Institutional neutrality mandates are inconsistent with academic freedom, full stop.
A lot of people have been writing about this relationship (e.g., John K. Wilson and Robert Post), but I think there’s still more to say. In particular, I wanted to highlight two distinct but interacting problems with such mandates; to note one way in which their aggressive deployment in recent months represents a significant departure from longstanding understandings of free speech on U.S. campuses; and to suggest that a cross-national lens may illuminate some dynamics that are obscured in the U.S. debates.
The people currently in charge of most U.S. colleges and universities are enamored with institutional neutrality mandates. As such, these policies will likely continue to proliferate until the fad passes, regardless of what any organized bodies of university faculty think. But some faculty-led organizations have also endorsed institutional neutrality policies, and they have sometimes done so in the name of academic freedom. I think this is a mistake, both conceptually and strategically.
By “people currently in charge,” I mean members of university governing boards and the campus presidents and chancellors who report to them. I have no strong objection when such university leaders adopt institutional neutrality policies as constraints on themselves. If they are so beset by demands from various university constituencies to speak out on matters of public controversy that lashing themselves to the mast with institutional neutrality policies seems the best way forward, that’s their call.
But the most significant variation among such policies lies with the range of actors whom they purport to bind. Syracuse University has adopted a campus statement on free speech that includes this passage:
Except under the most extraordinary circumstances and with the sole purpose of protecting its mission of discovery, improvement and dissemination of knowledge, the University does not make institutional statements or pronouncements on current controversies. Nor does the University require students, faculty, or administrators to express a particular viewpoint on such matters. This commitment to institutional neutrality is meant to guarantee the free participation of all members of this scholarly community in public debates without fear of reprisal. At the same time, the University’s commitment to institutional neutrality is not meant to restrict the free expression rights of individual members of the University community, but that expression cannot commit the University to positions that go beyond the University’s stated academic mission or its protection.
I was a member of the committee that drafted this statement. We were sharply divided on whether to include this passage, and we reached consensus only because its terms are limited to “the University” writ large. Other campuses have policies that reach downward to individual university units. For example, the University of Michigan’s policy reads in full:
The mission of the University of Michigan is to serve the people of Michigan and the world through preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future. To advance the University’s mission and protect its longstanding commitment to diversity of thought and freedom of expression; preserve an environment where members of our academic community are free to engage in open inquiry, dialogue, and disagreement; and avoid any suggestion that the University community must conform to a particular side of a contested issue, the University will maintain a position of institutional neutrality on political or social issues and events not directly related to its internal governance.
Therefore, University leaders, including Regents, the president, executive officers, chancellors, deans, directors, chairs, and others in similar positions, will not issue statements on behalf of the University or the unit, campus, school, college, department, division, board, or executive committee under their authority, unless such statements directly relate to matters of internal governance. University leaders may issue statements in their individual or scholarly capacity, provided they indicate that they are not speaking on behalf of the University.
Reportedly, some institutional neutrality policies go even further, limiting not just collective public statements by university departments, but even classroom speech by individual teachers.
The Syracuse and Michigan policies share one problem, and the Michigan policy suffers from a second problem as well. Problem #1 (shared by Syracuse and Michigan) is that, when applied to university presidents and other campus leaders, the policies are inevitably adhered to only selectively. Problem #2 is that, when applied downwards as restrictions on individual campus units or even individual faculty, the policies directly infringe the free speech and academic freedom rights of the faculty.
Both problems are illustrated by the widely noted recent controversy surrounding Michigan’s 2026 commencement ceremonies.
Speaking to Michigan’s class of 2026, Professor Derek Peterson praised the fighting spirit of student activists opposed to the Israeli war in Gaza. University President Domenico Grasso responded with a formal letter to the university community apologizing for Professor Peterson’s remarks, which he characterized as “hurtful and insensitive.” Grasso’s letter further indicated that Peterson’s remarks were “inappropriate and do not represent our institutional position.” The online version of Grasso’s letter was updated to insert a footnote here that reads in full: “Our position is institutional neutrality.”
University of Michigan President Domenico Grasso to the campus community
There are two possible versions of what happened here.
Version one: The president of one of our leading public universities issued a formal statement denouncing public remarks made by one of his own faculty because the remarks were inconsistent with the university’s “institutional position” on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This presidential statement was in clear tension (to put it mildly) with the university’s own institutional neutrality policy. University administrators then inserted a footnote in the president’s statement to paper over this tension.
