By Erik Thomson
Following Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, many universities have adopted “institutional neutrality” policies. These policies declare that the university will not take a position on any political or ethical controversies unrelated to core university functions.
At first glance, this seems like a logical and even laudable response to a complex and hostile political environment. Official neutrality can help shield the university from the adverse consequences of controversy. Statements could alienate alumni, donors, students and faculty members, and incite politicians to intervene, eroding university autonomy.
Many supporters of institutional neutrality insist that it is critical to the defence of academic and expressive freedoms. They argue that official positions inhibit individual faculty members or students from expressing differing opinions.
Until recently, institutional neutrality has occupied a minor place in literature and policies about academic freedom. Only one book and a handful of articles have been dedicated to the subject. There is no mention of the term in Henry Reichman’s Understanding Academic Freedom, Matthew Finkin and Robert Post’s For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom or Joan Wallach Scott’s Knowledge, power, and academic freedom.
Some have argued that the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) 1915 “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure” inherently articulates a doctrine of neutrality when it denounces the threat to the freedom of teaching and research that may occur when faculty oppose views supported by donors, government or public opinion. Yet subsequent AAUP policies have scarcely mentioned the doctrine.
CAUT does not have a policy about institutional neutrality, though it is currently considering one.
It almost seems that institutional neutrality has been a peculiar concern of the University of Chicago. Its history there is worth examining as it reveals some of the doctrine’s strengths, tensions and limitations. In 1899, Chicago’s faculty unanimously endorsed the “complete freedom of speech” as an immutable principle, and at the same time noted that it “should be clearly understood that the university, as such, does not appear as a disputant on either side upon any public question.”
In 1967, amidst student protests about race relations, the draft, and divestment from South Africa, the university president convened a committee to examine the university’s political action, chaired by the eminent constitutional law professor Harry Kalven. In the Kalven report, the committee agreed that there was no way for a university to reach or espouse a collective position that would not inhibit the opinions of individual faculty members or students.
The university’s central purpose of teaching and research, rightly understood, required it “to embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest variety of views among its community.” Therefore, the university needed to refrain from reaching public positions about controversial subjects, to avoid diversion from its mission of “the discovery, improvement and dissemination of knowledge... into playing the role of a second-rate political force or influence.”
However, the Kalven committee’s own deliberations suggest that one weakness of the doctrine of institutional neutrality is that it is impossible for a university to fulfil its core mission without making decisions that are political and ethical in their nature.
Chicago’s history also suggests that institutional neutrality is not necessary for the robust defence of academic freedom and the freedom of expression. One might consider Robert Maynard Hutchins, its president from 1929-1945 and chancellor from 1945-1951. Few would describe Hutchins as exemplifying “neutrality” or even restraint in taking public stances on disputed questions; he also placed the university at the service of political values. At the 1932 Democratic National Convention, Hutchins — identified as the President of the University of Chicago — proposed that the United States lead the cause of world disarmament with the League of Nations. The following spring, he denounced Hitler’s regime and advocated for the rescue of scholars fleeing Nazi tyranny. When war broke out in Europe, he criticized Lend-Lease and advocated for American neutrality. After Pearl Harbor, he declared to the faculty, “we are now an instrumentality of total war.”
Hutchins would commit the university to the war effort, most famously supporting the Manhattan project with the establishment of the “Metallurgical Laboratory,” which would initiate the first controlled nuclear chain reaction under the bleachers of the university’s old football stadium. Four days after Fat Man destroyed Nagasaki, Hutchins denounced Truman’s decision on NBC radio, opining that “the United States has lost its moral prestige” by using atomic bombs.
Yet the University of Chicago rightly includes Hutchins among a pantheon of defenders of academic freedom, alongside William Rainey Harper and Hanna Holborn Gray. The 2014 “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression,” often known as the “Chicago Principles” celebrated Hutchins’ defence of a student group that had invited the Communist Party’s presidential candidate to speak. They cite him defending the students by declaring publicly “our students... should have freedom to discuss any problem that presents itself.”
When Charles Walgreen — owner of the eponymous chain of drugstores — wrote Hutchins to inform that he was withdrawing his niece from the university because she had been exposed in classes to communist “seditious propaganda under the guise of academic freedom,” and shared the letter with the Hearst press, Hutchins did not blink. In the press, and in front of an investigatory committee of the Illinois Senate, he defended his faculty’s right to teach. As John Boyer recently argued, “Hutchins’s rigor on [the issue of academic freedom] reinforced Chicago’s identity and reputation as a place for serious, independent students and faculty whose educational and research programs demanded that the intellectual and cultural autonomy of the faculty and students be respected.”
While I might hope that university administrators adopt Hutchins’ forthright courage in defending academic freedom, I do not think many presidents or administrators should be as forthcoming with their opinions as he was. Particularly in an age when we seem eager to conflate speech with significant action, administrators should exercise restraint in expressing political opinions out of principle and prudence. Members of the Kalven committee were right to fear that profligate expressions of institutional belief could distract an institution from its mission of research and teaching and lead it to be a second-rate political influence.
However, administrators should not merely adopt a universal position of institutional neutrality but consider restraint as requiring a conscious ethical and political choice about when it is appropriate to express an opinion and when to remain silent. That choice is in itself subject to criticism and questioning.
There is a danger, otherwise, that adopting “institutional neutrality” could chill debate. If university administrators pledge not to adopt a position on a moral or political controversy, official university statements or policy could seem above political or ethical criticism. Universities must make ethical and political choices to function. We should probably all adopt the University of Chicago practice of naming the people who populate bodies like the Kalven committee who make statements on behalf of an institution, and of allowing those who dissent from their conclusions space to express their reasons.
The freedom of intramural speech is thus a far more important component of academic freedom than institutional neutrality. Even when the university administration expresses an opinion, faculty members or students can object to it, or articulate their own view.
In Canada, collective agreements spell out the right of faculty members to disagree with their employer. Faculty members should have the courage to exercise this right. They can express their independent judgment, even if it conflicts with opinions articulated by all the arrayed ranks of university administrators. They can disagree with decisions arrived at even after due deliberation by collegial government. While they can come together with colleagues and make joint statements, they can also dissent from their colleagues’ opinions. There, too, anonymous statements should be avoided, but rather statements should be expressions of individuals with due space for dissent.
Labour arbitrators should be reminded that faculty enjoy substantial exceptions from the duty of loyalty generally owed employers precisely because the university, to quote the Kalven committee, must “encourage the widest variety of views among its community” to carry out its work of teaching and research.
Erik Thomson is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Manitoba and a member of CAUT’s Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee.