After a tumultuous period marked by its administration’s weak response to Hamas’s attacks in Israel and pro-Palestinian student encampments on campus—culminating in resignation of its president, Liz Magill—the University of Pennsylvania badly needed a makeover. Last month, as the 2024–2025 academic year opened, Penn announced its commitment to “upholding academic independence” by implementing a policy of institutional neutrality. This means that Penn will no longer make official public statements on political issues. Interim university president Larry Jameson says that the policy is necessary to avoid suppressing the “creativity and academic freedom of our faculty and students.”
Is Penn turning a corner on academic freedom? Not so fast. Two weeks after its “academic independence” announcement, Penn sanctioned tenured law professor Amy Wax for her prior controversial comments on race, gender, and class. With this move, Penn made clear that its newfound appreciation for academic freedom runs skin deep, at best.
Since the atrocities of last October 7 and the subsequent campus unrest, 18 institutions have adopted institutional neutrality policies that resemble Penn’s. Their announcements have garnered cautious praise from defenders of academic freedom and free speech. Though it’s obvious that universities want to save face after their failure to condemn unequivocally Hamas’s massacre of civilians, there’s hope that these statements might still be a move in the right direction despite the flawed reasons behind their origin.
But the reasons that universities are taking these steps do matter. True institutional neutrality involves a deeper commitment than simply refraining from commenting on political issues. Given how often administrators place their thumbs on the scales of various decisions, ranging from student admissions to faculty hiring, achieving genuine neutrality would require schools to evaluate and overhaul a host of politically biased policies and practices. If administrators’ only motivation for adopting institutional neutrality is public relations, then it is unlikely they will fix these deeper issues.
The concept of institutional neutrality dates back to the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report. Responding to the intense political environment faced by universities in the 1960s, the now-famous report reaffirmed the university’s commitment to remain neutral on political and social issues and to “encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community.” The report solidified the University of Chicago’s status as a defender of free speech and academic freedom in the following decades.
But today, it’s not just student protesters who fight against the notion of neutrality. Political bias and activism are more deeply embedded at universities than ever before. Many schools still use diversity statements to evaluate prospective faculty based on their adherence to progressive racial dogma. Universities have created “bias response teams” to police student and faculty speech on controversial issues. Sadly, many of the institutions that have recently adopted neutrality statements inspired by the Kalven Report seem uninterested in fixing these issues.
At Penn, the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty promotes diversity search advisors in hiring. If a candidate pool lacks diversity—along racial, ethnic, and gender lines, that is—then departments are encouraged to conduct “further outreach” to achieve the required quotas.
Washington State University’s Office of Outreach and Education pays more than $14 per hour for students to serve as social-justice peer educators, who “challenge inequity and injustice as it manifests in everyday life and on the WSU community.”
Syracuse University still requires diversity statements from applicants in fields like neuroscience and medicinal chemistry. Scientific researchers at Syracuse must affirm progressive dogmas such as the belief that colorblind equality is inequitable.
All of the above universities have adopted neutrality policies. Their hypocrisy seems lost on them, but the public—and especially donors to these institutions—should hold them accountable to their commitments. State lawmakers can require public universities in their care to eliminate diversity statements in hiring and to uphold the First Amendment.
University leaders now fear pressure campaigns like those that led to the ousting of the presidents of Harvard and Penn, and they hope that their newfound appreciation for academic freedom—in word, if not in deed—will turn back calls for more substantive reform. But much remains to be done before universities can become the bastions of academic freedom that they are supposed to be.
Photo: Bob Krist / The Image Bank via Getty Images