Is Institutional Neutrality Censorship by Another Name?
A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education claims it is. Spoiler alert: It's not.
Bradford Vivian, a professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, recently published an essay in The Chronicle with the intriguing title Institutional Neutrality Is Censorship By Another Name. In this essay, Vivian makes the counterintuitive claim that, by adopting a policy of institutional neutrality, and therefore by NOT speaking on behalf of all faculty, universities are censoring the rights of faculty to express their own opinions (even though faculty, as individuals, DO have those rights). This seems, on the surface at least, like somewhat of an “up is down”, contrary-to-logic kind of argument, since one of the arguments FOR institutional neutrality is that the policy does NOT chill speech on controversial topics by individual faculty. But Vivian IS a professor, so he’s presumably very smart. So let’s take a look at exactly what he’s saying.
BTW — in this posting, I won’t be presenting Vivian’s entire essay. Instead, I’ll cherry pick parts of the essay to comment on, while trying not to misrepresent Vivian’s arguments. And let me first note that, in general, I thought this was one of the (and perhaps THE) most infuriating articles I’ve ever read in The Chronicle. While putting forward a flawed and weak argument against institutional neutrality, Vivian denigrates all who disagree with him, imputes (without possessing any direct evidence) ill and/or shallow motives to organizations that support institutional neutrality, and repeatedly fails to draw the simple but necessary distinction between university policies that are directly related to the university’s core mission/function and the adoption by the university of a political stance related to world situations and events that have no direct bearing on the operation of the institution. While the article was published as an “opinion” piece, it nonetheless fails to meet even the most minimal of standards of evidence-based scholarship that should be required for even “opinion” articles printed in The Chronicle.
OK – now that you know what my general take on the article is — on to the article itself. As usual — quotes are in italics, with my comments in standard font.
Institutional Neutrality Is Censorship by Another Name
By Bradford Vivian February 12, 2025
… neutrality is a historically recent invention predominantly absent from the history of U.S. higher education. In fact, the historical norm has been that college administrations, as part of their academic missions, take a stand for various causes.
Oberlin College made history by admitting Black and female students as early as the 1830s. In the late 1850s, the founders of Berea College declared that it was “opposed to Sectarianism, Slaveholding, Caste, and every other wrong institution.” The co-founders of Cornell University, Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, dedicated their institution, in 1867, “to creating a university that was open to all individuals, regardless of race or gender,” as Cornell’s website puts it now. As Ezra Cornell said at the time, “I want to have girls educated in the university as well as boys, so that they may have the same opportunity to become wise and useful to society.” In 1873, the trustees of the University of South Carolina called their university “the common property of all our citizens without distinction of race.”
What Vivian seems to be suggesting here is that, had these universities adopted a policy of institutional neutrality, they would not have admitted females or racial minorities. But that simply is not necessarily true. What Vivian is doing here is conflating a university’s own policies with the appropriateness of the university taking a stand on controversial issues that have little or nothing to do with the functioning of the university itself – reflecting a lack of understanding by Vivian of the distinction between within-university policies and statements that the university might make regarding controversial world events.
The University of Chicago issued its oft-cited Kalven Report at this time [during the political upheavals on campuses in the 1960s]. This statement, which a faculty committee chaired by legal scholar Harry Kalven Jr. issued in 1967, ostensibly affirmed “the neutrality of the university” concerning “political and social action” among the upheavals of the civil-rights era, the anti-apartheid movement, and mass protests over the Vietnam War.
Pundits, think tanks, and politicians today fetishize the Kalven Report, promoting it as an obligatory policy doctrine. They argue that colleges should refuse to issue public comments or adopt policies construable as “political statements” in deference to a single faculty-committee report from 1967.
