The Review: What is institutional neutrality, anyway?

Competing theories of a contested concept. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. “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. NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. Consider, for instance, a tweet by the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health following the Supreme Court’s overthrow of Roe v. Wade: “The Supreme Court set the clock back 50 years. Recent research has demonstrated harmful impacts for those in the U.S. who are denied abortions.” Conservative groups, Post notes, argued that by violating the principle of institutional neutrality, such tweets unduly inhibited open “discussion and inquiry on campus.” But how do we know? “Whether the tweet in fact chilled discussion and inquiry,” Post writes, "… is a complex empirical question.” Post seems to me to over-insist on the importance of this fact. “Anyone who makes such a claim,” as Ginsburg writes, “either agrees with the dominant views expressed in the statements, or has not been a junior faculty member in a very long time.” Because assessing the extent to which official administrative or departmental statements chill faculty speech is a social-scientific task of no small order, surely the prudent course is to assume that, since they certainly could, they are often a bad idea. We might expect institutions — especially public institutions — to avoid statements that give even the least appearance of dictating an official line to faculty. That stricture perhaps applies even more to departmental statements than to top-down administrative ones. Whatever their real thoughts on the matter, Ginsburg writes, junior faculty will either be “pressured to sign” such statements “or else face the consequences from people who will decide on … tenure.” And whenever a departmental statement pronounces authoritatively on field-specific issues which remain in fact highly contested, it is reasonable to suppose that junior faculty members will experience the statement as a constraint on their own research. Consider, for instance, the recent [statement]( by the University of California system’s Ethnic Studies Faculty Council, which criticizes the UC administration for the language it used to describe Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. The faculty council particularly took issue with the administration’s use of the word “terrorism": A community trying to free themselves from decades-long ethnic cleansing and genocide is not the same as one of the world’s strongest state militaries, a nuclear power with the unconditional backing of the United States, wielding advanced forms of technologized destruction aimed at full-spectrum dominance. To equate the two and to hold the oppressed accountable for “terrorism” reinscribes a colonial narrative that seeks to have the world believe that history began on October 7, 2023. If you are a junior faculty member in a UC department of ethnic studies who does think that “terrorism” is an appropriate label for Hamas’s attack (hardly, one assumes, an aberrant position), you might feel that your faculty council was inappropriately prescribing the terms of scholarly engagement. By the same token — and this is what motivated the faculty council’s statement in the first place — if you think that words like “terrorism” are counterproductive or obfuscatory, or that they are deployed tendentiously against Palestinian but not Israeli actions, you might feel that the administration’s initial statement chilled the academic freedom of academic critics of Israeli military policy. What if, instead, everyone had just kept quiet? Not least among neutrality’s virtues would be its curbing the endless war of statements. And that might have the salutary effect of sheltering the university from excessive partisan criticism from outside. One of the reasons to avoid statements is to avoid backlash. “Those who would drag the university into partisan controversies,” Ginsburg writes, “impose needless risk on other members of the university, by inviting interference.” They’re getting it. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? 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