A Decade of Ideological Transformation Comes Undone

“It was only once chants of ‘globalize the intifada’ started disrupting classes and harassing students that you suddenly became a stalwart for free speech. Do you understand why that’s troubling to people?”

That was Rep. Kevin Kiley, a youngish Republican from California, interrogating Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, during this month’s congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. Kiley, the most efficient and articulate of the Republican inquisitors, appeared late in the proceedings, by which point the general lines of the argument — that American colleges were at once broadly suppressive of free speech and inexplicably tolerant of antisemitism — had been laid down.

As several congresspeople had done before him, Kiley began by reminding Gay that Harvard was ranked “dead last” in the Campus Speech Rankings compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). “Now you’ve quibbled with the study, the methodology,” Kiley said, with the slightly self-satisfied confidence of the high-school debate champion and Yale law graduate (’12) he is, “but you don’t get to be dead last without there being some truth there. And yet in the aftermath of October 7, including several times today, you’ve repeatedly stressed Harvard’s commitment to free speech. You’ve certainly been more outspoken about free speech after October 7 than you were before.”

That colleges entertain hypocritical double standards when it comes to campus speech — that they give a “wide berth,” in Gay’s phrase, not to political speech in general but only to speech on the left, while routinely punishing conservative speech — has long been common wisdom among Republicans. From one point of view, the antisemitism hearings were only nominally about antisemitism; they were instead a vehicle for a much larger set of grievances around a perceived campus takeover by the left under the banner of diversity, equity, and inclusion. As Rep. Joe Wilson, a Republican of South Carolina, put it, “Diversity and inclusion are a George Orwell 1984 implementation.” That might have been the hearing’s real message.

But a remarkable feature of the responses to the antisemitism hearing is that such criticisms no longer come just from the right and from a handful of contrarians on the left. On CNN, for instance, Fareed Zakaria — a reliable barometer of centrist consensus — lambasted “the broad shift that has taken place at elite universities,” in which they “have been neglecting a core focus on excellence in order to pursue a variety of agendas, many of them clustered around diversity and inclusion.” In The Washington Post, the Harvard political scientist Danielle Allen wrote that, while “the values of lowercase-i inclusion and lowercase-d diversity remain foundational to healthy democracy,” nevertheless campus “DEI bureaucracies have been responsible for numerous assaults on common sense.” Coming from Allen, who was co-chair of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, these are very strong words.

How did we get here? Why, in the last 10 years, have elite colleges in particular become sites of such relentless ideological confrontation and objects of such severe political contestation? Allen names the “adoption of vocabularies and frameworks that made it difficult for a forward-looking pluralism to make headway” during the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd. Understanding the summer of 2020 is surely indispensable to understanding the winter of 2023. But the real story begins about a decade ago, when a renascent brand of identitarian student activism began to assume moral authority on campus, commanding administrative fealty and inspiring conservative loathing in equal measure. By 2015, the idea of “the campus” had become a political symbol in a way it hadn’t been since the battles over “political correctness” in the mid-1990s — a development that came to a kind of ruinous climax in the congressional hearing on antisemitism.

We may as well start with the Yale Halloween Costume Controversy, which in retrospect appears a compact fable containing all or almost all of the elements of our disorienting campus present. On October 28, 2015, Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Council (IAC) — which “is dedicated to creating cultural awareness and inclusivity on campus” — sent out an email warning students away from potentially offensive Halloween costumes. Halloween, the IAC noted, is “unfortunately a time when the normal thoughtfulness and sensitivity of most Yale students can sometimes be forgotten and some poor decisions can be made including wearing feathered headdresses, turbans, wearing ‘war paint’ or modifying skin tone.” Before selecting a costume, the IAC urged, students should ask themselves a series of questions, like “Does this costume reduce cultural differences to jokes or stereotypes?” and “Does this costume mock or belittle someone’s deeply held faith tradition?” In particular, the risks of “cultural appropriation and/or misrepresentation” should be considered.

