At center of storm, Harvard ponders neutrality
Some colleges opting for silence to try to ease conflicts but they still face heat
For nearly five months, Harvard has been engulfed in controversies over what to say about the Israel-Hamas war. Now, a growing chorus of professors and administrators is proposing a simple solution: silence.
At Harvard and other universities, momentum is building for “institutional neutrality,” the principle that university leaders should refrain from taking positions on weighty social and political matters. That idea was, until recently, a fairly obscure concept debated within the academy. But after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel plunged many American universities into turmoil, and thrust their leaders into debates over an intractable conflict, schools from Cambridge to California are considering adopting institutional neutrality as a matter of official policy.
Interim Harvard president Alan Garber is assembling a working group to study the matter. Columbia’s University Senate recently adopted institutional neutrality in a unanimous vote. Faculty groups at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University are pushing their leaders to do the same.
Proponents argue that adopting neutrality will make universities more governable and protect their mission of fostering open inquiry. Universities, they say, should be forums for debates, not participants in them. But critics say the idea of a neutral university is a chimera. Endowments invest in fossil fuel stocks and some schools accept donations from representatives of autocratic regimes. Neutrality, critics say, is a way to deflect scrutiny and avoid taking morally correct but inconvenient stands.
Momentum for institutional neutrality built during the fall semester as schools were buffeted by conflicts over their statements about the war. A few schools, such as Brandeis University — a school with a strong Jew
ish identity and whose board has opposed institutional neutrality — took an immediate and unequivocal stand on the Hamas attack, condemning it as terrorism and expressing full sympathy for Israelis. But a greater number of universities tried to thread a needle: acknowledging the suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians, nodding to the historical roots of the conflict, and, ultimately, infuriating both sides.
By the end of the fall semester, Harvard’s then-president Claudine Gay had proposed that Harvard should examine institutional neutrality. At a private dinner in December, a group of prominent Harvard faculty lobbied members of the top oversight board, the Corporation, to adopt neutrality. At a faculty meeting at Harvard’s Kennedy School, professor Steven Walt advocated for neutrality and there weren’t “any objections,” recalled Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor who attended the meeting.
“Everybody in higher ed knows now about [institutional neutrality],” said Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School who co-leads a Harvard faculty group, the Council on Academic Freedom, that supports the principle. “They might not have known about it three months ago, but they all know about it now.”
Institutional neutrality is not a new idea. In the context of the modern American university, it dates to 1967, when the University of Chicago adopted neutrality to avoid taking sides in fierce debates over the Vietnam War. A smattering of other schools have adopted such policies since then, and some university leaders have observed the principle even if they didn’t codify it into their schools’ policies.
But during the past decade or so, professors and university leaders said, activists of all stripes have increasingly demanded that universities take principled stands on consequential matters.
“There is no such thing as neutral — you support the current state of things or you want to change them,” said Lara Jirmanus, a physician and clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School.
Sometimes taking a stand is easy. When former Harvard president Lawrence Bacow flew the Ukrainian flag over Harvard Yard after Russia’s invasion, few complained. When Gay, a dean at the time, published a searing note after George Floyd’s murder about the impact of the “callous and depraved actions of a white police officer in Minneapolis,” she was giving voice to views widely held on Harvard’s campus.
The problem wasn’t the content of those messages, but the expectation they reinforced, advocates of institutional neutrality argue. Last semester, when an issue came along that generated campus schisms, as opposed to consensus, university leaders found themselves in an impossible bind, facing competing calls for solidarity.
“Unlike Bacow’s strong statement of support for Ukraine . . . or Dean Gay’s powerful statement on police violence, we have as yet — 48 hours later — no official Harvard statement at this time of moral testing,” former Harvard president Lawrence Summers wrote on social media on Oct. 9, before Gay had made a statement about the Hamas attack or Israel’s retaliatory bombing of the Gaza Strip.
When Gay and other top leaders did issue a statement later that day, it pleased no one, and kicked off a leadership crisis that eventually led to Gay’s resignation at the start of this year.
Just before Christmas break last year, Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier found himself in a situation similar to Gay’s.
“I had one petition from each side,” he said in an interview last week. Pro-Palestinian activists were imploring him to boycott a vendor with ties to Israel. A proIsraeli faction wanted him to voice public support for Israeli policies.
But he had an out. Diermeier, a former University of Chicago provost, had formalized institutional neutrality at Vanderbilt in 2022. Now, when the school faces demands such as the dueling petitions last year, “we just remind people of the institutional neutrality pledge, and that’s the end of discussion,” he said.
That kind of situation exemplifies the “practical reason” for adopting neutrality, Diermeier said. There are also “principled reasons.”
“We need to be a place where ideas are explored,” he said. “If the university takes a position on issues that do not directly pertain to the operation of the university, it chills debate, and in particular it chills debate among [those who hold] minority opinion[s].”
Garber, Harvard’s interim president, said in a statement Tuesday that “more and more people on campus see ‘institutional neutrality’. . . as a promising approach toward encouraging more open discourse on campus.”
Even proponents of neutrality agree there are moments when university leaders must break their silence — but there is disagreement about exactly when that should be.
Edward Hall, a Harvard philosophy professor and copresident of the Council on Academic Freedom, said presidents, deans, and other top administrators should only weigh in on matters “directly relevant to the mission” of the university. (That view echoes the tenets of the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, which described institutional neutrality.)
The university should, for example, publicly oppose political interference in the university’s affairs, he said. That could include laws, such as one signed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022, that seek to restrict certain kinds of teaching on race and gender.
But under an institutional neutrality policy, Hall said, Harvard would remain silent about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “mainly because, as awful and deeply troubling as it was, it doesn’t immediately affect our core mission.”
But what about affirmative action, a controversial issue that intersects with a core university function: admissions decisions? Or then-president Donald Trump’s 2017 executive order that restricted travel from several Muslim-majority countries and affected some students at US colleges and universities? There are no hard and fast answers.
Critics of institutional neutrality contend that universities have a responsibility to officially weigh in on the world’s injustices.
Jirmanus, the Harvard Medical School instructor, who is also a pro-Palestinian activist, said Israel’s war in Gaza is such an injustice. Institutional neutrality is a “smoke screen for a very clear position that Harvard has taken that it plans to do nothing to stop genocide,” she said.
Columbia University president Minouche Shafik disputed that view in recent remarks to the school’s senate. “University presidents should not be providing a running commentary on current events,” she said, according to the student newspaper. “Columbia University doesn’t have a foreign policy.”
Sandro Galea, dean of Boston University’s School of Public Health, supports institutional neutrality. But he has a more constrained view of what it means than other proponents. To him, the institution itself should generally stay out of politics. But leaders — presidents, deans, department chairs — should retain their roles as public intellectuals, and meet their “pastoral responsibility” to guide their communities through tumultuous moments.
“If neutrality is supposed to mean that anybody who is an academic leader says nothing, it seems to me it’s depriving the world of a resource,” he said — academic leaders “who have something to contribute to the issues of the day.”