“Institutional neutrality” — broadly, the notion that university presidents, administrators, and departments should refrain from weighing in on the public issues of the day, lest their pronouncements politicize the university in the eyes of outsiders and constrain the academic freedom of individual faculty members — has been a subject of more debate recently than at any time since the late 1960s. Already salient, the topic has received sharpened interest because of campus agitation over the war in Gaza.
On the pro-neutrality side, the University of Chicago constitutional-law expert Tom Ginsburg in Persuasion, Matthew Yglesias on Substack, and former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier in our pages have all argued that, as Ginsburg puts it, “sometimes, silence is golden.” (Regular readers will know that I tend to agree.) On the anti-neutrality side, the Portland State University film studies scholar Jennifer Ruth argues, also in our pages, that while institutional restraint is sometimes warranted, “avoiding all risk by crying ‘neutrality’ is like waving a white flag in the face of the forces of democratic erosion and rampant misinformation.” And Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, believes that presidents have a responsibility to speak up, because modeling for students how to disagree about important matters is a core pedagogical concern.
The current version of these debates dates to the ‘60s, when both the Vietnam War and divestment from South Africa’s apartheid regime were the issues of the moment. One watershed incident, as the higher-education historian Julia A. Reuben describes in her contribution to Neil Gross and Solon Simmons’s edited volume Professors and Their Politics (2014), was the demand by a group of Harvard professors that the faculty declare its official opposition to American involvement in Vietnam. The demand did not go unchallenged: Other faculty members rejected “the official and collective involvement of the faculty — sitting as a faculty — in political debate.” Although the local victory went to those who wanted the faculty to formally oppose the war (255 yays, 82 nays, 150 abstaining), in the ensuing years, a modest version of neutrality, as a tacit norm if not an explicit rule, won out across the American university landscape.
There were at least two reasons for that. First, it was felt that non-neutrality would risk, as Reuben writes, inserting “the university into constant political struggles.” Second, it was felt that it would threaten the academic freedom of faculty members themselves. As Kenneth Keniston, at the time an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University, wrote in 1968, “Acting as a lobby or pressure group for some particular judgment or proposal, a university in effect closes its doors to those whose critical sense leads them to disagree, and thus destroys itself as an environment in which the critical spirit can truly flourish.”
Keniston’s “pluralistic understanding of institutional neutrality,” Reuben observes, “had implications for academic freedom.” Those implications had been taken up in much the same terms as Keniston’s own by the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report the year before, which assumes, as Tom Ginsburg writes in his contribution to Keith E. Whittington and John Tomasi’s forthcoming edited volume Revisiting the Kalven Report, “that, in order to have robust internal debate, external neutrality is required.” The unfettered disputation by which academic ideas are tested and refined can only thrive, on this theory, if the institution is a neutral container. Academic freedom and institutional neutrality are mutually entailed.
Not every theorist of academic freedom agrees. In his own contribution to Whittington and Tomasi’s volume, Yale Law’s Robert C. Post says that there is no formal sense in which administrative statements should be understood to limit a faculty’s academic freedom, because that freedom is guaranteed independently. “The Report,” Post writes, “may have assumed universities necessarily compromise the independence of faculty because universities ‘speak for’ faculty whenever universities address issues of social and political controversy. But this assumption contradicts a basic axiom of academic freedom, which is that universities do not speak for faculty, just as faculty do not speak for universities.” When supporters of institutional neutrality allege that institutional speech on charged issues can chill academic freedom, Post says, they are offering an empirical supposition, not a logical claim.
