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September 11, 2024 - 7:15pm
Several of America’s top universities are embracing institutional neutrality in the wake of a turbulent year of campus protests.
The University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, announced this week that it would no longer take institutional positions on external events, citing academic freedom concerns. “Although well-meaning, these institutional messages fundamentally compete with the free and unencumbered creation and expression of ideas by individuals,” the announcement read. “By quieting Penn’s institutional voice, we hope to amplify the expertise and voices within.”
Penn was the site of unruly protests over the war in Gaza throughout the 2023-24 school year and a related Congressional hearing which ultimately led to the university’s president stepping down. When asked by a member of Congress whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated campus rules, then-president Liz Magill said it was “context-dependent”, a comment eagerly picked up by the national press.
Having taken public stances on a number of hot-button issues in the years prior, the outbreak of war in Gaza put the University of Pennsylvania in a difficult position. In addition to student protests over the university’s perceived lack of support for Palestinians, donors revolted against the school for not being pro-Israel enough, resulting in massive financial damage.
Other top universities have found themselves in a similarly difficult position, prompting a wave of interest in institutional neutrality, which would allow universities to extricate themselves from contentious debates in the name of free speech and academic freedom. The new president of Yale, for instance, announced this week that the school was considering institutional neutrality, having appointed a committee to determine “when the university, or those speaking on its behalf, should comment on matters of public significance”.
The Board or Trustees at Stanford also reaffirmed the school’s policies discouraging institutional statements this week, months after the university updated its academic freedom policies. “When speaking for the institution, Stanford University leaders and administrators should not express an opinion on political and social controversies, unless these matters directly affect the mission of the university or implicate its legal obligations,” the updated Faculty Senate statement read.
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SubscribeThat last paragraph needs to be sung from the rooftops. I’ll take universities seriously when they all stop requiring ideological (and deeply controversial) compliance statements on DEI from academics before hiring them.
They would also need to shrink their rabidly Left-partisan Humanities and Social ‘Science’ staffs – both academic and administrative – by maybe 80% (or is that 90%?)
Somebody should send this article to our cretinous eduction minister.
Liberals never change, they just go into hiding until the heat is off.
What American universities require are high calibre presidents not institutional neutrality.
I strongly doubt that this will do anything to reduce the efforts of politically biased and outspoken faculty members at these institutions to use their positions to impose their values and opinions on their students. When faculty return the mission of teaching students how to think rather than what to think and recognize that being “an activist” is antithetical to their role only then will a declaration of institutional neutrality will mean something.