A troubling pattern has emerged on America’s campuses: Administrators are abusing campus neutrality policies in ways that silence the very speech the policies are designed to protect.
Institutional neutrality as a policy of American universities seems to be reviving. Leading universities such as Dartmouth College, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford and Vanderbilt Universities have recently adopted versions of it. The main idea is that universities should not take public positions on controversial or controversial issues unless there is a direct and tangible impact on the university and its students, staff and faculty. Institutional neutrality has real value, but its success depends entirely on clarifying who actually speaks for the institution.
Recent events suggest that such clarity is often lacking. At Cape Fear Community College, officials demanded that the slogan “No Kings” be painted on the set of the student theater. At the University of Utah, a student editor was told to scrub language about climate change from an Earth Day paper. At Purdue University, the institution has cut ties with the student newspaper. In each case, administrators plead neutrality to justify student censorship. And in each case, the administration misunderstood that neutrality prevailed.
Students do not speak for their universities because they speak on campus, or because they are part of an official student group. So none of these actors have an institutional voice that neutrality policies are designed to dominate.
The problem is not neutrality itself, but the failure to define its scope. When universities fail to define what institutional discourse really is and who is authorized to speak for the institution, well-intentioned administrators fill the void with their own judgment, often badly. The result is that the speech of the average student and faculty is treated as if it were official university speech.
Universities have always been places where disagreements run rampant and where debate is the point. That goal depends on protecting one’s sense of self, especially in times of real conflict. Achieving institutional neutrality strikes wrong at the heart of what the university stands for. This makes clarity important. Some recent controversies show what happens when universities don’t have those clear guidelines.
Consider what happened at the University of Michigan earlier this month: The chair of the Faculty Senate left the floor when he began praising student protesters who supported Palestine, quickly drawing fire. The university president Domenico Grasso responded, apologetically, the same day. These comments, he said, “are inappropriate and do not represent our institutional position.” (The chairman of the Faculty Senate, on the other hand, denied that he deviated from the authorized text of the speech in any meaningful way.)
Some of the teacher pushback that followed said administrators had no business rejecting a co-worker’s speech — and that, by doing so, the president violated the institution’s principles of neutrality. That misses an important distinction: A university start is not an open field. The center organizes it, manages its content, selects its speakers and reviews ideas in advance. A faculty member who leaves a script in that setting is not exercising personal freedom of study; they direct a formal university forum in front of a captive audience. The university was within its authority to clarify that the words of the chair of the Faculty Senate did not override its position. What Michigan lacked was not a right of reply, but a clear written policy that would have prevented confusion in the first place.
The Michigan incident illustrated the confusion caused by unclear boundaries. Another recent debate at the University of California, Los Angeles, presented a different question: When should the institution itself speak?
When the Undergraduate Students Association Council, which claims to represent UCLA’s 29,000 students, condemned a campus event with former hostage Omer Shem Tov on October 7, university leadership did not invoke neutrality as a shield. It spoke.
In a statement, the university said, “Abandoning a peaceful event to share a story of resilience in the face of great suffering is against the values of our Bruin community.” UC Chancellor Jay Sures spoke for many in the campus community when he argued that student leaders would benefit from hearing Shem Tov’s opinion, rather than dismissing it outright. UCLA’s leadership deserves credit for recognizing that neutrality does not require institutional silence in all circumstances. This is exactly the kind of time when the campus community needs to hear its leaders reaffirm the shared values of the institution.
The UCLA and Michigan cases together illustrate a principle often lost in discussions about institutional neutrality: Policy governs what the institution says, not what students and faculty say. If those lines are blurred, something has gone wrong. And when universities fail to define those boundaries in advance, confusion is inevitable.
Some situations are clear: Universities must take positions on Pell Grants, student safety or threats to academic freedom. Some are not—foreign wars, reproductive rights, police brutality: These are all areas where reasonable people disagree and the danger of institutionalization is real. The important thing is that the lines are drawn deliberately, not automatically.
The important question is not whether universities can ever talk about controversial issues. They are the ones who have the authority to speak for the institution when they speak. And the answer should be to control the access of the policy.
During my time as president of the University of California, I was often criticized for speaking out against an anti-Semitic campus on the grounds that doing so would undermine dissenting views. To this I will answer that times of crisis are precisely when campus leaders must reflect to strengthen campus values and serve as a moral compass for the campus community.
However, that responsibility must be given clearly. Departments at many universities have taken sides in the Gaza war, criticized Israel, sponsored anti-Israel speakers or events, consistently issued dissenting views and refused to hire or promote Zionists. When a department posts a statement about a matter of public concern on its official website, it strongly suggests that it is making an official statement, separate from the constitutionally protected free speech rights of individuals and private organizations.
I would like departments to be banned from making such statements. But the most important thing is clear instructions.
In my opinion, the president, the Board of Regents or both should be responsible for official university announcements. As a matter of institutional policy, individual professors, departments, departments and college deans should not speak for the entire university. Dartmouth and the University of California have adopted this standard: Dartmouth, for example, states that the only “recognized institutional spokespeople” are its Board of Trustees, and one of a small number of senior leaders (or their nominees): the president, the provost, the senior vice president for communications, the director of media relations and the general counsel.
And University of California policy identifies a set of standards that statements by the department and other academic institutions must meet, including a requirement that they “be accompanied by a disclaimer that clearly states that the statement is not to be construed as the position of the University, or the institution, as a whole.”
Few, if any, universities formally authorize departments to speak on behalf of the institution, although many tacitly allow it in practice. The same principles apply to students: The decision of the student government or the production of the campus is not the institution that speaks. Campuses should clearly define when departments and other campus structures can speak for the entire university, and those rules should be written, not spoken.
At public universities, there are no substantive First Amendment issues regarding official speech. The government itself gets to decide who speaks for them and what they say. In private colleges, the boards and their presidents should decide, and the government should not interfere. The First Amendment rights of private business are very broad. But in terms of institutional governance, they must decide who speaks for them and enforce those decisions consistently.
None of this works without clear rules. University leaders owe their communities clear, written guidance on what institutional neutrality means in practice. That means designating a specific person or body—such as the president, the board, or both—as the institution’s sole legitimate voice, and making it clear that everyone, from departments to student councils to Faculty Senate seats, is speaking only for themselves. This is the first thing that universities owe to their communities. Despite that distinction, net neutrality is not a protection for free speech, but a reason to stifle it.
