In the two weeks after George Floyd’s 2020 murder, more than 200 U.S. colleges and universities issued statements mentioning his name, according to a joint report from associations representing student affairs administrators and diversity officers. Many of the statements referenced discrimination against African Americans and structural racism. The groups ranked the messages and criticized some as insufficient.
This wasn’t the first, nor would it be the last, news event that university leaders would issue statements over. Many denounced then-president Donald Trump’s 2017 ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries and decried the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, to name two examples.
But, immediately after Hamas’s attack on Israel last October, American university leaders struggled over what to say. They continued to struggle as Israel’s swift retaliation began.
College presidents faced a tug-of-war between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine factions, both on and off campus, criticizing them for saying nothing—or for what they did say. As fall turned to spring, an old idea gained new purchase.
The idea was to not say anything—or at least to speak out less. The concept is called institutional neutrality, and it dates back to earlier politically fraught times on U.S. campuses. But interpretations of what it means and how to follow it vary.
Below is an explanation of this imperfect defense against continued criticisms that universities are partisan, Zionist, “woke” or havens for left-wing indoctrination.
Generally, institutional neutrality calls for universities to, as institutions, show more restraint in issuing statements—or not issue them at all. But definitions differ, even among its advocates. And even the 1967 Kalven report, often called the seminal document on institutional neutrality, said, “The application of principle to an individual case will not be easy.”
Technically titled “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action,” it was written by a University of Chicago committee chaired by law professor Harry Kalven Jr. “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic,” the roughly two-page report declares. It calls for “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day.”
The Kalven report wasn’t the birth of the idea of institutional neutrality. It’s unclear how far back the concept goes. A few advocates noted that long-ago University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper made an early reference. In a convocation speech, Harper read off a statement that he said the “Congregation of the University” unanimously adopted in 1899. That statement said, “It is desirable to have it clearly understood that the university, as such, does not appear as a disputant on either side upon any public question.”
What happened between 1899 and the 1967 Kalven report isn’t clear. In an essay on institutional neutrality, Peter W. Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, wrote that “as far as I can tell, only one book has ever been published on institutional neutrality—a book that has been out of print for over fifty years.”
The text of Kalven report doesn’t specify exactly why it came into being in 1967, beyond that then-University of Chicago president George Beadle had requested “a statement on the university’s role in political and social action.” The report mentions the University of Chicago’s involvement in various “matters,” including working with the Selective Service.
Wood wrote that Beadle had earlier stirred up controversy by saying, “The university would comply with a law that required it to provide the government with academic information about students who had registered for the Vietnam War draft.” But Wood also said the university was facing other, unmentioned controversies, including students’ civil rights protests and their demands for divestment from companies with ties to South Africa.
Wood called institutional neutrality “a vogue term that has failed to catch on as a key concept—perhaps until now.” Conservative groups other than his own, plus free speech and academic freedom advocacy groups, have revived the formerly obscure report to push for neutrality amid universities’ ongoing struggles over what to say about the current Middle East conflict.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but, in February, three groups that advocate for free speech and academic freedom—the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), Heterodox Academy and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)—released a joint open letter calling for institutional neutrality. A week later, the conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) announced its own national campaign.
Tallies differ significantly, partly because groups differ in when they count an institution as having adopted institutional neutrality.
FIRE lists 22 institutions that “have adopted an official position of institutional neutrality substantially similar to” the Kalven report—17 in 2024 alone. It counts whole systems of universities, such as the Universities of Wisconsin and the University of Texas, as one institution each, so the number of covered campuses is larger.
Heterodox says 24 institutions adopted institutional neutrality in 2024 alone. It doesn’t have a tally for earlier years. Some of the institutions it counts are the same as FIRE’s, and it also counts each system as one. ACTA, counting across multiple years and again counting whole systems as one institution, lists 20 institutions as having “adopted a policy or statement of institutional neutrality” and 19 more that have “affirmed or partially adopted.”
