More universities are choosing to stay neutral on the biggest issues

Boston Globe

11-03-2025

According to a report released Tuesday from the Heterodox Academy, a group that has been critical of progressive orthodoxy on college campuses, 148 colleges had adopted 'institutional neutrality' policies by the end of 2024, a trend that underscores the scorching political scrutiny they are under. All but eight of those policies were adopted after the Hamas attack.
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'We must open the way for our individual faculty's expertise, intelligence, scholarship, and wisdom to inform our state and society in their own voice, free from institutional interference,' said Mark Bernstein, a regent at Michigan, after adopting the policy in October.
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He said the university had historically refrained from issuing statements on momentous events, including the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, and during the two world wars.
"So institutional statements are a modern phenomenon and a misguided venture that betrays our public mission," he said.
The universities are adopting such policies at a time when the Trump administration has moved aggressively to punish them for not doing enough to crack down on antisemitism and for embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
On Friday, the administration announced that it was pulling $400 million from Columbia, a move that sent shock waves across higher education. The administration has said it is looking to target other universities.
Universities ramped up issuing statements on hot-button issues about a decade ago, after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the police shootings of Black people in places in Ferguson, Mo., and other places, said Alex Arnold, director of research at the Heterodox Academy.
Some conservatives had long lamented such statements and believed they veered too leftward. Speech groups, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, worried that they discouraged dissent. For a while, the statements were hardly the subject of widespread controversy.
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The Hamas attack and the war that followed changed the equation.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always split the left, but the attack on Oct. 7 and the war that followed sharpened those divisions. The statements that universities issued on the attack and Israel's bombing of the Gaza Strip came under scrutiny and were often criticized for being too late, too weak, too biased — or all three.
University leaders, under pressure from donors, lawmakers, and the public, began to ask: Why put out statements at all?
About four out of five colleges that adopted neutrality policies are public and face scrutiny from state lawmakers. Several states, including Texas, Utah, and North Carolina, forced their public universities to adopt such policies. Others, such as Tennessee, are considering it.
Most of the new policies apply to senior administrators, including college presidents and provosts. Others also encompass units such as academic departments. And many apply to faculty members when they are speaking in an official capacity, but often make clear that faculty are free to express personal views, according to the Heterodox Academy.
"The whole experience of coping with the campus controversy triggered by the Hamas attack has really gotten institutional leaders to think carefully and to reflect on what the function of our institutions of higher education is," Arnold said. "I do think this is probably going to be a pretty durable change."
Critics of the neutrality trend have argued that administrators are merely sidestepping difficult debates on the Middle East conflict and scared of angering donors and lawmakers.
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After Clark University in Massachusetts said it would shy away from taking positions, the school newspaper's opinion editor called the move a 'fake policy' designed to curb discussion of the conflict.
Presidents are often stumbling over their new policies. During an October interview with the school newspaper, Harvard president Alan Garber called a statement by pro-Palestinian students 'offensive,' prompting criticism that he should follow his own policy.
Last month, the American Association of University Professors, a faculty rights group, issued a statement on neutrality that was, more or less, neutral. It stated that the idea "is neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it."
The reelection of Donald Trump is now testing those policies.
As the new administration, which has described universities as "the enemy," ratchets up its attack on higher education, colleges are under greater pressure to be voices of resistance.
But many college presidents have been spooked into silence, said Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, a small Catholic institution three miles from the White House.
"They look at what happened to Claudine Gay, and some of the other presidents," she said, referring to the former Harvard president who resigned last year after a congressional hearing on antisemitism. "And they're like: 'I don't want that to happen to me. So I'll just shut up and hunker down, and hope this cloud passes.'"
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