Amid a polarized political climate and debates about the war in Gaza and hot-button social issues like abortion rights, university leaders’ statements about current events have attracted attention and scrutiny. A small but growing number of institutions are responding to the pressure by swearing off such statements altogether.
Columbia University’s University Senate last week approved a resolution stating that “the University and its leaders should refrain from taking political positions in their institutional capacity, either as explicit statements or as the basis of policy, except in the rare case when the University has a compelling institutional interest, such as a legal obligation, that requires it to do so.”
Supporters of “institutional neutrality” are hailing the senate’s resolution as a victory, and Columbia is just the latest institution where leaders have adopted the principle or discussed exercising caution in issuing public statements. For instance, Vanderbilt University’s website depicts “institutional neutrality” as one pillar upholding “free expression.” The University of Virginia formed a committee this week to consider whether and when the institution should make statements about current events. And last year, North Carolina enacted a law requiring public universities to “remain neutral … on the political controversies of the day.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and two other groups this week penned an open letter calling on university trustees to adopt institutional neutrality. “In recent years, colleges and universities have increasingly weighed in on social and political issues,” the letter reads, in part. “This has led our institutions of higher education to become politicized and has created an untenable situation whereby they are expected to weigh in on all social and political issues.”
It’s unclear whether more campuses will heed the call. Steve McGuire, a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni who specializes in academic freedom and free-speech issues on campus, told The Chronicle that he hopes they do. “We’ve noticed especially in the last few months that there’s been increasing discussion around the principle of institutional neutrality,” he added.
Politicians, activists, and free-speech advocates have chastised college administrators for the variety of ways they have enforced their codes of conduct and free-speech policies amid heightened campus protests.
What “institutional neutrality” means in practice is likely to differ from campus to campus. Columbia’s resolution is nonbinding, but it passed through a committee that included top administrators, so it is likely to influence their thinking.
But Joseph Howley, a member of the senate’s committee on faculty affairs, academic freedom, and tenure, disputed the notion that the resolution was a vote for institutional neutrality. “There’s no language in there about neutrality,” said Howley, a classics professor. “Restraint and neutrality are two different things.”
“Neutrality implies that the institution does not have values,” Howley said. Restraint, on the other hand, simply “implies that the institution is very careful” about taking public positions, he said.
In response to the University Senate resolution, a Columbia spokesman told The Chronicle: “Columbia is committed to academic freedom and open inquiry. We appreciate the Senate’s contribution to the ongoing and important dialogue about these issues.”
The resolution comes at a time of heightened tensions on college campuses nationwide, sparked by the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza. The controversy has been particularly acute at Columbia, which was roiled by protests for weeks, and in the broader Ivy League. Harvard University’s president, Claudine Gay, faced furious criticism for not forcefully condemning the Hamas attack in her initial public statement. (She later resigned after a disastrous congressional hearing and subsequent claims of plagiarism in her scholarship.)
I don’t think it’s a good trend because I think administrators, in general, are incredibly cowed right now.
Controversies like that have prompted college leaders to dust off the Kalven Report, which was written in 1967 by a University of Chicago faculty committee, and is almost always referenced in discussions of institutional neutrality.
Written during a similarly tumultuous time in American history, the report urges colleges to remain neutral and avoid taking political stances as a way of protecting their unique mission to foster “the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.”
“The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student,” the report states. “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”
When a university itself takes a position on political debates, the report says it risks being “diverted from its mission into playing the role of a second-rate political force or influence.”
Vanderbilt University’s chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, cited the report in an essay last year in The Chronicle, in which he wrote that “a college campus might be the last, best place where students can learn to converse, cooperate, and coexist with people who see the world differently.”
But Jennifer Ruth, a film professor and associate dean at Portland State University, is skeptical of the report’s newfound popularity. She notes that it was written at a time when University of Chicago administrators were under pressure to divest from South Africa, and to respond to the unpopular war in Vietnam. When those pressures subsided, Ruth said, the Kalven Report wasn’t talked about as much anymore.
Now it’s back in the news. And some of its biggest fans, Ruth said, are “white men tilting center-right.”
Ruth, who also published an essay in The Chronicle on the topic, cautioned that the Kalven Report, and its increasing clout among college leaders, provides a convenient excuse for leaders to stay silent as many institutions contend with efforts by politicians to restrict how they operate.
“Is it a good trend? I don’t think it’s a good trend,” Ruth said. “And I don’t think it’s a good trend because I think administrators, in general, are incredibly cowed right now.”
“They’re very afraid to poke the bear,” Ruth added. “What if our money, the state money, was withdrawn, or we upset a politician who punished us in some way?”
The Columbia resolution does not specifically mention the Kalven Report, or its ideals, but Jacqueline Gottlieb, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia, said the resolution “gets very close to that.”
Gottlieb is a co-chair of Columbia’s Academic Freedom Council, which has a link to the Kalven Report on the homepage of its website.
Gottlieb told The Chronicle she has been frustrated by how often department heads and other university leaders weigh in on controversial issues.
“It’s one-sided,” she said. “It imposes a position.”