AFA, Heterodox and FIRE asked in their letter for college and university board members to adopt, by the start of this academic year, “a policy of institutional neutrality on social and political issues that do not concern core academic matters or institutional operations.”
They wrote that this neutrality should apply “only to leaders and units of the institution,” including central administration, schools, departments, centers and programs—not to faculty or students “either individually or as members of voluntary, non-institutional associations.”
Advocates continue to cite the Kalven report as a model. But, in February, Heterodox released its own “Model of Statement Neutrality.”
Heterodox’s model says statements are OK in some cases. When events or controversies “impact the institutional community,” it says, “colleges and universities should still feel free to express concern and empathy and share available resources and practical updates, as long as this practice does not amount to political/social opinion-signaling.”
The model suggests university leaders and units shouldn’t have taken a position on Hamas attacking Israeli civilians or on Israel’s invasion of Gaza or the civilian casualties there. But they could still “convey sympathy and publicize available support systems for students most affected, as long as selective empathy is not used as position-taking by other means.”
Heterodox also says that when institutions should and shouldn’t issue statements may also vary based on their differing academic missions. John Tomasi, the organization’s president, told Inside Higher Ed that focuses may differ among, for example, religious colleges. So it might be OK for a religious institution to weigh in on the current Israel-Palestine conflict.
There’s also the contested issue of whether institutional neutrality should also affect universities’ corporate activities—such as whether they invest in or divest from certain companies. Read on.
They say university or unit leaders stating positions on politically contested issues can chill the speech, teaching and research of dissenting faculty and students. That could harm part of the purpose of a university—to foster intellectual debate on these social questions.
A university must “maintain an independence from political fashions, passions and pressures,” the Kalven report said, and “must embrace, be hospitable to and encourage the widest diversity of views.”
“It is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness,” the report said. It said a 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.”
FIRE’s website says, “The closer a college or university administrator is to the top of institutional leadership, the greater the risk that those in the campus community will associate their public statements on social or political issues with that of the institution.”
That organization also says that “when a unit or department of an institution, such as a faculty unit, takes a social or political position,” individual dissenting faculty “may be too fearful of professional consequences to speak against” the endorsed view.
Institutional neutrality advocates say the opposite: that having the university itself stay silent encourages free faculty and student expression, debate and research.
The Kalven report says a university “creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.” But “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student.”
However, FIRE, Heterodox and AFA do say institutional neutrality should apply to academic units, which means faculty majorities in academic departments would have less freedom to state official positions on behalf of their entire departments.
Oct. 7 and what’s happened since appears to be the fuel. AFA, FIRE and Heterodox said in their February open letter that “many institutions responded to this tumult by releasing messages expressing solidarity with one cause or another. But this didn’t—and doesn’t—work.” They wrote that “taking official political positions pleases few and alienates many while establishing campus orthodoxies.”
ACTA, in announcing its push, said “the responses of many colleges and universities to the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre reflected hypocrisy, as well as intellectual and moral bankruptcy.”
The groups advocating it don’t say so. Along with ACTA, the conservative Goldwater Institute has also advocated for institutional neutrality. But Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, takes issue with the concept.
It’s debatable. Wood argues that institutional neutrality still allows university administrators to take stands on things they want to while having an excuse not to take stands on other matters. He said, “It means nothing.”
The Kalven report says that “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, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures.”
Tomasi, the Heterodox president, said presidents should be able to speak out on, say, a proposed steep tax on endowments or legislation that could restrict classroom teaching.
The Kalven report said there should also be a “heavy presumption” against a university “modifying its corporate activities to foster social or political values.” But, it said, “in the exceptional instance, these corporate activities of the university may appear so incompatible with paramount social values as to require careful assessment of the consequences.”
Steven McGuire, ACTA’s Paul and Karen Levy Fellow in Campus Freedom, said institutional neutrality should mean that investment decisions are “left to the financial experts to be made on financial grounds as opposed to political ones.” But Tomasi, the Heterodox president, said his group only considers institutional neutrality to refer to statements—or the lack thereof.
This article was first published by Inside Higher Ed on October 10, 2024.
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