The Myth of Institutional Neutrality

By Caleb Dunson

“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”

—James Baldwin

In the fall of 2023, the world had its eyes on the slaughter in Palestine. Mass killings and destruction in Gaza stirred a student movement in the US the size and intensity of which had not been seen since the anti-South African Apartheid and anti-Vietnam War movements.

Protests sprouted up on campuses across the country, and university administrators, facing pressure from donors, elected officials, and a disgruntled subset of the public, were forced to respond. Donors threatened to halt their contributions to schools like Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. The presidents of those universities, and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were brought before the House Education Committee and lambasted for their permissive approach to the protests. President Biden even made remarks criticizing the campus demonstrations.

As protests persisted and pressure mounted on university administrators to take action, they decided to respond with force. The demands of many protestors –– for their universities to divest from weapons manufacturing companies –– were denied and, over several weeks, university leadership sent campus and local police to arrest thousands of students and destroy the encampments they had created. Over 3,000 demonstrators were arrested, and media outlets dispatched reporters to campuses to show the nation images of students brutalized and handcuffed.

Amidst this turmoil, faculty and administrators sought to retreat from public scrutiny, and found justification for their actions in the idea of institutional neutrality. Institutional neutrality — which generally calls for any given university to remain quiet on the issues of the day, with few exceptions — was an off-ramp for university leaders who were thought to have veered too far into the political realm. For many proponents of institutional neutrality, universities’ decisions to make statements about the October 7th attacks, and subsequent campus protests, was an easily avoidable mistake that invited unnecessary criticism. These statements were considered by many to be the latest in a long line of unsolicited position-taking and political punditry that indicated a habit of university administrators speaking beyond their station.

Editor’s Note: Proponents of institutional neutrality seem to view the role of a university as one-dimensional: an institution. As mentioned in the next paragraph, universities are complex and wear many hats as profitable businesses, cutting-edge researchers, and perhaps most importantly, educational campuses.

If one believes that at least one of the primary roles of a university is to educate young adults (as I sure hope one does!) then interference during widespread political protests on campus grounds is far from unsolicited. To create an environment where young adults are able to learn, there must be boundaries. Protecting the safety of students on both sides was the primary argument as to why UPenn removed the encampment on College Green. They cited “disruption of our academic mission,” as protestors were loud, incompliant, and at times, violent in speech and behavior. Moreover, there were reports of non-Penn adults within the encampments that posed a danger to those in the encampments themselves.

As the UPenn letter says, “abiding commitment to open expression requires balancing free speech with our responsibility to safety, security, and continuing the operations of the University.” Maybe that’s why Professor Amy Wax’s racist statements remained unaddressed. That kind of “free speech,” in contrast, was covert, behind closed doors, and non-disruptive. It was the safe and identifiable kind of “free speech” that has existed “in the world as one has always known it.”

Thus, while it is important to consider the argument of safety in influencing universities’ decisions to end college encampments, one should question for whom or what this safety exists to protect. —Olivia Lee, politics, philosophy, and economics student at the University of Pennsylvania

But those supporters of institutional neutrality often fail to appreciate the complexity of universities and their inextricable link to politics (whether the link is articulated through official statements or not). This mindset creates a false perception of the university as a neutral actor, which allows university leaders to distance themselves from the political consequences of their actions.

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The country’s most enduring policy on institutional neutrality came out of the University of Chicago in the 1960s. At the time, the campus was roiled by anti-Vietnam War protests. In response, a group of university faculty led by law professor Harry Kalven came together to author a document, called the Kalven Report, outlining the university’s role in commenting on social issues.

Author’s Note: Back then, the country had requested universities submit grades and class rank to the Selective Service, considering a proposal that would make students in the bottom half of their class eligible for the draft. Students and faculty at UChicago organized a sit-in in response, and as more anti-war protests cropped up across the country, the university was suddenly thrust into the political sphere.

The report’s authors generally took the position that, in order to preserve free speech and dissent, the university should not comment on such issues. “There is no mechanism by which [the university] can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives,” the report reads.

In an ideal world, perhaps this principle would make sense. Institutional neutrality would theoretically avoid alienating students, faculty, and donors, all of which are essential to the survival of the university. So it is understandable that elite universities are beginning to embrace the idea.

The University of North Carolina, Ohio State University, and Harvard University have all adopted institutional neutrality policies. So have Northwestern University and Williams College. And faculty groups at other campuses are organizing to pressure administrators to take up the institutional neutrality mantle. At Yale, the movement “insist[s] on the primacy of teaching, learning, and research as distinct from advocacy and activism…”

But in reality, it is impossible for a university to remain “neutral” on political issues. Universities exist in social and political contexts, and that is especially the case for elite universities, as their power is derived from accumulated wealth and resources. For many of the older universities in America, their wealth is intimately tied to the crimes and misdeeds of their predecessors, chattel slavery and indigenous genocide among them. Universities have themselves acknowledged the political implications of such sordid histories and commissioned working groups to examine their responsibility and offer redress.

Editor’s Note: When we ask for a ‘university’ to remain neutral, who are we addressing? Surely not students or faculty, whose diversity of personal and political perspectives make up a rich academic environment. Hopefully not the administration, who has a duty to set clear and just boundaries that allow for these perspectives to be challenged and flourish without violence or hate. Not the donors, who are oftentimes reverenced for their influential personal ideas or achievements.