So — according to Vivian, those who support institutional neutrality don’t do so for principled reasons. Instead, they “fetishize” the Kalven Report (what a nice descriptor to use!), and oppose universities making statements about, for example, Israel’s sabotaging of Hezbollah’s pagers or the riots that occurred during the George Floyd protests “in deference to a single faculty-committee report from 1967". Wow. Vivian’s dismissal of the possibility that current supporters of institutional neutrality might have actually thought about the issue — is not just lacking in generosity and respect but deeply and unfairly and gratuitously insulting. Whatever the merits of his own arguments, it speaks poorly of him that he would write this way about those who do not share his perspective.
This interpretation of the Kalven Report belies an obvious fact: It was a political statement. It participated in protracted debate among other universities over how to deal with timely controversies involving educational institutions.
So? Vivian seems to be arguing here that institutional neutrality is not just wrong, it is actually a logically incoherent position for a university to take – which would be news to all those universities that have adopted the policy, including the U. of Chicago, which has followed the policy for more than 50 years. And again, Vivian is failing to acknowledge the fundamental distinction between universities’ policies related to their own operation and university statements regarding unrelated world events and situations.
In recent years, the hyperpartisan Goldwater Institute has amplified the reputation of the Kalven Report as an allegedly singular and authoritative rationale for institutional neutrality. In doing so, it has helped catalyze a movement to pressure colleges to adopt a censorial definition of neutrality that threatens both First Amendment rights and academic freedom.
The institute’s rationale for institutional neutrality was partisan code crafted in response to heightened student activism on campuses, much of it aligned with various causes for social justice, racial equality, and institutional accountability for past discriminatory policies.
Counter-speech — protest and criticism of others’ speech — is just as legitimate an expression of First Amendment liberties as any other. Yet the Goldwater Institute draft legislation outlined arbitrary and punitive measures for what it deceptively described as “interference with the free-speech rights of others” on campuses — a strategically vague standard that could include historically protected expressions of protest and dissent on college grounds.
Vivian’s discussion here of the Goldwater Institute report is infuriating for a couple of reasons. First, because a university could adopt a policy of institutional neutrality without enshrining into their own internal legislation a copy of the institute’s recommendations. And secondly – because Vivian is grossly mischaracterizing the Goldwater Institute report itself. THIS is what the Goldwater Institute report actually recommends:
The model legislation presented and explained in this brief does several things:
It creates an official university policy that strongly affirms the importance of free expression, nullifying any existing restrictive speech codes in the process.
It prevents administrators from disinviting speakers, no matter how controversial, from whom members of the campus community wish to hear.
It establishes a system of disciplinary sanctions for anyone who interferes with the free-speech rights of others.
It allows persons whose free-speech rights have been infringed by the university to recover court costs and attorneys fees.
It reaffirms the principle that universities, at the official institutional level, ought to remain neutral on issues of public controversy to encourage the widest possible range of opinion and dialogue within the university itself.
It ensures that students will be informed of the official policy on free expression.
It authorizes a special subcommittee of the university board of trustees to issue a yearly report to the public on the administrative handling of free-speech issues.
It requires security fees for invited speakers to be reasonable, and not based on the content of speech. The university may restrict the use of University facilities to invited individuals.
Contrary to Vivian’s characterization of the report, the Institute’s proposed “model legislation” is NOT directed at criticisms of other’s speech per se. Rather, it’s directed at clear attempts to silence the speech of others. Any fair reading of the proposals makes clear that the goal of the proposed legislation is to ENCOURAGE free speech on campus, while protecting the rights of those who hold opposing views on an issue to all have the right to express their views — and to protect the rights of those who want to LISTEN to a particular speaker to be able to do so. And the Goldwater Institute report is not being DECEPTIVE when it recommends punitive measures for what it describes as actions involving “interference with the free speech rights of others” – unless one believes that cancelling speakers, and blocking the entrance to speaking events, and chanting loudly to drown out what a speaker is saying (thereby robbing others of the right to hear what the speaker is saying) are nothing more than forms of “counter speech” that should be permissible on campus. (And as a side note — I’m confident that if those kinds of speech-suppression actions were taken AGAINST speakers whose views Vivian AGREES with, that Vivian would not be willing to characterize those kinds of actions as nothing more than permissible “counter speech”).
