Institutional Neutrality Is Censorship by Another Name

Colleges today face increasingly intense pressure to declare institutional neutrality. The notion that they should avoid making official statements or adopting policy reforms in response to current events has never been more fashionable — a fact no doubt related to the acute political vulnerability of many institutions.

But neutrality is a historically recent invention predominantly absent from the history of U.S. higher education. In fact, the historical norm has been that college administrations, as part of their academic missions, take a stand for various causes.

Oberlin College made history by admitting Black and female students as early as the 1830s. In the late 1850s, the founders of Berea College declared that it was “opposed to Sectarianism, Slaveholding, Caste, and every other wrong institution.” The co-founders of Cornell University, Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, dedicated their institution, in 1867, “to creating a university that was open to all individuals, regardless of race or gender,” as Cornell’s website puts it now. As Ezra Cornell said at the time, “I want to have girls educated in the university as well as boys, so that they may have the same opportunity to become wise and useful to society.” In 1873, the trustees of the University of South Carolina called their university “the common property of all our citizens without distinction of race.”

Conversely, many institutions opposed social progress and racial equality for decades without fear of being labeled as non-neutral. For much of the 20th century, Southern universities marketed themselves as shrines to the Old South and centers for the preservation of Confederate heritage. Princeton University long had deep ties to the Confederacy, symbolized most memorably in Woodrow Wilson’s embrace of Confederate ideology as university president. Admissions policies of other Ivy League institutions during the early 20th century included quotas for Jewish students and other minority groups.

The doctrine of institutional neutrality emerged only when Ivy League and land-grant institutions began to address their segregationist histories in the late 20th century. The policy positions of colleges became matters of public interest when artificial barriers to educational opportunity for people of color, women, and other historically marginalized groups began to fall.

The University of Chicago issued its oft-cited Kalven Report at this time. This statement, which a faculty committee chaired by legal scholar Harry Kalven Jr. issued in 1967, ostensibly affirmed “the neutrality of the university” concerning “political and social action” among the upheavals of the civil-rights era, the anti-apartheid movement, and mass protests over the Vietnam War.

Pundits, think tanks, and politicians today fetishize the Kalven Report, promoting it as an obligatory policy doctrine. They argue that colleges should refuse to issue public comments or adopt policies construable as “political statements” in deference to a single faculty-committee report from 1967.

This interpretation of the Kalven Report belies an obvious fact: It was a political statement. It participated in protracted debate among other universities over how to deal with timely controversies involving educational institutions.

Indeed, the Kalven Report stressed that universities play an important role in changing society for the better. It raised the principle of neutrality in passing, but affirmed the role of universities in fomenting positive change at length:

The central question that the report posed was not if but how universities should challenge and change “social values, policies, practices, and institutions.”

In recent years, the hyperpartisan Goldwater Institute has amplified the reputation of the Kalven Report as an allegedly singular and authoritative rationale for institutional neutrality. In doing so, it has helped catalyze a movement to pressure colleges to adopt a censorial definition of neutrality that threatens both First Amendment rights and academic freedom.

In 2017, the Goldwater Institute announced a proposal, for adoption by state legislatures, to supposedly protect free speech on campuses. Neutrality was its signature trope: Versions of that word appeared dozens of times across “Campus Free Speech: A Legislative Proposal.” Universities, it stated, “ought to remain neutral on issues of public controversy.”

The institute’s rationale for institutional neutrality was partisan code crafted in response to heightened student activism on campuses, much of it aligned with various causes for social justice, racial equality, and institutional accountability for past discriminatory policies.

Counter-speech — protest and criticism of others’ speech — is just as legitimate an expression of First Amendment liberties as any other. Yet the Goldwater Institute draft legislation outlined arbitrary and punitive measures for what it deceptively described as “interference with the free-speech rights of others” on campuses — a strategically vague standard that could include historically protected expressions of protest and dissent on college grounds.

The “Campus Free Speech” proposal advocated severe punishments for alleged violations of campus “neutrality” rules and rationales for involving states attorneys general in such disputes. Thus, the Goldwater Institute’s influential 2017 definition of institutional neutrality included a pretext for criminalizing dissent and protest on campuses while promoting a punitive approach to free expression.

A coordinated campaign by a network of partisan think tanks has intensified pressure on colleges to pledge institutional neutrality. In addition to the Goldwater Institute, powerful groups like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Heritage Foundation consistently allege that colleges practice leftist indoctrination in the forms of “gender ideology,” “CRT,” and “DEI” rather than providing quality higher education. Most of what colleges now do, according to such hyperbole, amounts to the making of “political statements” that should be eliminated.

Formally nonpartisan groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and Heterodox Academy also promote a specious interpretation of institutional neutrality, helping it to achieve bipartisan acceptance. Despite their pretense of nonpartisanship, these organizations likewise endorse the censorial premise that higher education needs to be “fixed” by eliminating programs meant to achieve equal educational opportunity while increasing “conservative viewpoints” on campuses.

Think tanks that advocate institutional neutrality based on these pretexts are among the least credible advocates for fair and nonpartisan academic policies. Organizations like the Goldwater Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and AEI do not directly represent either professional educators or publicly funded schools. The same is true of FIRE and Heterodox Academy. Wealthy private interests overwhelmingly fund these groups; they operate to advance their donors’ political goals, not the civic goods of publicly funded education.

The doctrine of institutional neutrality that such organizations advocate has contributed to a historic increase in state censorship of higher education. Since 2020, state legislatures have proposed or ratified myriad bills that censor “liberal” and “merely political” academic programs devoted to the study of multiculturalism, sex and gender diversity, racial equality, and social justice — all in search of “balance” or “neutrality” in higher education. Many of these gag orders, as PEN America calls them, ban lists of words associated with those topics from specific campuses, allow ideological monitoring of faculty and student political views, and mandate state-approved levels of “viewpoint diversity.” These measures parrot the dubious premise, concocted in reactionary think tanks, that colleges must teach “both sides” of every subject from an ideologically neutral standpoint.

The Goldwater Institute’s campus speech draft legislation mirrored the Kalven Report in claiming that institutional neutrality encourages open dialogue and freer expression on contentious issues. But the opposite has proven true. College administrations that hew to the ideal of institutional neutrality have, to chilling effect, instructed faculty to self-monitor their teaching and adjust their curriculums in “viewpoint neutral” ways. For example, in November of 2023 the University of California president, Michael V. Drake, announced generously funded programs to develop “viewpoint neutral” understandings of “the Middle East” and related issues of “anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.”

Pressuring institutions to pledge “institutional neutrality” has become an all-purpose loyalty pledge — a litmus test that college administrations must pass to satisfy the whims of hyperpartisan legislators and privately funded interests.

Colleges are not cable-news hosts or social-media content moderators — for good reason. Truth and knowledge are not found in the slim, intellectually desiccated gray area between bellicose “liberal” and “conservative” talking points. Colleges benefit the public by pursuing truth and knowledge in ways that transcend those narrow and artificial political stereotypes.

Institutions of higher education should stand for something: freely chosen and meritorious academic missions, values, and priorities. They should not reactively dilute their policies and curricula under external partisan pressures. If their missions prove to be misguided, then the best remedy (as per the classic dictum) is more speech and deliberation — more good-faith criticism and reflection among learning communities — not a retreat from constructive political and social action into the vagaries of “neutrality.”