Having gotten tangled up with campus protests demanding that they take political stands and divest from Israel (something which we entirely disagree with) some big-name universities are adopting positions of institutional neutrality. Harvard took the plunge Tuesday, following in the footsteps of Stanford and Northwestern.
The pure version of this principle, adopted by the University of Chicago decades ago, is that an administration will keep its mouth shut on social and political controversies. Harvard’s slightly diluted permutation is to keep quiet on issues that don’t directly “directly affect the university’s core function” — but to reserve the right to speak out about, say, a proposal to tax university endowments or ban certain types of research.
There’s no question universities have stumbled in the wake of Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel and Israel’s fierce military response, which has unleashed waves of protest and encampments on campuses across America, including some real incidents of nasty antisemitism.
In recent years, college administrations have increasingly stepped into social debates, issuing statements on Black Lives Matter, gun control, abortion rights, transgender identity and other issues. But when a massive rhetorical war in the Mideast fell in their laps, sharply dividing their own campuses, some tried to stay out of it — but it was too late.
They couldn’t duck when taking a stand became difficult. So they twisted themselves to issue carefully calibrated statements about Hamas’ unacceptable terrorism and Israel’s response, inevitably pleasing no one and fueling anger. And then when some of the anti-Israel rhetoric leached into antisemitism, putting Jewish students on guard, they were slow to tag it as unacceptable hate speech.
As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has correctly pointed out, faculty and students have expansive rights to take political positions, rights that must be consistently protected. When an institution takes a formal stand, it puts a big thumb on the scale of debate. The University of Chicago realized that long ago.
So we welcome the general shift — but think a commitment to stand on the sidelines is far easier made in principle than executed in practice.
Harvard, like many other universities, has an endowment with investment in businesses that operate all over the world. That gives protesters hooks to demand divestment from companies seen to be destroying the planet or running roughshod over workers or seeming to further the aims of governments committing human rights abuses.
In the heat of 1980s anti-apartheid pressure campaigns urging divestment from South Africa, appeals to neutrality would’ve understandably sounded like cynical attempts to evade moral responsibility. Today, divestment campaigns inspired are pushing universities to make a hard break with the gun industry. Is institutional neutrality a get-out-of-accountability-free card?
Local examples make the complexities even clearer. NYU has a campus in Abu Dhabi and another in Shanghai. On Roosevelt Island, Cornell has a partnership with Israel’s Technion Institute of Technology. Columbia has built global centers in Amman, Istanbul, Beijing, Tel Aviv and elsewhere. While universities may not wish to have foreign policies, many positions taken by these governments, or by the United States in the world, may force the academic institutions into tough spots.
