As we all know by now, American universities are starting to follow the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, which declares that our school is to be “institutionally neutral.” This means that no moiety of the University—no department, no center, and no official unit—can make an official ideological, moral, or political pronouncement unless it has to do with the mission of our University. (In reality, such statements, as I note below, are really the purview of only the University President, not subunits.)
But what is our mission? It’s pretty much outlined in the page on the foundational principles of the University of Chicago. In short, it combines the usual goals of a university—the promotion, promulgation, and preservation of knowledge, as well as teaching it—with a fierce dedication to preserving free expression.
And it’s the latter, free expression, that institutional neutrality is meant to preserve. If there were some departmental or university presidential statement, for instance, endorsing Governor Pritzker as a better Presidential candidate than J. D. Vance (I’m looking ahead), that would chill the speech of those favoring Vance. Because the statement is official, it could inhibit the speech of pro-Vance untenured faculty (or even tenured ones) as well as students, who would fear punishment or other sanctions for bucking what’s is an official stand. The Kalven Report, of course, emphasizes that any member of the University community can speak privately on any issue (we have First-Amendment-ish free speech). And we’re encouraged to speak our minds as individuals. But in fact, the only person who can decide what the University can say publicly about such issues is the University President. (This has been violated in the past, but we try to police it. Because of some violations, President Bob Zimmer issued a clarification of Kalven in 2020, affirming that it applied to all official units of the University.)
One example of a political issue on which the University of Chicago spoke publicly was to favor DACA, as the University believed that its mission would be enhanced by allowing all students to compete for admission (or, if admitted, remain here) regardless of their immigration status. (The “Dreamers” came to America as children and grew up here.) And we have a policy that we do not reveal anything about the immigration status of students, for losing them would make our student body depauperate of diversity. (Yes, “diversity” is a principle of the U of C, too: see our Foundational Principles of Diversity and their codification here), but we are seeking viewpoint and experiential diversity, not ethnic diversity.
The University of Chicago was the first school to officially codify institutional neutrality, but now, according to FIRE, 41 universities have adopted neutrality. That’s still pathetically few: only 1% of the 4,000-odd degree-granting institutions in America. In contrast, 115 have adopted the Chicago Principles of Free Expression. But the list of Kalven-adopting schools is growing fast, for we’ve seen what happens when universities take gratuitous political stands.
However, Brian Soucek, a law professor at UC Davis, disagrees, claiming that it’s impossible for universities to be neutral. In his misguided and poorly-written piece at the Wall Street Journal‘s “Education News section”, Soucek says that “the neutrality so many are touting and pledging is an illusion.” That’s wrong, which becomes clear when you read his argument. Further, he says that “by one estimate, over 150 universities” have adopted the principles of the Kalven report. He gives no link, and I don’t believe it, because FIRE is punctilious in keeping the list linked above and, as I said, it lists but 41 schools.
I argue that, with the exception of schools like Brigham Young and Catholic University, in which promulgating faith is part of their mission, and schools like West Point and Annapolis, which produce future military officers, all universities should adopt institutional neutrality, for neutrality promotes free speech and free speech promotes learning, teaching, and academic freedom. (I may have missed a few exceptions, but I can’t think of any.)
Click the headline below to read:
So why is it impossible for universities to be truly neutral? Why is neutrality “largely an illusion”? It may be hard to maintain, and be violated in some schools, but the reason Soucek gives for the “illusory” nature of neutrality (which should apply to many companies, too!) are unconvincing. I’ll summarize his two main reasons in bold, but indented statements are from the article.
1). Universities sometimes have buildings named after people, expressing admiration for them. And sometimes those names are taken down. Both acts are, says Soucek, political.
More common are the choices around the names that universities give to their schools, buildings, scholarships and chairs. Schools express something with each of these choices.