Is the ‘institution’ those who control the investment decisions, such as the Penn Trustees, or the Yale Investment Office? If investments are political statements, is it fair that a group of financial advisors, typically alumni, get to speak on behalf of the university in this way?

Moreover, the general need to appease donors, who often hold prescriptive beliefs about how the university should operate, also influences the university’s political posture. In 2023, American universities took in nearly $60 billion in donations, which comprise large portions of their operating budgets.

Yale’s endowment income and annual donations make up nearly 40% of its revenue, meaning it has an incentive to maintain a consistent, committed donor base. So, I imagine it would be awkward if Yale, which named its central dining hall after alum and mega-donor Steven Schwarzman, were to comment on his alleged contribution to the global housing crisis and investment in slums.

And it actually did get awkward when university professor Beverly Gage resigned from running a campus program because donors attempted to institute an advisory board asserting control over her curriculum (the board would have included war criminal Henry Kissinger). Silence on the evils perpetuated by donors is a political position in and of itself — it is an implicit assent to their actions, as well as an acknowledgment that the concerns of the university’s bottom line take precedence over harm caused by benefactors.

This is especially salient when it comes to the financial interests of the university. Its investments are, in fact, endorsements, explicit or not. What the university chooses to fund is reflective of what it supports, or at least what it is willing to tolerate for profit.

Editor’s Note: In The Innovative University, the late Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen argues that higher education institutions must adapt and fundamentally transform the way they operate, think about education, and deliver value. Universities are, at all times, engaging in an arms race with peer institutions and must carefully manage their roles as businesses, research centers, and classrooms in order to compete.

A normative case can be made that a university’s investments should reflect its moral aspirations, even at the cost of lower returns. However, as funding for universities falls increasingly on its students through tuition and fees, an argument can be made that it is important for universities to be financially successful, through any means necessary, in order to provide robust financial aid that allows students from disadvantaged backgrounds to attend and advance through an elite education. It follows that the colleges with the most robust commitment to need-based financial aid packages are also the most “elite,” and have large endowments to weather these costs.

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Yale, much like other universities, follows principles outlined in the book The Ethical Investor, and in doing so acknowledges the social implications of where it puts its money. It was explicit about the politics of its endowment when it released a decision earlier this year to not divest from weapons manufacturers because, in its opinion, “military weapons manufacturing for authorized sales did not meet the threshold of grave social injury.”

On a local scale, Yale and other schools use their tax-exempt status to avoid paying property taxes at the expense of the local community. Yale’s decision to offer a voluntary contribution to the city of New Haven well beneath what it would owe in property taxes is overtly political, and it has material consequences for New Haven residents.

Some university positions on institutional neutrality, like Harvard’s, acknowledge that the goal is unattainable, and yet still find it noble to pursue. But that pursuit may do more harm than good. The ultimate effect of chasing institutional neutrality is, quite often, a simple endorsement of the status quo. At the University of Chicago, for example, the Kalven Report has been used to avoid engaging with student demands on the issue of fossil fuel divestment, and most recently, it was used as justification for clearing the school’s pro-Palestine encampments, as detailed by the university president in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Though the University of Chicago may have over-extended the applicability of the Kalven Report, its actions nevertheless reveal how adhering to institutional neutrality undermines the ability of grassroots movements to change university operations.

Author’s Note: To briefly address some major counterarguments: The idea that institutional neutrality could foster the inclusion of diverse viewpoints, especially on issues that have the capacity to be deeply alienating, is weak. It rests on the presumption that people will look mainly to the statements of universities as indicators of where its political loyalties lie. But people are smart enough to look beyond statements and to actions, and once they do so they immediately pierce the veil of neutrality.

This is, indeed, why students have called for their universities to stop supporting fossil fuels and weapons manufacturers. Not because their universities have released statements on the issues, but because they can look at balance sheets and board selections and draw reasonable conclusions from there. The distinction between political viewpoints expressed in both words and actions is thin.

It is possible for an institution to simultaneously express a position and hold space for dissent. It is also possible for institutions to implement mechanisms that prevent the subordination of unpopular views –– that is precisely why tenure was created.

There is also a critique that sees the university taking public positions amounts to little more than virtue signaling, obscuring their true operating values. In such a case, remaining silent would thus be preferable. But a university commenting on issues, even if they are being hypocritical, is a step closer to change than a university not commenting at all.

Casting the university as a place approximating value-agnosticism shuts down meaningful critiques of how the university operates and what values are reflected in its actions. It allows university administrations to bury their heads in the sand and avoid the social and political implications of their actions. The willful ignorance it enables is all the more concerning when considering existential social issues that pertain to all of us –– like climate change, the rise of fascist movements and the erosion of democratic institutions. All of us must resist these threats, especially those institutions that claim their core mission is seeking knowledge and truth, a fact even some institutional neutrality proponents concede.

Institutional neutrality serves more as political cover than meaningful policy, and such political cover will almost inevitably reinforce the inertia of these schools, contributing to their persistent unresponsiveness to student concerns. As the fall semester starts and discussions of institutional neutrality re-emerge, it is critical to call attention to the false promise of neutrality so that universities do not skirt responsibility for their positions, regardless of whether they come packaged in official statements or hidden in financial spreadsheets.

Caleb Dunson is the former opinion editor for the Yale Daily News and is currently a freelance writer. Editor’s Notes were left by Olivia Lee, a student at University of Pennsylvania studying politics, philosophy, and economics.