The IAC’s message — schoolmarmish, bureaucratic, vaguely party-pooping but nevertheless well-intentioned and perhaps even wise, given a spate of incidents in recent years in which college students across the country donned blackface — would normally have disappeared without a trace, skimmed or deleted without opening by the majority of its recipients. But Erika Christakis, who was at the time a quasi-parental “associate master” of Silliman, one of Yale’s residential colleges, ensured otherwise. (The title “master” has since been phased out, due to what Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, called its “painful and unwelcome connotation” of the history of slavery.) Erika and her husband, Nicholas Christakis — a professor of social and natural sciences and the “master” of Silliman — lived in the college and oversaw various student activities. Erika disapproved of the IAC’s letter and responded by sending Silliman residents a letter (“Dear Sillimanders”) of her own.

“Nicholas and I,” she began, “have heard from a number of students who were frustrated by the mass email sent to the student body about appropriate Halloween-wear.” She went on to suggest that, although the IAC’s sensitivity was well-meaning, it might also be misplaced. “I don’t wish to trivialize,” she wrote, “genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation, and other challenges to our lived experience in a plural community.” Nevertheless, “I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students.”

The backlash was severe and, for the Christakises, bewildering. Erika’s letter was interpreted by many students as a broadside against the interests of minorities. Protests broke out across campus. Messages chalked in front of the library declared “SOLIDARITY PENDING REVOLUTION” and similar slogans. When Nicholas tried to talk to a group of protesting students, one student told the others to “walk away.” “He doesn’t deserve to be listened to,” another student said. Another yelled at Nicholas — “Be quiet!” — before explaining what she took to be his pastoral duties as master: “It is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman. You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?”

Nicholas: “No, I don’t agree with that.”

The student, previously on the verge of tears but now screaming at full voice: “Then why the fuck did you accept the position? Who the fuck hired you? You should step down. If that is what you think about being master, you should step down. It is not about creating an intellectual space. It is not! Do you understand that? It is about creating a home here.” And in conclusion: “You are disgusting.” By July, the Christakises had stepped down from their role at Silliman.

Fatefully, the encounter was filmed. Unavoidably, it became a media event. For some, it was an allegory about spoiled students run amok, “behaving more like Reddit parodies of ‘social-justice warriors’ than coherent activists,” as Conor Friedersdorf put it in The Atlantic. For others, it was a story about the uneven progress made by historically discriminatory institutions in treating minority groups fairly — about, as Aaron Lewis, then a senior at Yale, wrote in the Huffington Post, “real experiences with racism on this campus that have gone unacknowledged for far too long.”

It may have been about something else, too. When Erika asked her Sillimanders whether they should be more skeptical about “bureaucratic and administrative” power over college students, she put her finger on a generational rift between baby boomers like herself and the millennials she was superintending. She simply couldn’t fathom that many students welcomed the guiding hand offered by administrators at the Intercultural Affairs Council. Her own generation, after all, had demanded that college students be emancipated from the in loco parentis oversight of their elders on campus. “Whose business is it,” Erika had asked in her letter, “to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that.” Students disagreed.

What is the relationship between administrative bodies such as Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Council and the substance and tone of students’ behavior? The final several minutes of the tape could give a clue. A student begins to speak. Nicholas asks her name and extends a hand. “I do not want to shake your hand,” she says. “I do not respect you … I’m disgusted. I am sick.” She warms to her subject. “I am sick looking at you. … You are disgusting.” When Nicholas tries to interject (“It’s my turn now”), the student continues: “You do not want to play this game with me … It is not your turn, sir. It has never been your fucking turn for a long time.” She concludes: “You are going to be the disgusting man you were 20 seconds ago, a minute ago, 30 minutes ago, an hour ago, a week ago, and onward.”

Standing over the shoulder of the student during the length of her harangue? Burgwell Howard, senior associate dean of Yale College, associate vice president for student life, and principal author of the IAC email. At no point in Nicholas’s tense encounter with the students does he intervene. Might his presence among the students have seemed to tacitly authorize their confrontational posture and abusive language? I asked Howard. He had arrived when the confrontation was already in progress, he said. “You show up in a situation and you’re trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s not my place to jump in and try and defend Nicholas.”

