This fall, Yale’s new President Maurie McInnis convened a faculty committee to make recommendations on the use of “institutional voice.” The committee was charged to deliver a policy by the end of October. This is lightning speed for a committee like this, and the deadline seemed conveniently timed with the election, as if part of the point was to find reasons to stay silent in a time of political turmoil. And stay silent Yale’s leaders did, as almost all university Presidents have in the aftermath of Trump’s return to power. This despite the fact that the incoming administration poses extraordinary new threats to higher education.
There’s a lot to unpack here: the problem with so-called “institutional neutrality,” the subtleties in our committee’s recommendations (lost on those who claimed, wrongly but predictably, that Yale has adopted a position of institutional neutrality), and the implications of all of this for the future of higher ed. The example also provides a useful moment to reflect on what we can expect of powerful institutions in the second Trump era, and what that means for the rest of us.
First, what’s wrong with institutional neutrality? As Dan HoSang and I explained in an op-ed in the Yale Daily News, the push for neutrality is a key piece of a broader conservative campaign to suppress speech on campus that conservatives don’t like. That campaign has led to nearly 100 new bills around the country directly targeting higher education, many of which seek to curb speech on campus, particularly about race and gender. It is one part of a larger, well-funded attempt to take over what conservatives see as an important locus of progressive power.
Neutrality rules are commonly defended as a means to protect faculty and student speech. The purported idea is that when the university makes a statement on issues of the day – about the war in Ukraine, or the Supreme Court’s SFAA affirmative action decision, for example – it chills the speech of those who teach and learn on campus, who will fear retaliation for expressing contrary views.
But this is nonsense. We want our leaders to speak in defense of our institutional values, in part because collective voice carries different import than individual voice. That’s why, for instance, Yale recently sent an institutional representative to Hartford to testify against a proposed state law banning legacy preferences in admission. I disagree deeply with the university’s position on the law, but the problem isn’t that Yale took a position. And nothing about it doing so prevented me from stating my contrary view – nor did it deter our students, several of whom went to Hartford to testify against Yale’s position. (If there’s a procedural problem here, it’s that universities like Yale don’t really have a good means to ensure that they’re really speaking for the collective, or in response to our values. Instead, our leaders more and more seem to speak in the interests of the trustees, or the all-powerful endowment, even where these are at odds with our mission.)
Unless our leaders are acting in retaliatory ways, statements themselves aren’t going to chill faculty or student speech. What does chill speech are rules against speaking — rules like those narrowing the use of institutional voice. Those rules, which come with an implicit promise to punish, create a new weapon for those who don’t like the content of university speech: the argument that the speech is not just substantively wrong or misguided, but that it’s breaking the rule. This is why people who want neutrality rules don’t think they should be limited to university presidents or other top officials. They argue that these rules should also apply to deans, department chairs, academic centers and – a colleague recently reported to me – law school clinics. You heard it here first, folks: expect that we’ll now see arguments that clinics should stop any kind of public interest work that might make a “statement.” This, of course, would be a direct violation of the academic freedom to teach, while also undermining important ways that our professional schools serve the public.
We should also expect that only some kinds of speech will be targeted as political. Here at Yale, we had a striking recent example of this. The student-run Women’s Center offered to co-sponsor a panel on Palestine. Other students, as well as an off-campus conservative group, objected. When we returned to campus this fall, the administration instructed the Center to “maintain broad neutrality” in its programming. What could that possibly mean? Do centers for religious life have to provide programs for atheists? Places like Women’s Centers – and the university itself – can never be “neutral” in a generic sense precisely because they have missions to advance.
Thankfully, the directive to the Women’s Center was rescinded. And our committee on institutional voice itself recognized that “neutrality” rules make no sense for universities. We cannot be neutral as to matters that affect our mission. We can’t be for calculus, and also against it, or for vaccine science, and against it. Instead, we – and our leaders – must speak, and act, in defense of our mission and disciplinary work. Yale’s mission is broad and includes “improving the world,” including through practice. Protecting it requires both speech and action. As we noted in our op-ed:
Institutional voice is not simply a problem. It is essential to the pursuit of the mission of the university. To be faithful to the breadth of our mission requires, among other things, active work in the world, including protecting academic values, but also educating and influencing practice. Limiting institutional voice to a narrow set of issues concerning the legislative or policy interests of the university — admissions policy or taxes on the endowment — betrays our shared obligation to advance this mission in practice. Consider the professional schools, for example. They study and speak about vaccines to support better public health and study and speak about the Constitution to defend a democratic form of government. Sometimes our leaders might even speak on these matters; for example against laws that threaten free speech everywhere, or against a proposed FDA commissioner who is anti-vaccine. So it should be, particularly in perilous times….
Instead of rules or guidelines against university speech, we should recognize that institutional voice can be important to achieving the university’s mission — and encourage leaders to speak when our mission is threatened. We should be clear that there are bad reasons not to speak — for example, for fear of angering donors or politicians. We should urge our leaders to use good judgment and not cheapen the impact of statements by making them all the time, or always running them through PR professionals. We should recognize, finally, that silencing our leaders creates risks to the university mission, including free speech on campus.
Importantly, Yale’s new policy is stated in prudential terms, and not absolutes. And in this respect it is better than the neutrality rules produced elsewhere. While it does too much to encourage silence, it also makes clear that “the decision whether to issue statements should remain a matter of judgment.” Consistent with that, our President has told faculty that these are not rules, but recommendations, and will not result in sanctions. This is far better than the alternative, though still too broadly casts forms of collective speech as problematic.
What does all this imply for the future of higher ed? Institutional voice rules are dangerous, and even prudential versions like ours, I fear, will be used by leaders to avoid defending the mission of the university today, even where it is very explicitly at stake. While that defense isn’t done only through public statements, effective leaders sometimes have to make such statements, because speech is part of how we communicate to one another what is at stake in the world around us.
When I was researching this issue, I went back to read some of the statements of Kingman Brewster, the President of Yale at a time when universities were in far more turmoil than even today, and who is widely celebrated for how he navigated these crises. If you have a moment, read the statement he released during the most volatile occasion in his tenure, on the eve of the trial in New Haven of nine members of the Black Panthers for murder. In it, he declares: “On the fundamental matter of the fact and feeling of justice in our own community, Yale cannot be neutral,” and that “whatever we do, none of us should be neutral in his commitment to a continuance of the struggle for decency and justice for all people.” He also said that he was “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.” The statement inspired tremendous backlash – including a speech by Vice President Spiro Agnew calling for his ouster. But Brewster did not resign. Instead, he defended the right of students and protestors from around the country to gather on campus at a tense but remarkably peaceful May Day rally.
Brewster was hardly himself a revolutionary. Yet it’s almost impossible to imagine a university President speaking with such conviction and clarity today. That’s not something to celebrate, even if it isn’t terribly surprising. The voices we need on campus will have to come from the rest of us. They’ll be stronger if they speak for a collective that also has the power to act on them. That’s why on our campus we’ve recently formed an AAUP chapter. I encourage all of you who can to start, or join, your own.
There’s a broader lesson here too. In this era of authoritarian threat, leaders of many of our institutions are going to see every reason to keep their heads down – even if that means abandoning smaller and weaker people and institutions to the wolves. The rest of us need to make our own collectives, cultivating the strength and conviction that comes from solidarity, allowing us to be brave in the face of risk. We’re going to need them.
