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Dozens of American colleges have recently committed to institutional neutrality. In June 2023, lawmakers in North Carolina passed a bill formally committing all state institutions of higher education to a position of neutrality explicitly modeled on the Kalven Report. In 2024 a consortium of free-speech organizations called on trustees and regents across the country to follow suit. The Chicago position has been endorsed by well-endowed liberal-arts colleges and by prominent private universities, including Columbia, Stanford, and Vanderbilt. Harvard has recently announced its own distinct neutrality policy, and the principle of institutional neutrality has now even spread to Europe.
The rise of institutional neutrality is likely to accelerate following recent protests in solidarity with Palestine, because the situation in Gaza is not likely to improve anytime soon and because the crisis on college campuses is more acute than ever. After the encampments, the two main demands of the movement — for divestment from Israeli companies and from companies that supply Israel with arms, and for dissociation from Israeli institutions of higher education — remain largely unmet. Meanwhile, the movement appears to be broader and better organized than before. It used to be that students were the only organized advocates for solidarity with Palestine; now, alongside chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, there are also chapters of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (an important development, because faculty and staff members have a much different and longer-term relationship to the institution). Moreover, many of the leading campus organizations are explicitly Jewish, a fact that makes it more difficult to discredit the movement as antisemitic. One suspects that the spring of 2024 will be remembered as the moment when the dam finally broke for solidarity with Palestine. There is every reason to think that, although there may be a lull during the summer holiday, the national campus movement is rising to its feet.
Alivisatos claims to have broken off negotiations because “students demanded that we side against Israel, violating a core principle of institutional neutrality.” Significantly, he does not explain why accepting the students’ demands — for divestment and dissociation from Israel — would amount to “siding against” Israel. In treating that claim as self-evidently true, Alivisatos trades on a sophism — a fallacious argument that is prone to deceive. It is important to understand what the fallacious argument is, and how it is deceptive, because its deceptiveness is the key to understanding why the principle of institutional neutrality is so useful to college presidents.
The principle of neutrality has been employed as an all-purpose tool for repelling social criticism. In the midst of a national protest movement, nothing could be more convenient.
It is one thing to demand that an institution side against Israel, and another to demand that it stop siding with Israel. The first calls on the institution to take a partisan position. The second does not. Unlike the first, the second demand is compatible with not supporting either side — a position whose neutrality is unimpeachable.
The demand that a college stop siding with Israel is the demand that it abandon a status quo partisanship favoring Israel. To withdraw from a position of partisan support — to desist from an existing practice that strengthens one side of a conflict against the other — is not to violate neutrality but, on the contrary, to achieve it. So, if it is true, as students allege, that the university’s status quo position is one of partisan support for the state of Israel against the Palestinians, then their demand that the university withdraw its support of Israel — by divesting and dissociating from Israel — is not a demand that the university violate neutrality. Rather, it is the demand that the university change its current practice so as to become more neutral than it is.
The dynamic is easier to see in connection with a specific demand. Consider the demand for divestment. Investment in Israeli companies is uncontroversially good for Israel. That is the position of Benjamin Netanyahu, expressed in a friendly interview with David Rubenstein, chair of the Board of Trustees at the University of Chicago. On this point, the prime minister of Israel and the Palestinian solidarity protesters agree. If an investigation of the university’s investment portfolio revealed that its investments were heavily biased toward Israel, that would plausibly constitute partisan support for Israel, which, one might think, a commitment to neutrality would require the university to correct. In principle, the correction could be made in one of two ways, either by investing more in the Gazan economy or by divesting from the Israeli economy. However, there is no Gazan economy: All civil society in Gaza has been deliberately destroyed by the Israeli military. So the only available path to institutional neutrality would require divestment from Israel.
To withdraw from a position of partisan support is not to violate neutrality but, on the contrary, to achieve it.
