurd for a historian or a sociologist as it would be for a mathematician or a chemist. The scholarly disciplines that exist in varying forms across the whole of the University, including Lab, represent a remarkable array of methods and techniques for rendering informed judgments about the world. Rarely, if ever, are those judgments absolute, but the absence of total certainty does not make all viewpoints equally valid. Nor need they, or should they, take public opinion into account in rendering such judgments by disciplinary standards. In this respect, the framework of “viewpoint neutrality” outlined in the new Lab standards represents not a fulfillment but a direct threat to the core academic mission of the University, disguised in an invocation of UChicago’s famed commitments to academic freedom. On this score, the Kalven Report itself is both eloquent and clear. “By design and by effect,” the Report explains, a university “is the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.” The model of neutrality proffered in the Standards, in its overt deference to existing social arrangements, represents the very opposite of that “distinctive mission.”
The Inversion of the Kalven Report
To the objection that the Standards clearly contravene both academic norms and protections of academic freedom as they currently exist for University faculty, the accompanying FAQs explain that the “Laboratory Schools and the University share a fundamental commitment to open inquiry but operate in distinct educational settings that call for somewhat different implementations of shared principles.” By this account, Lab faculty engage only in teaching, not research, and their students are minors for whom “authority effects are stronger.” Pedagogical research and basic common sense support the position that teaching practices and classroom dynamics for kindergarteners and doctoral students should not be the same, and current US case law on “academic freedom” affirms a distinction between K-12 and higher education.
Yet the Standards do not follow in any clear way from this distinction. Many instructors at the University also engage only in teaching in their formal role; are they also to be subject to a different speech regime than tenure-track faculty? More generally, per the Kalven Report, it is the University as an institution that must remain neutral in order to guarantee “the fullest freedom for its faculty and students as individuals to participate in political action and social protest” and to invite “the most searching and candid discussion of public issues.” By contrast, the Standards extend the mandate of neutrality in unprecedented ways to the curricular decisions, speech acts, and even personal dress of the Lab faculty in the name of better securing freedom of inquiry for the students. Faculty are thereby discouraged from addressing “public issues” in their classrooms. More than this, they are barred from employing their pedagogical and subject-expertise, here rendered as “adult authority,” in any manner that could be construed as directing students toward conclusions that might differ substantively from those they might glean from other sources of “adult authority,” most obviously their parents.
It is indeed significant that Lab students are dependents, unlike College students. But this fact creates not only the danger the Standards recognize—of undue teacher influence; but another, which the Standards/FAQs minimize, of inappropriate parent involvement in school policy and curriculum. While the Standards contemplate this concern, it is dismissed as something easily prevented by the “contested issue” / “settled judgment” distinction. This is circular logic: the “contested issue” / “settled judgment” framework opens the door to the inappropriate political influences that it claims to exclude, by weighing public opinion over academic judgment. The Standards’ only reply on this issue is that Lab policy will prevent inappropriate meddling by reference back to the same “contested issue” / “settled judgment” framework. But given that “settled judgment” is ultimately and necessarily a moving target, that its definition is somewhat arbitrary, and that the Standards invite a role for public opinion, the question of what counts as settled will be called—presumably over and over. This question can only be answered, under current procedures, by the central administration. The reform of Lab thus has the procedural effect of placing final authority over scholarly judgments in the hands of the central administration. This transfer of authority is something faculty may live to regret.
The inversion of the meaning of the Kalven Report in its application to a unit of the University—even as that unit is drawn more closely into the life of the wider University—poses a threat to the academic freedom of the entire institution. In an equally ad hoc way, the University might declare that different evidentiary standards characterize the interpretive fields, as compared to more quantitative and positivist fields; thus requiring different standards of “viewpoint neutrality” in History, English, or Sociology, as compared to Physics, Genetics, or Computer Science.
Written in general language and lacking any specific mechanism of interpretation and enforcement, the Kalven Report can only be read as a statement of principles. To introduce differential regimes of application to a text that is articulated only as a general statement of principles is not coherent, tenable, or defensible; particularly when the resulting policy directly governs a group, Lab faculty, who are not represented in University governing bodies.
To realize this new climate of classroom neutrality, the Standards will require faculty to “share unit-level [lesson] plans with divisional leadership” and “ensure that administrators have visibility into instructional goals, materials, and framing.” It should go without saying that this mechanism of administrative oversight and control over the curricular decisions of faculty would be a dire violation of current norms if imposed on University faculty. It is also highly unusual, if not without parallel, among the highly-ranked independent schools that Lab counts among its peers.