Still, there is some evidence that the proliferation of administrative bureaucracies like the Intercultural Affairs Council stimulates student protest against certain kinds of speech, especially conservative speech or speech, like the Christakises’, taken by student activists to be conservative. A recent study by Kevin Wallsten, a political scientist at California State University at Long Beach, finds that student tolerance toward conservative speakers is negatively correlated with the number of diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators, but it finds no such effect for tolerance toward liberal speakers. By the same token, Wallsten found, the student bodies at campuses with a high number of DEI administrators are more likely than those at campuses with lower numbers of DEI administrators to support disruptions of controversial speech. The perception that some administrators are soft sponsors of student protests has, in the last year, invited intense scrutiny and even official policy revisions. In a memo issued in March 2023, for instance, Jenny Martinez, then dean of Stanford Law, included a section called “Academic Freedom, Free Speech, DEI, and the Role of University Administrators,” in which she specifically focused on the troubled relationship between free speech and DEI.

In 2015, though, such intra-administrative power struggles occurred only behind the scenes. And the first climax of this strange past decade of campus politics was still on the horizon.

The protests that followed the filmed police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 were not primarily campus phenomena. They were national, indeed international, paroxysms in the already apocalyptic atmosphere of global Covid lockdowns and under the shadow of former President Donald Trump’s last (for now) disorienting year in office. But despite the semi-operational state of campuses at the time — campus residency was sporadic, and Zoom classrooms replaced most in-person learning — the Floyd protests would have major effects on the culture of higher education. Over the following year, “antiracism centers” sprang up across colleges. Buildings and schools were renamed. Countless departmental and universitywide statements articulating messages of political solidarity were issued. Petitions and open letters demanded increased diversity in hiring, admissions, and curricula.

An almost-random sampling from June 2020: The Rutgers University English department released a letter detailing its “actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter"; these included a “Racism in Education Reading Group” as well as workshops on “how to have an antiracist classroom.” The latter would be “mandatory for all tenure-track, tenured, non-tenure-track, part-time, and graduate instructors — everyone.” The Harvard College Office of Admissions and Financial Aid issued a statement promising, among other things, to “commit to engaging more deeply in antiracism work to support our work in admissions and financial aid and in hiring, professional development, and promotions within our office.” Cornell University’s Office of Student and Campus Life issued a statement explaining that “the institution of higher education is founded on and continues to function with intentional systemic barriers in place for marginalized people, especially our Black community members.” The president of Brandeis University promised to “transform our campus and address systemic racism” via a series of “action plans": “We must go further than dialogue and understanding. We must rapidly move toward concrete change.”

In July 2020, an open faculty letter circulated at Princeton and signed by several hundred faculty members likewise asked that the university take “immediate concrete and material steps to openly and publicly acknowledge the way that anti-Black racism, and racism of any stripe, continue to thrive” on campus. The suggested steps were many and heterogeneous, including “implement administration- and facultywide training that is specifically antiracist,” “acknowledge on the home page that the university is sited on Indigenous land,” and “fund a chaired professorship in Indigenous studies for a scholar who decenters white frames of reference.” As critics pointed out, several items were illegal under existing discrimination law, for instance the proposal that “faculty of color hired at the junior level should be guaranteed one additional semester of sabbatical.” Others, like the establishment of a committee to “oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty” would be difficult to square with the requirements of academic freedom.

Indeed, in the two years following the murder of George Floyd, it became apparent that academic freedom and activist demands — even some demands backed by administrators — were sometimes in severe tension. Almost every week seemed to bring a fresh incident. Some of the cases are farcical: In 2020, a white professor of clinical business communication at the University of Southern California, Greg Patton, used the Mandarin word “nèige,” which means “that,” in a lesson on filler words (nèige can be used similarly to “um” in English but sounds vaguely like the N-word). A joint letter signed by “Black MBA students” referred to the “emotional exhaustion of carrying on with an instructor that disregards cultural diversity and sensitivities and by extension creates an unwelcoming environment for us.” Patton was removed from the course. Other cases fundamentally threaten academic freedom as it pertains to classroom teaching: At the University of Michigan, Bright Sheng, a composer from China who teaches in the music school, showed a 1965 film version of Othello in which Laurence Olivier appears in blackface. Students were upset; Sheng apologized and agreed not to finish screening the film. That response was felt to be unsatisfactory. Sheng was removed from the course. His dean, David Gier, explained that Sheng’s misdeeds “do not align with our school’s commitment to antiracist action, diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

