‘The Assumption of Neutrality’
When George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officers four miles from the campus of Macalester College, in May 2020, its then president, Brian Rosenberg, felt he could not remain silent. People on campus were deeply hurting, he said, and wanted to hear something from him.
“I grieve for all of us, but especially for the people of color in our community who cannot feel safe driving a car or going to a store or jogging on a street,” Rosenberg wrote in a statement to the Macalester community. “They cannot send their children from their homes without a constant and gnawing fear. This undermines whatever claims our society has to being just and inclusive.”
I interviewed Rosenberg recently for a story about the Kalven Report, a 56-year-old statement by a University of Chicago faculty committee that has been mentioned more frequently in recent years on campuses as leaders think about whether it’s ever appropriate for colleges — or units within them — to take positions on the issues of the day.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees cited the Kalven Report last summer in a resolution reaffirming its commitment to academic freedom. The report has been discussed recently at the University of California at Berkeley and Princeton University. And it was cited in model legislation that has inspired laws in a handful of states.
At the time of the Kalven Report’s creation, in 1967, University of Chicago students were demanding that the administration take positions on the Vietnam War and divesting from South Africa.
The report argued in favor of institutional neutrality, declaring that the university should avoid taking stands on social and political issues so people on campus could speak as freely as possible. Supporters of institutional neutrality argue that when campus leaders take positions, they create an environment where dissenters may not feel free to express their views. Those supporters believe that colleges should focus on research and teaching, not participating in politics.
Nowadays, college leaders feel pressure to weigh in on a variety of topics. Following the murders of Floyd and Breonna Taylor, which set off racial-justice protests, for example, college leaders, including Rosenberg, have often felt compelled to speak up about race and structural racism.
Mary Dana Hinton, president of Hollins University, a women’s college in Virginia, was among those who pushed back against the notion that colleges should aspire to institutional neutrality.
“The assumption of neutrality serves those who get to determine what is and is not neutral,” Hinton said. “Institutional neutrality, if it exists at all, is predicated on the notion that there is a singular truth and that there’s one group determining that, and therefore they can be neutral in response to all other positions.”
There is a sense now, Hinton said, that people at one end of the political spectrum are not able to speak freely on college campuses. But for a long time, she said, there were many others who didn’t have a voice. “I don’t think this notion of people feeling silenced is all that new,” Hinton said. “I think what’s new is that it’s not those who dwell on the margins who are feeling silenced any longer, and folks are having a hard time adjusting to that.”
Rosenberg, now a visiting professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has argued that American colleges have never been truly independent from social and political forces. Selective universities that restricted Jewish or Black admissions in the past, for example, may not have made institutional statements about what they were doing, but they were making policy choices with real impacts, he said.
As president of Macalester for 17 years, Rosenberg said he often turned to the college’s mission statement, which speaks to scholarship with an emphasis on internationalism, multiculturalism, and service to society, for guidance on when to make a statement.
After Floyd’s murder, Rosenberg said, he also felt he needed to play a pastoral role to help comfort those on campus who needed it. “You really have some responsibility as a leader to speak to those people, [to] allow them to feel that the institution feels their pain and that the leadership feels their pain,” he said.
