Now Is Not the Time to Be Neutral

President Trump wasted no time launching his attack on higher education in the United States. The plans laid out in Project 2025 are already well underway: The Department of Education has been ordered to identify up to nine colleges for investigation into their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming; the Department of Justice was given the task of expanding the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision ending affirmative action in university admissions; and colleges might again be forced to host military recruiters who now refuse to hire students who are transgender, a group of people the federal government will no longer recognize, at least if the courts allow Trump’s executive orders to stand.

This all comes just as colleges across the United States have been enacting “neutrality” policies — whether voluntarily or under orders from state legislators. Following the example set by the University of Chicago in the late 1960s, colleges have recently announced in record numbers that they will stay silent on social and political controversies. Their timing couldn’t be worse.

Like Chicago, these newly neutral institutions claim that when colleges take positions, their faculty and students inevitably feel censored. Institutional neutrality, they say, is necessary to protect the academic freedom that gives colleges their distinctive value.

But the American Association of University Professors, which has led the way in defining and defending academic freedom in the United States since 1915, disagrees. In a new statement that I helped draft as a member of its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the AAUP argues that while colleges might sometimes protect academic freedom by staying quiet, they could just as easily endanger it by failing to stand up for their values. Pledging neutrality isn’t necessary for protecting freedom of inquiry and expression on campus, but neither is it categorically incompatible with academic freedom, at least when the pledge is chosen rather than imposed.

Part of the problem here comes from confusion over what neutrality really means. As the AAUP’s new statement explains, neutrality most often refers to a college committing to silence, at least on certain topics, but it can also involve silencing departments, centers, and schools within the university, even on issues that are at the core of their mission or on which they have special expertise. (Does the Yale Women’s Center need to be “broadly neutral” about feminism?) Neutrality also gets invoked to sidestep calls for divestment from protesters who want colleges to infuse their values into their investment decisions. Even colleges’ recent crackdowns on campus protest wrap themselves in the language of neutrality. What they call content-neutral speech rules actually mask value-laden judgments about how to balance expressive disruption against safety, nondiscrimination, and efficient operations on campus.

Making these kinds of judgments requires shared governance: the joint effort of faculty, administrators, trustees, and other members of a campus community who respect the distinctive expertise that each brings to the project of setting and advancing a college’s mission. The student encampments that swept the country last spring with their calls for divestment contributed to this joint effort. But faculty voices are even more central to shared governance, which the AAUP has long recognized as being “inextricably linked” to academic freedom. When institutional neutrality becomes a gag order on the departments and other units of a college where research and teaching occurs, shared governance and academic freedom both suffer. We end up undermining the very mission of an institution when we silence departments and faculty in the name of neutrality.

To be sure, there are dangers in taking a stand. After the October 7 attacks in Israel and the war in Gaza that followed, we saw some colleges make statements that ranged from ineffective to outright alienating. Some administrators might have done better to stay quiet. Departments too need to be especially careful that the positions they take don’t chill the voices of their members. Their small size makes the threat greater. (No one wants to anger the chair who assigns course schedules and decides on raises, or the colleagues that vote on tenure.) When departments speak, they should stick to issues on which they have expertise, or which affect university operations. They should consider anonymous voting rules and be clear about who is speaking. And a college’s policies and practice regarding academic freedom — its demonstrated commitment to protecting those who dissent — themselves can reduce the potential chill.

Dissent does not just come from individual faculty or students, though. Truly shared governance means listening to collective voices as well. Policies that silence departments, take issues like divestment off the table, or target certain forms of student expression end up having effects that are anything but neutral, particularly in a world where administrators, trustees, and legislators are increasingly imposing their own direction on colleges. The faculty’s collective voice is needed, especially now, to ensure that higher education as we’ve known it will continue to exist.

The Trump administration’s efforts to reshape American higher education are a direct attack on academic freedom. All voices are needed to defend it: protests by individuals, both inside and outside of higher education; the collective voice of faculty speaking through their departments as well as through faculty senates, scholarly organizations, and unions; and the voices of the colleges themselves. Luckily, most institutional-neutrality policies, even Chicago’s, make an exception for institutional speech in defense of a college’s mission and values. The question is: Which colleges will speak up, and for which of their values? In the face of the current attacks, cowering behind a pledge of “neutrality” is really just submission.