The recent history of Lab’s culture and upper leadership may help to indicate why this dramatic subordination of faculty autonomy and expertise to centralized administrative control should be cause for concern. There have been recent episodes involving a swastika and the use of the n-word. This past fall, a public allegation was made that Interim Director Sue Groesbeck had been racially profiling Black students on the high school campus. This was never publicly addressed, although Interim Director Groesbeck departed soon after.
When President Alivisatos wrote to the Lab community to announce that Dean Bueno de Mesquita would step into the director role, he acknowledged that “Ethan is not an expert in pre-K-12 education.” Notably, nothing in the Standards or the FAQs references the sources of expertise and authorities on which Dean Bueno de Mesquita relied in judging that the new practices imposed by the Standards represent the best known methods for achieving the worthy goal of student-centered open inquiry that has always been central to Lab’s identity. Prior to assuming this role, he did however make a strong and compelling case about why precisely the type of administrative centralization that the Standards contemplate should be treated with extreme caution. As he noted in an essay in the Boston Review in the spring of 2024, “an analysis that takes seriously the pressure university leaders will inevitably face argues against giving them robust powers to control speech.” As Dean Bueno de Mesquita observed, a wider context of political attacks on academia should especially put us on guard about such pressure.
That wider context has been conspicuous by its absence throughout the process that led to the drafting of the Standards. When President Alivisatos wrote to the entire Lab community on February 24, 2025 to announce an unanticipated “review of the Laboratory Schools to evaluate current practices,” he made no reference to the Trump administration’s well-publicized preparations for the series of investigations, lawsuits, and funding cuts directed against many of UChicago’s peers. But the timing, content, and language of both the review and the new Standards that emerged from it closely paralleled developments elsewhere in the country where right-wing legislatures imposed what they clearly understand and describe as an affirmative political realignment of both K-12 schools and universities.
We offer some examples:
Texas A&M fired a lecturer after a student complaint that the class violated the principle that there are only two genders. Her termination was defended in terms of viewpoint neutrality: “It is unacceptable for A&M system faculty to push a political agenda.”
As part of a review of hundreds of courses (including a number of course cancellations), that university also recently barred a philosophy professor from teaching Plato. These measures have occurred under the justification that courses must not “advocate race or gender ideology, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”
At the University of Texas, which has adopted an institutional neutrality policy modeled on Kalven, the administration has been warned by both ACLU and FIRE that its efforts to prevent student organizations from making political statements are violations of free expression. This year, that institution warned faculty to avoid “controversial topics.”
Florida passed a law prohibiting the training or instruction of students in certain supposedly divisive “concepts.” Applying this law, an elementary school unit on Rosa Parks was changed so that materials no longer said she was “told to move to a different seat because of the color of her skin,” and instead said only “she was told to move to a different seat.” This represented compliance with the law, which required that “such training or instruction is given in an objective manner without endorsement of the concepts.”
These are several among a growing number of instances in which viewpoint neutrality, sometimes explicitly invoking the model of Kalven, is deployed for the purpose of repression. There is no reason to believe we are immune to this danger, given the economic and political pressures on the University. Indeed, we fear that this phenomenon has entered our institution already through a weak point in its system of governance and regime of academic freedom—the Lab School.
In his statement to the Lab community following the release of the review committee’s report last fall, President Alivisatos stated that “it should be magical for a school like this to sit on the campus of a great university.” We strongly endorse that ideal and see the current moment as an opportunity to think creatively and expansively about how to establish new avenues of inquiry and collective deliberation among students and faculty at Lab and the University as a whole. But we also see these new Standards as setting an array of dangerous precedents that threaten to do lasting damage not only to the community and academic standards of Lab but to the University as a whole.
