To the Editor:
“Institutional Neutrality Is a Copout” argues Rev. John I. Jenkins in a January 7 Chronicle Review essay. In my view, university position statements on matters such as the Covid pandemic, Black Lives Matter, climate change, and land acknowledgements are nothing more than virtue signaling. And they are symptomatic of a bigger problem: the far left’s ideological capture of higher ed. The present move toward neutrality, along with other efforts to bolster free speech and intellectual diversity on campuses, is a course correction, not a copout.
There’s a lot of daylight between a policy of making institutional position pronouncements on controversial cultural and political issues of the day and a total ban on ethical discussions. No one is recommending the latter. In fact, institutional neutrality is the rich soil in which discussion and debate on big moral questions can take root.
Institutional neutrality is consistent. It protects against the very concern Rev. Jenkins expresses about non-positions: The only time a non-position is the same as a position is when an institution is inconsistent in taking positions. Neutrality means consistency.
Rather than give in to today’s mob that insists that institutional “silence is deafening,” universities (and other organizations) should integrate their moral values into everything they do. Actions speak louder than words. If an institution prizes empathy, tolerance, and justice, this will be evident in the classroom, campus culture, and all university policy.
One can imagine — or remember — a world where universities lived out their values rather than decreeing them in published statements. Of course, institutions should have guiding principles, and operate according to moral values, and even deeply held beliefs. This is the case for most American private universities, which were founded as religious institutions.
Interestingly, when a religious university, such as Notre Dame, takes a stand against a government birth-control coverage mandate, it gets no kudos for moral courage, not from academe anyway. It gets a lawsuit.
In adopting a policy of neutrality, many of today’s universities are correcting for recent mistakes. They are demonstrating a moral virtue that is always indeed in scarce supply: humility.
Hadley Heath Manning
Executive Vice President
The Steamboat Institute