And then there was the affair of the Yale Law School trap house. In 2021, a Native American second-year law student named Trent Colbert sent an email on behalf of the Native American Law Students Association (NALSA) and the campus chapter of the conservative legal organization the Federalist Society inviting students to a party “at the world-renowned NALSA Trap House” featuring “Popeye’s chicken” and “basic-bitch-American themed snacks.” He was accused by fellow students of “cosplay/blackface” for deploying the slang term “trap house,” with which young people routinely refer to a place to party but which (unbeknownst to him, Colbert said) referred originally to houses used to cook and distribute crack cocaine.

Colbert was invited by Ellen M. Cosgrove, an associate dean, and Yaseen Eldik, Yale Law’s diversity director, to discuss the matter. Colbert’s secret recording of the conversation made him a cause célèbre for both conservative and liberal critics of the perceived encroachments of diversity administrators on academic freedom and free speech. To their detractors, Eldik and Cosgrove appeared like punitive inquisitors in some unfunny outtake from the mid-'90s satirical film PCU. That Colbert was politically conservative was an explicit part of his offense, as Eldik made clear: “The email’s association with FedSoc was very triggering for students that already feel like FedSoc belongs to political affiliations that are oppressive.” Eldik then suggested that Colbert apologize, and even rehearsed some suggested language for him, such as “I’m taking the time to be educated on these issues, and I hope to do better.” Colbert demurred.

The scandal seems to have resulted in Eldik being moved to a new position, and Cosgrove retired the following year. Cosgrove, for her part, disputes one of the most incendiary accusations made by interpreters of the incident: that, in the words of the muckraking conservative journalist Aaron Sibarium, she had “implied [that] Colbert might have trouble with the bar exam’s ‘character and fitness’ investigations, which she could weigh in on as associate dean.” In fact, Cosgrove told me, she made no such threat; on the contrary, she was hoping to prevent other students from tattling on Colbert to the Bar. (Eldik did not respond to a request for comment.)

In any event, Yale Law didn’t learn its lesson. When, the following year, the Federalist Society sponsored a conversation between the fundamentalist Christian lawyer Kristen Waggoner, who has contributed to legal strategies against gay marriage and abortion rights, and the liberal lawyer Monica Miller, who directs the secularist American Humanist Association, protests were so disruptive that the police were sent to accompany the speakers on leaving. (This, too, became an object of protest: An open letter signed by a majority of Yale Law students and sent to the Yale Law dean, Heather Gerken, declared that “the decision to allow police officers in as a response to the protest put YLS’s queer student body at risk of harm.”)

As this last event suggests, the intensification of the culture of campus activism precipitated by the murder of George Floyd was not in the long run restricted to matters of race and racism. In law schools, especially, reproductive rights and LGBT rights would become warrants for disruptive protest. In yet another incident involving the Federalist Society, Stanford Law made headlines in the spring of 2023 when Kyle Duncan, a Fifth Circuit judge, was prevented from speaking by student hecklers concerned with his conservative record on gay marriage, among other issues. As the legal journalist David Lat summarized, “For about 10 minutes, the judge tried to give his planned remarks, but the protesters simply yelled over him, with exclamations like ‘You couldn’t get into Stanford!’ ‘You’re not welcome here, we hate you!’ ‘Why do you hate Black people?!’ ‘Leave and never come back!’ ‘We hate FedSoc students, fuck them, they don’t belong here either!’ and ‘We do not respect you and you have no right to speak here! This is our jurisdiction!’”