Signed,
Gabriel Winant, Associate Professor, History
Denis Hirschfeldt, Professor, Mathematics
Cathy Cohen, D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor, Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity
Daniel Morgan, Professor, Cinema and Media Studies
Tyler Williams, Associate Professor, South Asian Languages and Civilizations
Genevieve Lakier, Professor of Law, Law School
William Sites, Associate Professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
Alice Goff, Associate Professor, History
Danielle Aubert, Professor of Practice in the Arts, English Language and Literature
Mehrnoush Soroush, Assistant Professor, Middle Eastern Studies
Matthew Harris, Assistant Professor, Divinity School
Veronica Vegna, Senior Instructional Professor, Romance Languages & Literature
Aaron Jakes, Associate Professor, History and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization
Tina Post, Associate Professor, English and Theater and Performance Studies
Willemien Otten, Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of the History of Christianity and Theology, Divinity School
Miguel Martinez, Professor of Spanish, Romance Languages & Literature
Marianne Bertrand, Professor of Economics, Booth School of Business
Jennifer Mosley, George Herbert Jones Professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
Lisa Wedeen, Mary R. Morton Distinguished Service Professor, Political Science
Megan Browndorf, Slavic & East European Studies Librarian
Jason Grunebaum, Instructional Professor, South Asian Languages and Civilizations
John Schneider, Professor of Medicine, Medicine, Public Health Sciences
Seth Brodsky, Associate Professor, Music
Richard Hornbeck, John P. Gould Professor of Economics, Booth School of Business
Sergio Delgado Moya, Associate Professor, Romance Languages & Literature
Daragh Grant, Associate Senior Instructional Professor, The College
Lindsay Alpert, Associate Professor, Pathology
Jessica Darrow, Associate Instructional Professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
Kjirsten Nyquist-Schultz, Registered Nurse, UChicago Medicine
Jasmin Tiro, Professor, Public Health Sciences
Tessa Huttenlocher, Assistant Instructional Professor, Sociology
Asim Farooq, Professor and Vice Chair for Academic Affairs, Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Science
Sianne Ngai, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor, English Language and Literature
Clifton Ragsdale, Professor, Neurobiology
Neil Brenner, Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology, Sociology and CEGU
Kaneesha Parsard, Assistant Professor, English Language and Literature
Patrick Morrissey, Assistant Instructional Professor, Arts & Humanities Collegiate Division
Zach Loeffler, Lecturer, HCD
Rebekah Cross, Assistant Professor, Public Health Sciences
Carolina Lopez-Ruiz, Professor, Divinity School
Matthew Hilty, DevSecOps Engineer, BSd/CTDS
Alexander Cowan, Assistant Professor, Music
Alexander Arroyo, Associate Director & Senior Research Associate, Faculty Affiliate, Urban Theory Lab & CEGU
Emilio Kourí, Professor, History
Margaret Thomas, Assistant Professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
Diana Schwartz Francisco, Associate Instructional Professor, History
Ella Wilhoit, Associate Instructional Professor of Anthropology, MA Program in the Social Sciences
Philip Garboden, Associate Professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
Max Smith, Assistant Instructional Professor, MAPSS
Eman Abdelhadi, Assistant Professor, Comparative Human Development
Agnes Malinowska, Assistant Instructional Professor, MAPH and English
K.J. Hickerson, Assistant Instructional Professor, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity
Jonathan Flatley, Professor, English Language and Literature
Kristen Schilt, Associate Professor, Sociology
Amy Dru Stanley, Associate Professor, History
Kimberly Hoang, Professor, Sociology
Alison James, Professor of French, Romance Languages & Literatures
Stephanie Soileau, Assistant Professor, English and Creative Writing
Salomé Skvirsky, Associate Professor, Cinema & Media Studies
Andrew Brandel, The College
Michele Friedner, Professor, Comparative Human Development
Rashauna Johnson, Associate Professor, History
Na'ama Rokem, Associate Professor, Comparative Literature, Middle Eastern Studies
Eugene Raikhel, Associate Professor, Comparative Human Development
Ben Chung, Assistant Professor, Medicine
Susan Burns, Professor and Chair, History
Ariel Fox, Associate Professor, EALC, TAPS, and the College
James Lastra, Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies
Leora Auslander, Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor of Western Civilization, Race, Diaspora, & Indigeneity and History
Victoria Saramago, Associate Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures
Noel Blanco Mourelle, Assistant Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures
Rebecca Petrush, Instructional Professor, Romance Languages & Literatures
Thomas Lamarre, Professor, Cinema and Media Studies
Ryan Jobson, Assistant Professor, Anthropology
Allyson Nadia Field, Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies
John Murray, Assistant Professor, Medicine
Tia Kostas, Associate Professor, Medicine
Angela García, Associate professor, Crown Family School of Social Work
Anjali Adukia, Assistant Professor, Harris School of Public Policy
Katherine Buse, Assistant Professor, Cinema and Media Studies
Helga Anetshofer-Karateke, Lecturer, Middle Eastern Studies
Timothy Campbell, Associate Professor, English Language and Literature
Hoyt Long, Professor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Robert Vargas, Professor, Sociology
Maria Anna Mariani, Associate Professor of Modern Italian Literature, Romance Language & Literatures
Anna-Latifa Mourad-Cizek, Assistant Professor, Middle Eastern Studies
Susan Gal, Professor, Anthropology and Linguistics
Alice Yao, Professor, Anthropology
Matthew Kruer, Associate Professor, History and RDI