The students’ other demand, that the university should dissociate itself from Israeli research institutions, raises similar issues. In the official view of Israel, formal institutional ties are beneficial to Israel. In January, just three days before the International Court of Justice was to deliver its verdict on whether Israel was committing genocide, Yinam Cohen, consul general of Israel to the Midwest, paid an official visit to the University of Chicago “to further enhance the partnership between UChicago and Israeli research institutions.” During Cohen’s meeting with Alivisatos, the two men posed for a photo that was later posted on the X account of the Israeli Consulate. Alivisatos has never played host to an official Palestinian delegation.
As an example of the kind of “partnership” that the Israeli diplomat was hoping to promote on his official state visit, consider the University of Chicago’s study-abroad program at Hebrew University. The University of Chicago has never had such a program at a Gazan university. Nor could it start one now: Since October, all 12 Gazan universities have been targeted by the Israeli military and are either partly or completely destroyed. In the face of what the United Nations has called “scholasticide” — “the systematic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention, or killing of teachers, students, and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure” — the only available path to neutrality would require a discontinuation of the study-abroad program in Israel. The asymmetry of the status quo is especially troubling because many students — specifically, Palestinians and other Arabs or Muslims — confront a significant obstacle to so much as enrolling in a study-abroad program hosted by an Israeli university: They need to be granted entry by the state of Israel. And this is to say nothing of how such students are apt to be treated within Israel — e.g., at military checkpoints — should they be granted entry.
Another notable “partnership” is with the Israel Institute, a U.S.-based advocacy organization that has sponsored classes at the University of Chicago, including one about “counterinsurgency” taught by a former general in the Israeli Army. To argue, as students have, that the university should dissociate itself from this nakedly partisan organization, on the grounds that the institution should stop supporting Israel, is not the same as arguing that the university should begin supporting some other party to the conflict (whether it be Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian civil society, or anyone else).
The point here is not to suggest that institutional neutrality requires a tit-for-tat audit of every feature of a university’s immense organizational structure. There is no easy answer to the question how one should assess the status quo partisanship of a complex institution. The point is simply that this admittedly difficult question must be addressed by any university professing a commitment to institutional neutrality.
But this is an evasion, for two reasons. First, because the considerations being portrayed as “apolitical” — profit maximization and academic excellence — are anything but neutral. If the single-minded pursuit of profit would lead an institution to invest its endowment in the Israeli economy rather than in that of Gaza, that is partly because, before October 7, Gaza had been strangled by a military siege for 17 years, and because it is now being reduced to rubble. Similarly, if the single-minded pursuit of academic excellence would lead a university to pursue formal partnerships with Israeli academic institutions, rather than with Palestinian ones, that is partly because academic activity, like all other activity, is suffocated by a siege and destroyed by bombardment. The fact that there are comparatively few investment and academic opportunities in Gaza is not a circumstance independent of the conflict: It is a direct result of the conflict itself.
The maneuver is evasive for a second reason. It is tantamount to saying that although a university is susceptible to financial criticism, should it mismanage its investments, and to intellectual criticism, should it mismanage its academic programs, it is immune to social criticism. An absolute immunity to social criticism is no doubt very useful, and one can understand its appeal to a college president. But that is just a ruse.
An institution that commands an 11-figure endowment, tens of thousands of employees, square miles of real estate, and a privately owned police force does not merely say things — it does things. A university is not merely a speaker, facing a choice between making a statement or remaining silent: It is also, inevitably, an agent in the world. The consequences of its action are not limited to financial markets, or to the realm of ideas. If a university leverages its prestige to burnish the reputation of a state on trial for genocide, if it profits from the sale of weapons to that state, and if it uses those profits to fund its “core mission” of research and teaching, it must answer for what it does, just like any other social institution.
The principle of institutional neutrality lends itself to being used in a merely cynical way, as an all-purpose tool for evading social criticism. Any appeal to the principle that is not simply a ruse must take seriously the charge that a university’s practices and existing partnerships may well need to change.