When Duncan asked for an administrator to intervene, he was met with Tirien Steinbach, then Stanford Law’s associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Although Steinbach affirmed Duncan’s right to speak, she first scolded him for his politics: “For many people in this law school who work here, who study here, and who live here, your advocacy and your opinions from the bench land as absolute disenfranchisement of their rights.” Not only that, but she suggested that the protocols of academic freedom guaranteeing Duncan’s right to speak were open to revision. “I understand why people feel like the harm is so great that we might need to reconsider those policies, and luckily they’re in a school where they can learn the advocacy skills to advocate for those changes.”

The fallout was swift. Marc Tessier-Lavigne, then the president of Stanford, and Jenny Martinez, dean of the law school, apologized to Duncan. Later in the month, Martinez sent the law school a 10-page letter reaffirming the school’s commitment to free speech. Most saliently, Martinez’s letter circumscribed the role of administrators when it comes to conflicts between free speech on the one hand and DEI on the other. The “role of any administrators present,” she wrote, in boldface, “will be to ensure that university rules on disruption of events will be followed, and all staff will receive additional training in that regard.” Martinez has since become Stanford’s provost. Steinbach was put on administrative leave; she no longer works at the university.

Martinez’s letter is a sign that some college leaders are beginning to rethink the rapprochement with activists begun a decade ago and accelerated in 2020. That collaboration was never just about a set of concrete political goals. It was also about the terms by which those politics were fought over — terms emphasizing the psychic vulnerability of students. As Steinbach reassured student protesters during the Stanford incident, “There are always places of safety.” Detractors have labeled this way of thinking, and the policies that follow from it, “safetyism.”

Its rhetoric is the lingua franca of campus activism now, inflecting protests over everything from controversial speakers to curricular reform. A 2015 essay in the Columbia University newspaper describes a student who, reading a description of a rape in Ovid, “did not feel safe in the class.” Harvard law professor and New Yorker columnist Jeannie Suk Gersen, a perceptive analyst of campus culture, described in 2014 a new classroom sensitivity with regard to teaching rape law: “Individual students often ask teachers not to include the law of rape on exams for fear that the material would cause them to perform less well. One teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word ‘violate’ in class — as in ‘Does this conduct violate the law?’ — because the word was triggering. Some students have even suggested that rape law should not be taught because of its potential to cause distress.” In 2022, the University of Michigan art professor Phoebe Gloeckner was accused by her students of “curriculum-based trauma” for the material she’d chosen to teach in a class on underground comic books.

The last decade’s protest culture, with its emphasis on harm and care, abandons one of the central goals of an earlier age of student activism: the nullification of colleges’ in loco parentis controls. Instead, Gersen observed in 2015, students approach college administrations with a kind of “family feeling” hard to imagine in an earlier era. Of the Yale Halloween protests, she writes: “The world in which it’s not bizarre for a young person to rebuke someone for failing to ‘create a place of comfort and home,’ or to yell, ‘Be quiet … You’re disgusting!’ and storm away, is the world of family, where a child in pain desperately desires empathy and understanding from a parent.”

These psychodynamics are crossed with other, older traditions of campus protest, including the rhetoric of the left in the ‘60s. The result is an oddly psychologized species of militancy, a blend of personal insult, wounded outcries, radical political prescription — and demands that offenders be punished. Indeed, Gersen’s observation about students’ desire for familial protection from administrators should be supplemented with a complementary account of punishment. Families, after all, are where children are trained and corrected. The last decade has been marked by a decided willingness on the part of campus activists to ask administrators to train and correct both wayward faculty members and fellow students — and a decided willingness on the part of administrators to oblige them. Although the term “cancel culture” has become tainted by partisan political bickering, it gets at the broadly punitive atmosphere of campus life now.

In 2015, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff identified a disposition they termed “vindictive protectiveness,” which combines a neurotic fixation on one’s own vulnerability with a thirst for punishing others: “The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into ‘safe spaces’ where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable [and] to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally.” The sociologists Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen can help us understand how that disposition sometimes becomes the glue holding student activists together. In a 2017 paper, “Why Punishment Pleases,” Carvalho and Chamberlen coined the concept of “hostile solidarity,” whereby punitive rituals bind groups together at the expense of the punished. This concept, they note, might “assist an analysis of why the deployment of what can be deemed a punitive logic has become particularly appealing in contemporary liberal social settings” — like colleges. As one protesting student told Nicholas Christakis back in 2015, “Now I want your job to be taken from you.”

