Institutional Neutrality Doesn’t Go Far Enough

In the wake of the campus protests following Oct. 7 and the embarrassing performances before a congressional committee by the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, more and more universities are adopting policies of institutional neutrality. This means the president of the university refrains from speaking out on the day’s issues.

There are good reasons to back this approach. First, college and university presidents are often not very good at talking about controversies. If anything, the responses by Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth and Liz Magill to congressional questioning showed that the slippery rhetorical skills required to climb the administrative ladder do not translate well outside academia.

Then there’s the problem of equal time. If a president talks about an incident involving X group but not Y, surely those belonging to Y will feel excluded and angry.

But it’s not just a matter of differing skill sets, staying in one’s lane and avoiding favoritism.

A university, according to the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven report, is a special place, dedicated to a special mission; as such, the university needs to “encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community.” When the president speaks, he or she speaks for everyone, and that’s the problem: Because the university “cannot insist that all of its members favor a given view of social policy, if it takes collective action, therefore, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted.”

Institutional neutrality, the Kalven report holds, grants “the fullest freedom for its faculty and students as individuals to participate in political action and social protest.” The idea is that if the president remains silent, a thousand flowers will bloom and passionate, respectful argument will flourish.

Seems simple enough. But is it?

First, silence is itself a form of speech. To my knowledge, not one university president addressed the attempted assassination of Donald J. Trump in Pennsylvania. Was that neutrality in practice? Unlikely.

However, the most important problem with institutional neutrality is that it doesn’t go far enough or deep enough. The Kalven report depicts an idealized portrait of the university as “a forum for the most searching and candid discussion of public issues,” assuming that if the president takes a position, differing voices will be repressed.

But the reality is that differing voices are already repressed, regardless of what the president says or doesn’t say.

A recent report from a Stanford University task force on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias begins by describing how far the university has strayed from the Kalven report’s ideals:

Clearly, Stanford’s problems go well beyond the university’s C-suite.

It doesn’t matter if the president is neutral if academic departments advertise their political leanings, as many do.

For example, the chairs of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University published a statement on the Gaza war that begins, “We vehemently condemn the Israeli genocide and displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. We demand an immediate ceasefire, the provision of humanitarian aid and a permanent end to the genocide.”

Similarly, a collective of more than 100 gender studies departments and programs across the U.S. and Canada issued a statement in 2021 declaring, “We stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine.” The statement is absolutely explicit that there is no debate here: “We do not subscribe to a ‘both sides’ rhetoric that erases the military, economic, media and global power that Israel has over Palestine.”

When a department declares that it holds certain political positions and they brook no opposition, individual professors will import this intolerance into the classroom.

A report from a Columbia University task force on antisemitism details many instances of professors using their position to proselytize for their political beliefs and shut down dissenting voices. A guest lecturer, for example, in a public health class reportedly told students “that it’s best not to engage in debate with people who reject the settler-colonial frame.”

At City University of New York, the executive director of a Hillel center serving multiple campuses said that the faculty “only want one voice to be heard and one solution: ‘intifada revolution.’ That’s what they will tell you is their agenda.” His complaint is backed up by Judge Jonathan Lippman’s report “Antisemitism and Discrimination at the City University of New York,” recently delivered to New York governor Kathy Hochul. The judge urges CUNY to “examine its faculty recruitment and hiring processes and ensure that it recruits and hires those who will encourage and promote inclusivity, constructive dialogue and tolerance”—because, it seems clear, many current faculty members are doing the opposite.

Unsurprisingly, students are following their professors in disallowing contrary views. A recent Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression survey on free speech found that censorship and self-censorship are rife on college campuses, and often enough, it’s not the professors who are policing speech.

Both the Stanford and Columbia reports detail how intolerant students have become of anyone who does not affirmatively agree with them. A Barnard College student recounted how she found herself kicked off a Columbia dance team because she didn’t want the group to join the Columbia University Apartheid Divestment coalition. Significantly, she wanted the dance team to maintain a neutral position (exactly what the Kalven report wants for presidents). But the dance team refused to accept neutrality as a legitimate position and the student was kicked off the team.

Granted, colleges and universities had problems with free speech and dogmatism well before the Gaza war erupted. In 2022, for example, Emma Camp, then a senior at the University of Virginia, published an op-ed in The New York Times on how she expected “intellectual diversity and rigorous disagreement” from her college experience but found instead “strict ideological conformity.” Any number of articles have detailed the malign influence of cancel culture, the imposition of political litmus tests in hiring and intolerance for dissenting voices in higher ed.

But the Gaza war has made a bad situation much worse, which is why institutional neutrality is a Band-Aid rather than a cure. It gets the university president out of the line of fire. But will silencing the president lead to “robust dialogue,” as champions of institutional neutrality hope? Will neutrality unleash “the creativity and academic freedom” of faculty and students? Probably not. Because it’s not “institutional pronouncements [that] undermine the diversity of thought”; it’s the refusal of those below the president to tolerate diversity.

Fortunately, there is some movement toward remedying this situation. The regents at the University of California have banned political statements on university webpages, and Harvard’s neutrality policy now covers all administrators, deans, department chairs and faculty councils. But both actions have been met with stiff resistance by faculty, and other universities have not followed their example.

Until deans, department heads, faculty and students embrace intellectual and political diversity, institutional neutrality is no different than virtue-signaling, i.e., a hollow gesture that does nothing to address the real problem.