<p>@logicalidea: You think that the mere act of <em>hiring</em> a former politician in itself would violate the Kalven Report? That’s wrong. If he or she is hired to run an institute or join the faculty, that is precisely what the Kalven Report contemplates as permitted, indeed encouraged. Moreover, by your logic, the U of C could never have hired Ed Levi back to teach at the Law School after he had been Attorney General from 1975 to 1977. And Levi himself must have been very aware of the Kalven Report because he was appointed as the U of C’s president in 1968, just after the Report was issued. </p>
<p>(For those who don’t know, the Kalven Report (www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/07/pdf/kalverpt.pdf), was a report authored by a University committee chaired by Professor Kalven, a First Amendment expert at the U of C Law School in 1967. Some other members of the committee were Nobel-laureate-to-be George Stigler and the extraordinary scholar of African-American history, John Hope Franklin. The report laid out a general principle that the in order to protect and foster the atmosphere of free inquiry necessary for a community of scholars, the University – as a collective – should abstain from taking part directly in politics, although nothing in the report precluded individuals at the university from undertaking scholarly work with political implications. The Report anticipated that there would be exceptions to the rule against the University abstaining from politics, when the politics in question threatened or were antithetical to free inquiry and freedom of thought themselves. </p>
<p>The application of the Report by University administrators has often been criticized as inconsistent. Most recently, students, Professor Kalven’s son, and John Hope Franklin all argued that the University should not consider the Kalven Report to preclude the University from divesting in Darfur, because supporting genocide is something which is antithetical to free inquiry and freedom of thought.]</p>