Also note again that although Vivian claims to be discussing institutional neutrality, the Goldwater Institute’s report lists support for neutrality as just one of eight of its recommendations. If Vivian wanted to present a well-reasoned argument against institutional neutrality, he could have, and should have, done so without taking this detour into discussing a separate issue – protests on college campuses.
Think tanks that advocate institutional neutrality based on these pretexts are among the least credible advocates for fair and nonpartisan academic policies. Organizations like the Goldwater Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and AEI do not directly represent either professional educators or publicly funded schools. The same is true of FIRE and Heterodox Academy. Wealthy private interests overwhelmingly fund these groups; they operate to advance their donors’ political goals, not the civic goods of publicly funded education.
WTF. So now Vivian is arguing against institutional neutrality on the grounds that some organizations that he doesn’t like support it. Vivian obviously knows almost nothing about FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression). FIRE is now THE leading first-amendment-defending organization in the country, and for Vivian to claim that FIRE operates primarily solely to advance its donors’ political goals is patently both ignorant and defamatory. And make no mistake about it – nothing that Vivian has written in this paragraph is a logical argument against institutional neutrality. Nothing. Penn State should be embarrassed that one of its professors of Communication Arts and Sciences would argue in as shamefully unscholarly a manner as this.
The Goldwater Institute’s campus speech draft legislation mirrored the Kalven Report in claiming that institutional neutrality encourages open dialogue and freer expression on contentious issues. But the opposite has proven true. College administrations that hew to the ideal of institutional neutrality have, to chilling effect, instructed faculty to self-monitor their teaching and adjust their curriculums in “viewpoint neutral” ways. For example, in November of 2023 the University of California president, Michael V. Drake, announced generously funded programs to develop “viewpoint neutral” understandings of “the Middle East” and related issues of “anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.”
For this claim, Vivian gives one “example” – which involves a university president funding a program to support teaching about the Middle East in a balanced, rather than ideologically biased, manner. Of course, that has nothing to do with the principle of institutional neutrality, since the example relates to features of the campus curriculum rather than having anything to do with making statements about events external to the university. Apparently, Vivian thinks that open dialogue and free expression on contentious issues can only occur on campus if there are no courses that present history in as balanced a manner as possible. Very odd – and in any case, irrelevant to the question of a university policy of institutional neutrality regarding taking political stands on controversial issues.
Institutions of higher education should stand for something: freely chosen and meritorious academic missions, values, and priorities. They should not reactively dilute their policies and curricula under external partisan pressures. If their missions prove to be misguided, then the best remedy (as per the classic dictum) is more speech and deliberation — more good-faith criticism and reflection among learning communities — not a retreat from constructive political and social action into the vagaries of “neutrality.”
Again, Vivian is denying even the possibility that a policy of institutional neutrality could be based upon principles related to the purpose of the university combined with a desire to avoid the clearly unethical practice of a university president speaking on behalf of the institution’s faculty while voicing an opinion not supported by some within that community. Adopting a policy of institutional neutrality is certainly not a retreat from constructive political and social action; it instead properly locates those actions at the level of individual faculty without the administration speaking for them.
OK — so you might have sensed that I did not find Vivian’s arguments against institutional neutrality compelling. In that case — what about the third article on the topic recently published in The Chronicle? I’ll turn my attention to that article next.
Bradford Vivian wrote:
Institutions of higher education should stand for something: freely chosen and meritorious academic missions, values, and priorities. They should not reactively dilute their policies and curricula under external partisan pressures. If their missions prove to be misguided, then the best remedy (as per the classic dictum) is more speech and deliberation — more good-faith criticism and reflection among learning communities — not a retreat from constructive political and social action into the vagaries of “neutrality.”
Given that Vivian is a professor at a PUBLIC university, he should ask himself what do taxpayers want from universities. They pay a big chunk of his salary. I'm pretty sure they want universities to be focused on the traditional academic missions of teaching and research, to the exclusion of professors furthering their own political goals using the resources of their employers.