What’s New
Dartmouth College on Wednesday unveiled a new “institutional restraint” policy, a move it said goes beyond widely adopted institutional-neutrality postures by outlining when leaders of academic departments and schools should speak out on contentious topics. The policy, which is based on recommendations from a faculty committee, is designed “to provide space for diverse viewpoints to be raised and fully considered.”
The Details
The policy dictates that Dartmouth “should exercise general restraint in issuing institutional statements” and suggests that it do so only “sparingly” and “when external events have a direct impact upon the relationship of the institution to its members.” By avoiding taking institutional stances, which could have a chilling effect on those who don’t agree, the policy asserts, institutional restraint “protects and enhances” freedom of expression.
When the institution does issue a statement, the policy says, it should come from one of five designated spokespeople — the president, provost, senior vice president for communications, director of media relations, and general counsel. Individuals are entitled to make their own statements, provided they make clear they aren’t speaking for Dartmouth.
Academic departments may also decide to make or endorse statements on topics related to their expertise. The policy sets out a multistep process for doing so. For instance, an academic unit must decide which of its members — which could include tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty members, research associates, graduate students, and staff members — can vote on whether it will make a statement. Units are also expected to provide advance notice of their statements to the provost, to include a disclaimer that the unit’s statement does not speak for Dartmouth as a whole, and to publish their statements on webpages dedicated to this purpose rather than including them on departmental homepages. (A separate policy prohibits statements that “intervene in” any political campaign or that are “otherwise attempting to influence legislation.”)
The restraint policy expands on and replaces a 2022 policy on institutional versus individual statements and was developed by an ad-hoc committee that began work in July. The group’s charge was to “consider how and when Dartmouth (or its component schools, centers, and departments) should speak.” It issued recommendations in an October 31 report.
The committee was led by John M. Carey, a professor of government, and included six other faculty members from across the institution as well as Dartmouth’s senior vice president for communications. One member, Peter N. Golder, a professor of marketing, disagreed with the group’s recommendations, noting in a dissent that the document doesn’t outline exceptions to the “narrow circumstances” under which statements are permissible, making Dartmouth’s “in practice, a policy of silence on most topics.” Golder declined further comment in an email to The Chronicle, but Carey said feedback on the group’s work — which he’s presented to multiple committees and during a meeting of the general faculty — has been “generally positive.”
But the policy has been met with wider approval. The Steering Committee of the General Faculty accepted the committee’s report last month, the provost, David F. Kotz, wrote in a Wednesday memo, and Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees unanimously endorsed it, too. Kotz created the final policy, and said he and Carey would meet with deans and chairs this winter “to discuss how this policy applies to their academic units.”
The Backdrop
Dartmouth’s announcement comes amid a wave of institutional-neutrality pledges that have been made since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Three prominent groups — the Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — called in February for colleges to adopt such policies, and at least 20 have done so in 2024.
Most of those have drawn on the 1967 Kalven Report, a document produced at the University of Chicago that’s widely considered the gold standard for neutrality policies. Along with the Kalven Report, the Dartmouth committee examined a dozen other institutions’ policies, most of which were adopted this fall. Carey said the Dartmouth policy’s attention to departmental speech sets it apart — a result, he said, of the fact that the committee was led by faculty members. “There was a lot of interest in under what kinds of conditions departments or other academic units ought to be able to make statements,” Carey said, “so we felt we needed to address the issue.”
In what he called a “thoroughly deliberative process,” Carey said committtee members also decided not to use “neutrality,” the term favored by most similar policies. “People had different ideas about what the word neutrality implies, but we had consensus around what the word restraint implies,” he said. A “neutral” institution, Carey said, is sometimes understood to mean one “that is not articulating values.” Referring instead to “restraint,” he said, “conveys that we are a value-bearing institution, and at the same time, our leadership exercises restraint in its own expression in order to protect the space for the expression that we really want to prioritize, which I believe is the expression of individuals in the Dartmouth community.”
What to Watch For
As more college leaders consider whether to wade into the institutional-neutrality waters, Dartmouth’s new policy may offer a template to set forth separate guidelines for academic units. Faculty members, meanwhile, may use Dartmouth’s faculty-developed policy as grounds to argue for their own inclusion in the development — or revision — of their institution’s speech policies. And critics of neutrality policies, who argue that they allow institutions and their leaders to shirk responsibility, may interpret a vow to “institutional restraint” differently.