At UC Davis, I am lucky to work at King Hall, named after Martin Luther King, Jr., but some neighboring law schools haven’t been so fortunate. UC Berkeley no longer refers to its law school as Boalt Hall, having discovered how grossly anti-Chinese its namesake was. And the first law school in California, once known as UC Hastings, is now UC Law SF—less catchy but no longer associated with the massacre of Native Americans. Renaming efforts may strike some as hopelessly woke, but choosing to keep a name for the sake of tradition, or branding, is no less value laden.
Even the University of Chicago has dealt with this. A few years ago, the university renamed what was formerly its Oriental Institute, partly to avoid the “pejorative connotations” of the word “oriental.” Chicago also quietly gave its Robert A. Millikan chair a new title after other schools had removed Millikan’s name because of his ties to eugenics. In each of these decisions, Chicago, like other universities, did exactly what its former provost, Geoffrey Stone, said universities shouldn’t do: “make a statement about what is morally, politically and socially ‘right’”—and wrong.
Well, sometimes buildings are named after donors, and it may be in the donation papers that the donors’ names must stay on the building. Renaming the “Oriental Institute,” is not chilling speech, but expressing the faculty’s feeling that the word “Oriental” had bad connotations (thanks, Edward Said). And renaming a chaired professorship in the rush to purge people who had views we considered reprehensible may be something to argue about, but one thing it does not do is chill speech. There was no official statement about the badness of eugenics (actually, some eugenics is still practiced today, but not in the way it was once conceived). This was simply a renaming. Further, will not see any official statement of our University about eugenics or about prenatal screening for genetic diseases, or aborting genetically defective fetuses. In fact, you will find no official statement in our University about abortion at all. (I was told that OB-GYN had a big argument about this when the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision, and the upshot was that this medical department could not make any official statement about Dobbs.) That was the right decision. I myself opposed Dobbs, but I would not want universities saying so officially.
This stuff about renaming, while you might be able to squeeze a drop of juice out of it, misses the main point, which is not about names but official statements. The latter chill speech; the former almost never do.
2). Universities have different missions, and so even if they adopt neutrality, they will make different exceptions to neutrality.
Soucek shows that he misunderstands Kalven when he says stuff like this:
The University of Chicago itself has spoken out on any number of politically fraught issues in recent years, from abortion to DACA to Trump’s Muslim ban, which Chicago filed a legal brief to oppose. Some see this as hypocrisy. I see these choices as evidence of what Chicago considers integral to its mission. In its brief, Chicago claimed it “has a global mission,” which is what justified its stance on immigration law. Not every university shares that global mission; some exist to serve their states, their local community or people who share their faith. We’re not all Chicago, and that is OK. We can be pluralists about universities’ distinctive missions.
First, the University of Chicago has not spoken out officially on abortion. If it has, let Soucek give a reference.There are no official statements I know of. As far as DACA and banning Muslims, those are both conceived of as limiting the pool of students we could have, and that violates the University’s mission. This is well known, and doesn’t violate Kalven. Ergo, “having a global mission” was not the justification for our stands on immigration. Those came from seeing our mission to allow qualified faculty and students to form a diverse community regardless of immigration status.
Second, I am baffled by Soucek’s statements that “some universities exist to serve their states and their local community” (serving faith is okay for religious schools and allows Kalven violations, but faith-based universities are inimical to free thought and as an atheist I don’t approve of them). Even a community college or a state school should maintain institutional neutrality as a way to promote free speech. “Serving your community” can be one mission of a school, but it’s not one that should allow a school to make official pronouncements on morality, ideology, or politics.
Soucek goes on to explain that he taught a “great books” curriculum at three different schools (Chicago, Columbia, and Boston College, with the latter a Jesuit school, but one that encourages free expression). Again, with the exception of religious and military schools, most universities should share a similar mission, one that I outlined above. And insofar as they do that, they should have institutional neutrality. Because Columbia and Chicago taught great books courses for different missions (they used to, but no longer!) does not mean they should differ in what political/moral/ideological statements they make officially. It is the commonality of missions that lead to a commonality of reasons for neutrality.