Version two: The president of one of our leading public universities issued a formal statement denouncing public remarks made by one of his own faculty because he believed the faculty member’s remarks to be inconsistent with the university’s institutional neutrality policy. This interpretation would perhaps make sense of this line from Grasso’s letter: “Nor do [Professor Peterson’s remarks] represent the diversity of views across our entire faculty.” If Grasso was acting on this impulse, it strikes me as either a misreading or an unwarranted expansion of the university’s policy. Is every commencement speaker henceforward expected to say only things that “represent the diversity” of Michigan’s “entire faculty”? This sentiment appears to explain why some universities have been ridding their commencements of live speakers altogether.
photo courtesy of Michael Paris
On either version of the story, President Grasso’s actions were misguided and unseemly, particularly his removal of Professor Peterson’s remarks from the university’s commencement website. These actions make clear that Michigan’s institutional neutrality policy will either be applied selectively only to certain public statements by university leaders or that it will be applied hierarchically in ways that threaten academic freedom for individual faculty.
Again, I don’t care very much if Michigan’s regents want to prohibit the university president from speaking on matters of public controversy. But Michigan’s policy likewise prohibits department chairs from doing so, and the Peterson episode suggests that at least some campus administrators think it prohibits individual faculty from doing so as well. Here we have a university president not just lashing himself to the mast, but trying to lash the rest of us.
Michigan’s policy is not unusual. Many institutional neutrality policies purport to limit not just presidents and provosts, but all departments or other units of campus faculty, from making statements on matters of public controversy. And some campus statements on free speech and academic freedom endorse such efforts.
For example, the Academic Freedom Alliance joined with FIRE and Heterodox Academy in 2024 to issue a call for campus commitments to institutional neutrality that included this passage:
Critically, institutional neutrality applies only to leaders and units of the institution. This is true not only for the central administration, but also for the units of the university, such as schools, departments, centers, and programs.
Or consider the 2023 Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry, which state that “universities and their units should … refrain from publicly denouncing the research or extramural comments of members of the campus community with whom they disagree, lest they create official pariahs.” A recent statement from the AAUP likewise emphasizes that “a university’s public condemnation of the speech of individual faculty members or a group of faculty is far more likely [than other types of institutional statements] to have a chilling effect not only for those faculty members but also for the entire community, causing doubts about the very existence of academic freedom on campus.”
This last set of examples represents the best case for prohibiting official statements by the leaders of university units, but I’m not persuaded even here. Well-established academic freedom principles certainly preclude university administrators from firing or otherwise sanctioning faculty for speech that administrators disagree with, at least when the controversial speech falls within the faculty member’s expertise, broadly defined. Such employment actions cut to the heart of faculty academic freedom rights. But to say that administrators should under no circumstances publicly denounce a faculty member’s controversial comments implicates academic freedom rights in the other direction. In other words, university units and their leaders have an academic freedom right to publicly articulate their institutional missions and to criticize (though not punish) faculty comments that are at odds with those missions.
In other words, the president of the University of Michigan should be free to criticize one of his faculty members (though I see no good reason for President Grasso to have done so in Prof. Peterson’s case), but if he’s planning to do so, Michigan should get rid of its purported commitment to institutional neutrality.
As I have argued elsewhere, institutional neutrality statements have a long history (dating to the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report), but their increasingly expansive scope marks a sharp and mostly unacknowledged departure from longstanding campus free speech principles. Here, both some historical and comparative perspective may be helpful.
I was an undergraduate at Oberlin College during the 1980s/90s wave of national media obsession with campus “political correctness” (the “cancel culture” of the day), and I have been closely following campus speech debates ever since. Throughout this time, one of the leading voices in favor of a robust and distinctively American vision of campus free speech has been longtime ACLU President Nadine Strossen.
Strossen has argued since the early 1990s that campuses should avoid content-based regulations of hateful or otherwise harmful speech because such policies are steps onto the proverbial slippery slope, likely to lead to new and additional restrictions on speech that some members of the campus community find objectionable. In 1990, while serving as ACLU’s General Counsel, she published an influential Duke Law Journal article objecting to campus speech codes. She appended a policy on campus speech that had recently been adopted by the ACLU National Board of Directors. The policy reiterated the ACLU’s opposition to “all campus regulations which interfere with the freedom of professors, students and administrators to teach, learn, discuss and debate or to express ideas, opinions or feelings in classrooms, public or private discourse.”
