Who’s Afraid of Institutional Neutrality?

Faculty concerns about possible over-compliance are understandable.

I used to be a faculty senator. That’s right, a real resolutionary, a delayer of decisions, and a seasoned saboteur of bad policies. Just a few years ago I would have been one of the elected faculty representatives questioning my university’s consideration of institutional statement neutrality—a type of policy I now advocate from my position as an HxA staff member.

The work of faculty governors is important. They ensure that new initiatives, policies, administrative changes, and financial priorities fulfill the university’s mission. To be fair, sometimes governing faculty can be difficult, requiring time-sucking processes to ensure that new initiatives do not, you know, ruin the institution. And they can be so idealistic or naive that they neglect to consider budgetary or other constraints.

But In my time in academic governance, I saw plenty of new initiatives that threatened basic principles supporting the university’s mission or that just wasted resources and crushed morale.To use an almost comical case, when my university’s Faculty Senate was asked to support a proposal to spread “kindness rocks” across the campus for our well-being, we voted against the cute little rocks by arguing that faculty salaries at the institution had plummeted—a problem solved by raises, not praises painted on rocks.

So, I can understand why the faculty’s representatives in institutional governance might be skeptical of a proposed institutional neutrality policy. While a growing number of institutions have been adopting institutional neutrality policies, faculty members rightfully wonder how such a policy could play out at their own colleges and universities.

The worry I hear expressed most often by faculty members concerns over-compliance with institutional neutrality. It’s not as if we haven’t already seen multiple instances of universities applying measures that are stricter than a policy or law requires, out of sheer enthusiasm for a cause, an attempt to avoid risk, or a grab for power. Witness some university applications of DEI policies and copyright regulations, for example.

Some professors worry that university administrators will apply a principle of statement neutrality not only to themselves but also to the very people the principle is designed to protect. Over-interpreting a policy of institutional statement neutrality to imply that instructors must be neutral in their classrooms, or that faculty members must be neutral about bad university policies or when speaking extramurally on matters of public concern, would be a serious problem of over-compliance.

Institutional statement neutrality is meant to protect the ability of the faculty and students to speak on their own behalf, free of administrative pressure to conform to a campus orthodoxy. Faculty members and students deserve reassurance that administrators understand this, and will not use institutional neutrality as a pretext to silence the very people whose academic, intellectual, and expressive freedoms it is designed to protect.

Some have also criticized the idea of institutional statement neutrality by assuming that university leaders will be unable to speak out for their university’s mission, insisting that universities can’t afford to be neutral when it comes to their core purpose. But the principle behind institutional neutrality holds only that the university’s administrators and institutional units will refrain from taking official positions on the social and political issues of the day that are not related to the mission or that do not impact university operations.

Muzzling leaders when they ought to be speaking would be another form of over-compliance. When the community of inquiry is threatened, university leaders arguably have a duty to speak out and defend the university. That’s precisely why the HxA Institutional Statement Neutrality Model calls on college and university leaders to apply the principle of neutrality in light of their institution’s unique history and mission.

I’ve also heard worries about over-compliance when it comes to university communications—news releases and social media posts, for instance. Unlike faculty and students, university communications staff do speak for the university, and they routinely “take positions” about the victory of a sports team, a compelling art exhibition, a student club’s activities, or faculty research accomplishments. Some understandably worry that they’ll be told not to communicate about the activities of specific groups, for example, a club of Republican students or LGBT students, or about the latest research of a faculty member whose findings appear to have controversial policy implications. Such restrictions would over-comply with institutional statement neutrality because neither simple reporting on student club activities nor announcing a professor’s scholarly activities necessarily takes a position on them.

Another worry about institutional statement neutrality that comes down to over-compliance is the one that assumes administrators would become cold-hearted in a crisis. But institutional leaders not taking a position on political issues does not mean they must be silent during a crisis. Nothing in an institutional statement neutrality policy should forbid expressions of sympathy or pointing members of the university community to helpful resources.

A final worry concerns the way in which outside groups may over-interpret institutional neutrality in order to pressure the university to ban a certain book, idea, course, or program. This happens, for instance, when activists or watchdog groups suggest that a university’s book selected for its Common Reading Program violates institutional neutrality because the book’s author made an argument about a contested issue—as if assigning a book for students to read amounts to compelling their belief in what the author believed.

There have always been outside groups that object to some research, artwork, course, or book somewhere on a campus, and that probably won’t ever change, but institutional neutrality could become a new pretext for those antagonists to push for censorship.

In the end, we should take seriously faculty worries that institutional statement neutrality could wind up being used to punish and censor people—the very opposite of the intention behind such a policy—either because people misunderstand the principle or abuse it in a grab for power. It’s good that faculty skeptics are out there wanting to make sure people don’t use an institutional neutrality policy for censorship. We should all be vigilant in ensuring that institutional neutrality is understood and is implemented to support an environment for open inquiry and robust dialogue.

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