On October 7, hours after news of Hamas’s attack on Israel, a Yale professor tweeted her approval: “My heart is in my throat. Prayers for Palestinians. Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity #FreePalestine.” At Harvard, more than 30 student groups signed a statement holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Students for Justice in Palestine distributed a “toolkit” to campuses including a stylized image of a Hamas fighter in a hang glider. Student protesters at George Mason University chanted, “They have tanks, we’ve got hang gliders! Glory to our resistance fighters!” and, at Columbia, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” At George Washington University, “GLORY TO OUR MARTYRS” was projected on a campus building. At New York University, a law student tore down posters of kidnapped Israelis. A historian at Cornell said he found Hamas’s attack “exhilarating.”

For the Republicans who convened the campus antisemitism hearing, the apparent sympathy among campus activists for Hamas was a direct consequence of what Rep. Virginia Foxx, of North Carolina, called “the race-based ideology of the radical left.” The result, Foxx said, was “institutional antisemitism and hate.” But it was hard to avoid the impression that the real target was less antisemitism, of which few examples were adduced, than the double standard whereby college administrators encourage exquisite sensitivity toward every kind of potentially harmful speech except for the radical chic embrace of, say, Hamas iconography.

The argument that colleges are generally chilly atmospheres for speech is easy to make, although it doesn’t always confirm the Republicans’ insistence that colleges have become hotbeds of antisemitism. As FIRE notes in its negative citation of Harvard’s free-speech record, in January 2023 the university denied a fellowship to Kenneth Roth, former director of Human Rights Watch, over tweets suggesting that Israeli actions in the occupied territories stoke global antisemitism. Some cases from Gay’s tenure as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences conform more closely to the Republican narrative, for instance Harvard’s disinvitation of the philosopher Devin Buckley, who had been asked to give a talk about English romanticism, due to her belief that all-female spaces should not admit transwomen. But the notion that antisemitism enjoys a privileged exception in a broadly censorial atmosphere is not entirely borne out by the facts.

Nevertheless, the discrepancy in tone and volume between Gay’s pallid initial statement about October 7, which failed to condemn Hamas, and her statement about, for instance, the murder of George Floyd (“I have watched in pain and horror the events unfolding across the nation this week, triggered by the callous and depraved actions of a white police officer in Minneapolis”), and former Harvard President Lawrence Bacow’s statement about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (“The deplorable actions of Vladimir Putin put at risk the lives of millions of people … Today the Ukrainian flag flies over Harvard Yard”) was bound to raise eyebrows. Why did administrators who had become so accustomed to the language of moral condemnation suddenly find themselves bereft of it?

One explanation might be that, as Geoff Shullenberger has argued in The Chronicle, “the campus free-speech wars have only ever been secondarily about speech. Instead, they were primarily about the paternalistic role universities have arrogated for themselves as protectors of vulnerable groups.” When two groups — Jews and Palestinians, in this case — have competing claims to vulnerability, college leaders choke. The sprawling apparatus of therapeutic care they have erected over the last decade requires them to approve their students’ concerns, including political concerns, and to affirm their identities, especially when those identities have claims to marginalization. But when asked to take a stand between groups, the administrators faced a crisis.

On the war in Israel, there is no consensus. What hasn’t changed, though, is the student demand for the kind of emotional support and recognition Gersen associates with “family feeling,” a demand now coming both from students protesting against Israel and students identifying with it. As one writer for the NYU student paper put it, when a “university ignores its students’ pain, histories, and well-being, it fails to serve its communities.” College leaders have discovered, maybe too late, that the habit of validation has left them incapable of managing institutions in which real and deep disagreements exist.

Real and deep disagreements exist, too, about many of the political topics on which college leaders have become accustomed to opining. Race-based affirmative action, for instance, is disfavored by a majority of Americans, but that didn’t stop President Peter Salovey of Yale from saying he was “deeply troubled” by the Supreme Court’s decision in SFFA v. Harvard, which Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, likewise called “unwelcome and disappointing.” College leaders’ political pronouncements almost always assume a liberal consensus among college constituents — an assumption that Republicans have come to resent.