These principles did not, in the ACLU’s view, leave universities unable to respond to racist incidents on campus (then the chief focus of campus speech debates). To the contrary, the policy reiterated the organization’s support for narrowly drawn restrictions on targeted acts of harassment, intimidation, and invasion of privacy, and it also advocated broad use of universities’ own communication channels to condemn bigotry on campus. In this regard, the policy drew on a binding resolution adopted at the ACLU’s 1989 Biennial Conference, which among other things “encourage[d] school administrators to speak out vigorously” when racist incidents occur on their campuses.
I don’t know whether the ACLU has changed its tune, but some academic freedom organizations these days insist that presidents, provosts, deans, and department chairs should never denounce faculty speech because doing so establishes a campus orthodoxy. If these commitments are applied selectively—failing to prevent President Grasso from denouncing Professor Peterson, for example—then they aren’t worth much in practice.
But even if university administrators adhere to them scrupulously, I am not persuaded that they advance academic freedom principles. Academic freedom requires strict adherence to the principle that university administrators may not dismiss or otherwise sanction faculty based on ideologically motivated objections to their teaching, research, or extramural speech related to their professional expertise. Academic freedom does not in my view require that administrators never publicly criticize the content of faculty speech.
And if university administrators enforce institutional neutrality principles hierarchically—with provosts or deans sanctioning departments for issuing collective statements—then the institutional neutrality cure is worse than the disease. For this reason, the University of California’s Academic Council has recommended that while departmental political statements should be issued sparingly, they should not be banned system wide. The AAUP’s recent statement likewise reaffirms that “institutional neutrality is neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it.” The statement then draws some helpful distinctions among various kinds of institutional pronouncements on matters of public controversy:
Committee A does not agree that the issuance of institutional statements necessarily infringes on the academic freedom of the institution’s members. The effect of institutional statements on academic freedom is … an empirical question, and their effect is likely to vary based on the subject matter of the statements, the way they are formulated, and the background policies and culture surrounding the protection of dissent at the institution in question. Committee A therefore rejects the Kalven Report’s argument that “there is no mechanism by which [the university] can reach a collective position without inhibiting the full freedom of dissent on which it thrives.”
The Kalven Report itself represents the collective position of a committee in which one member partially and publicly dissented. It strains credulity to think that an institution known to protect academic freedom would meaningfully stifle research, say, on climate change simply by announcing and explaining its choice to divest from fossil fuels. A university president who writes the university community in celebration of Black History Month or Pride Month is not thereby (to quote the Kalven report again) “censuring any minority who do not agree” that those events are worthy of celebration. Those who disagree with such statements may or may not feel able to express their opinions publicly, depending on the administration’s tolerance for dissent—that is, on the prevailing conditions for academic freedom.
Here, some cross-national perspective may also be helpful. After all, countries around the world are facing attacks on key norms and institutions of democracy, and in virtually all of them, universities are facing threats to their institutional autonomy and the academic freedom of their faculty. These threats often include demands for institutional neutrality, and scholars elsewhere have debated such demands. From Brazil, for example, compare this public statement with this piece by Fernando Romani Sales and Maria Fernanda Silva Assis (and their follow-up post here).
In my forthcoming book on free speech and democratic backsliding, I recount a Brazilian case called National Confederation of Education Workers v. President of the Legislative Assembly of the State of Alagoas (2020). The case involved primary and secondary schools rather than universities, but the parallels are clear. Emphasizing the “political, ideological and religious neutrality of the state,” the northeast Brazilian state of Alagoas sought to prohibit teachers from indoctrinating students with regard to partisan, philosophical, or religious opinions. The law emerged from the “School Without Party” (Escola sem Partido) movement, which denounced alleged “leftist indoctrination” in schools and with which President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies were associated. The teachers’ association, with support from third-party filings by feminist and LGBT-focused NGOs, responded that the restrictions infringed teachers’ free expression and academic freedom rights. The Brazilian Supreme Court invalidated the law, emphasizing the “[i]ncompatibility between the supposed duty of neutrality laid down in the law and the constitutional principles of freedom to teach, to learn and pluralism of ideas…. [U]nder the pretext of preventing the indoctrination of students, [the prohibitions in question] could lead to the persecution of teachers who do not share the dominant views.”
In sum, as applied to campus-wide university leaders, institutional neutrality policies raise no sharp academic freedom concerns, but neither do they benefit academic freedom in the ways sometimes claimed—particularly if they are honored only selectively, which seems almost inevitable. As applied to individual campus units (e.g., disciplinary departments), or even worse, to individual faculty, institutional neutrality mandates raise acute academic freedom concerns. Universities should avoid adopting them, or second best, should limit their scope to key campus-wide administrators. And those administrators should redouble their efforts to adhere to these policies in an evenhanded way.