In fact, Soucek himself seems to realize that secular schools shouldn’t make Kalven-violating statements, and in a weird paragraph, he endorses neutrality (bolding is mine).
The real question universities need to be asking, then, isn’t whether some statement, policy or investment strategy counts as “political,” especially in a world where nearly every aspect of higher education has become politicized. Instead, I would replace all of the recent committee reports and neutrality pledges with something like this: “The university or its departments should make official statements only when doing so advances their mission.”
The last paragraph is in fact what institutional neutrality is for.
One more confusing paragraph. What is the sweating professor trying to say here?
Some issues, for some schools, so thoroughly implicate their mission that they need to be addressed no matter how controversial. Catholic University and the University of California were both right to talk about Dobbs, the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, though in opposite ways, and for different reasons.
Maybe Catholic University was okay to talk about Dobbs, as its stated mission is cultivation of Christianity (read Catholicism) for CU says this in its “aims and goals” statement:
As a Catholic university, it desires to cultivate and impart an understanding of the Christian faith within the context of all forms of human inquiry and values. It seeks to ensure, in an institutional manner, the proper intellectual and academic witness to Christian inspiration in individuals and in the community, and to provide a place for continuing reflection, in the light of Christian faith, upon the growing treasure of human knowledge.
But no, it was not okay for the University of California to talk about Dobbs. I don’t know what they said, but if they officially attacked the dismantling of Roe v. Wade, which is what Dobbs did, they would chill speech of those who are opposed to abortion, and members of the University community should have the right to say that without fear of retribution. Again, Soucek seems to misunderstand why Kalven is there, and gives no reason why the University of California should be okay with violating it.
Soucek also seems to think that maintaining silence in the face of a controversy means that you are taking sides–and defining your “mission”. He’s wrong. Have a gander at this:
More recently, when the Trump administration has denied the existence of transgender people and demanded that universities do so as well, so-called neutrality pledges give them nowhere to hide. If universities must speak out about threats to their mission but can’t speak otherwise, every choice about when to speak ends up defining what their mission is. Staying quiet when trans students, faculty and staff are under attack isn’t silence in that case. It is a loud expression that trans rights, and trans people, aren’t relevant to that school’s mission. There is nothing neutral about that.
In the end, Kalven’s loophole ensures that universities will always be saying something—about their mission, if nothing else—even when they maintain the institutional silence the Kalven Report has become so famous for recommending.
The University is not “hiding” about various transgender controversies. Au contraire, it is encouraging discussion about them by refusing to take any official position, which would squelch debate. A school not saying anything about Trump’s views on trans people does not mean that the University endorses those views. Rather, each person is free to say what they want without fear of retribution from the school. I, for example, think that Trump is wrong to ban transgender people from the military. Others may feel differently, and that difference leads to the kind of debate that college is about. Soucek’s big error is to think that by NOT issuing statements, the University is making statements, That’s the old ‘silence = violence” trope and again shows the authors’s ignorance of Kalven, an ignorance surprising coming from a professor of constitutional law. Soucek seems a bit short on logic.
As one of my colleagues said:
[Soucek] complains that if the university does not speak up against Trump’s statements about trans people, then trans people are not part of the university’s mission. Well, that seems reasonable to me. I don’t see that any particular group or identity is the “university’s mission”, no matter how topical. Individual faculty, students, and staff who research, treat, and advocate for trans people have that mission. But that’s not the university’s mission.
Is that so hard to understand?
Just when I finished this post, Luana sent me this tweet, saying “I hope he means it.” So do I.
NEW: Harvard President Alan Garber said the University “went wrong” by allowing faculty activism in the classroom, arguing professors’ political views have chilled free speech and debate on campus.@EliseSpenner and @HugoChiassonn report.https://t.co/CsyA2gfQNK
— The Harvard Crimson (@thecrimson) January 3, 2026