Republicans might be right that there has, in the last several years, been a double standard on campus whereby liberal speech is valorized and conservative speech stigmatized, or even suppressed. But there is an irony in invoking campus protests against Israel to make that point, because in fact those protests have provoked repressive administrative crackdowns on student groups associated with the anti-Zionist left. At Columbia, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace were both temporarily suspended; at Brandeis, they were permanently banned. It is likely that other private colleges will also move to restrict their activities. Such prohibitions are properly understood as infringements on academic freedom, which includes the associational freedoms of student groups.

This is a startling development. Although Republican state legislatures have for the past several years been burdening public colleges with worryingly censorial measures — Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida is the leader here — it has nevertheless been the case since at least the early 1990s that, as the historian Seymour Martin Lipset wrote in 1993, “more conservative and apolitical faculty now are the most likely to report harassment by students and colleagues as well as feelings of malaise about the behavior of administrators.” That fact helped make “academic freedom” and “free speech” conservative causes, and weakened their support on the campus left. But the revival of fierce donor pressure, administrative prohibitions of disfavored political groups, and frank McCarthyite grandstanding from politicians — “Your institution is clearly producing students who are sympathetic to a terrorist organization. Don’t you think that’s a misuse of taxpayer dollars?” as Rep. Bob Good, a Virginia Republican, asked Claudine Gay — will presumably force some realignments on both the right and the left. Whose commitment to academic freedom will prove to be rooted in principle, and whose in political convenience?

The most recent Gallup polling data show declining trust in colleges across the political spectrum. It’s difficult to draw conclusions from that fact, because other institutions — the military, hospitals, the police, small businesses — have suffered similar reputational declines. Still, the campus spectacles of the past 10 years cannot have helped matters, and college leaders seem to be newly concerned about the appearance of rampant politicization.

What will they do now? One possibility: Commit to the institutional neutrality enshrined in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, which calls for “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political or social issues of the day.” No more statements from college presidents scolding the Supreme Court; no more declarations of solidarity with Ukraine. One leader adopting this approach is Maud Mandel, president of Williams College, in Massachusetts. “Our most important mission,” she wrote to her campus, “is to teach students how to think, and empower them to do so for themselves — not to tell them what to think.” Danielle Allen, the Harvard political scientist, likewise told me that she thinks it would benefit colleges to “embrace” the Kalven Report. So did Ellen Cosgrove, the retired Yale law administrator who got ensnarled in the Trent Colbert case. Cosgrove predicts, too, that colleges will become much clearer in the future about the consequences of participating in disruptive protests.

Whatever neutrality’s intrinsic virtues, the intense scrutiny brought to bear on campus politics by Republican politicians makes it politically expedient, too. Colleges are under pressure to reverse the appearance of a political double standard on campus, and a policy of neutrality might not only remove a provocation to politicians but give colleges a tool with which to resist the imposition of a conservative orthodoxy by state legislatures.

A more complicated question is what neutrality might mean for the psychodynamic texture of campus life — the new “family feeling” Gersen began noticing in 2015. Those psychodynamics often seem reinforced by administrative bureaucracies imbued with a specific and controversial ideology of identity. “People have been taking identity in a hardened fashion,” Allen told me, “oriented toward oppressor and oppressed categories. It would be better to take a more pluralistic view.” Conservatives have called for the wholesale dismantling of DEI bureaucracies — and in some states, like Oklahoma, they have been eliminated from public institutions — but it seems likely that private colleges in blue states will pursue a reform policy along the lines Allen suggests, embracing a pluralism whose “goal is to activate potential for people from all backgrounds.”

If neutrality is a negative doctrine of restraint, pluralism is its positive consequence, the fruit it allows to grow. It is not conducive to “family feeling” — families tend toward consensus or else, à la the students screaming and weeping at Nicholas Christakis in the courtyard of Silliman, embittered antagonism. Perhaps, as happened after the explosive campus protests of the late 1960s, we are entering a new period of quiescence, all passion spent. Or perhaps not.