Dozens of Universities Are Embracing ‘Institutional Neutrality’ — Will the Policy Do Any Good?

As the anti-Israel student protests that roiled college campuses in the spring have started up again this fall, scores of American universities are hoping to temper the political climate by embracing a policy known as “institutional neutrality” and refraining from offering official positions on world events which don’t impact the school.

The trend marks a significant reversal for universities, which, in recent years, have become increasingly outspoken in issuing public statements in response to international and domestic political events. The question remains, though: Is the policy enough to dial down the political strife that has defined American universities over the past year? 

“Institutional neutrality is a good first step,” a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Steven McGuire, tells the Sun. “But there are many other things that colleges and universities need to do in order to become the kinds of places that will foster a robust exchange of ideas.”

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which partners with universities to promote academic freedom, has developed a list of twenty policies that the organization believes must be implemented by university administrators to promote a campus culture of free expression. Institutional neutrality is only one of them. 

Institutional neutrality as a policy traces back to a document issued by the University of Chicago in 1967, the Kalven Report, which provides guidelines for the school’s role in political and social activism. “The university,” the report defines, “is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” 

Thus, “to perform its mission in the society,” the report writes, “a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.” However, the report offers an important exception to the policy: “From time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.”

“In such a crisis,” the report notes, “it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.” 

In the past two weeks alone, the ideology has been adopted or affirmed by the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Barnard, the University of Wisconsin system, Washington State University, and the University of Virginia. During the same period, Columbia, Yale, Duke, and the University of Michigan have all begun considering the policy. Other schools, including Harvard, Cornell, Emerson, and others, had already taken the leap earlier in the year. 

The president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Michael Poliakoff, says that the policy will help universities get “back to the true origins and the true mission of the university — which is an academic mission” but stresses that comprehensive institutional neutrality won’t be achieved by ceasing to issue political statements alone. 

A neutral viewpoint should also be enforced in “hiring, promoting, and crafting school curriculum.” That, along with, in some cases, “strong disciplinary action” will help bring American universities back on track to foster and host academic excellence. 

“Unfortunately, colleges and universities have allowed themselves to turn into these echo chambers where in many cases you simply won’t hear anything that rattles the dominant orthodoxy of settler colonialism which is a weird, faddish theory,” Mr. Poliakoff tells the Sun. He believes that neutrality should have been adopted by institutions “years and years ago.” 

A Yale law professor, Kate Stith, who moderated a faculty panel discussion on institutional neutrality, says that neutrality is likely to be “even more important down the line.” Political statements issued by departments, she notes, “may be potentially even more chilling to junior faculty, to graduate students, to potential applicants as opposed to what distant administrators say.” 

Further, some proponents of institutional neutrality are careful to point out that universities will interpret the policy differently and that not all applications of neutrality are equally effective.  Certain schools, like Harvard, have refrained from stating that the policy would preclude the possibility of divestment, a core demand of many anti-Israel campus groups.

Other schools have made clear that divestment runs counter to institutional neutrality — an interpretation of the policy that Mr. Poliakoff’s American Council of Trustees views favorably. Mr. Poliakoff predicts that anti-Israel protests may begin to lose prominence at universities that adopt the latter interpretation.

“Divestment has been the holy grail of the BDS movement. And once it is taken off the table, I  think a lot of the wind is going to go out of the sails of these protests,” he tells the Sun. “This is a place where institutional neutrality gives the board the opportunity to stand firm.” He also points out that the University of Chicago, which has historically disavowed divestment in the name of institutional neutrality, “has not really had such virulent demonstrations.” 

Some university leaders, however, have voiced concern that the policy would dampen their ability to speak out on issues of particular importance to the community. “I worry that institutional neutrality prevents us from being able to speak out when we need to,” the president of Oakland University, Ora Pescovitz, tells Jewish Insider. 

Ms. Pescovitz is one of the first academic leaders to release a statement unequivocally condemning Hamas’s attack on October 7. “A president’s voice is precious,” she adds. 

Other critics are less confident that universities will thoughtfully determine which events deserve a response. A former Harvard Divinity School student currently suing the school over its response to campus antisemitism, Shabbos Kestenbaum, told Jewish Insider that the timing of Harvard’s adoption of the policy was “quite telling.”

“Harvard adopted a policy of institutional neutrality after its inability to clearly and quickly condemn the rape of Jewish women, the kidnapping of Jewish babies and the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust,” Mr. Kestenbaum said.

Mr. McGuire, however, refutes that institutional neutrality would bar a university leader from making a statement in response to the events of October 7. He points to the statement released by the University of Chicago — the school which created the Kalven doctrine — following Hamas’s attack. The statement, he notes, “acknowledged that something terrible happened and provided resources and contacts for community members. They focused on what they needed to do to help out the members of the university who were directly affected.” 

While Ms. Stith acknowedges that the policy isn’t a “silver bullet,” just the fact that universities are hosting discussions on neutrality, she suggests, shows that schools are “willing to rethink what they’ve been doing.” The Yale faculty panel on the subject, which she says “got pretty lively,” serves as “a model for what Yale needs more of: People disagreeing in public and not being afraid to express their disagreements.”

“People are afraid to say things. It’s part of the zeitgeist,” Ms. Stith says. “But I think this is the beginning of a recognition that we have to look internally as to whether we’re really pursuing our mission the way we should.”  

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This article originally appeared in The New York Sun on September 21, 2024.