A troubling pattern has emerged on American campuses: Administrators misapplying institutional neutrality policies in ways that silence the very expression the policies were designed to protect.
Institutional neutrality as a guiding principle for American universities appears to be undergoing a renaissance. Leading universities like Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford and Vanderbilt Universities have lately embraced versions of it. The core idea is that universities should not take public positions on partisan or controversial issues unless there is a direct and palpable impact on the university and its students, staff and faculty. Institutional neutrality has genuine value, but its success depends entirely on clarity about who is actually speaking for the institution.
Recent events suggest such clarity is often lacking. At Cape Fear Community College, officials demanded a “No Kings” slogan be painted over on a student theater set. At the University of Utah, a student organizer was told to scrub language about climate change from an Earth Day flier. At Purdue University, the institution severed ties with its student newspaper. In each case, administrators invoked neutrality to justify student censorship. And in each case, administrators misunderstood what neutrality governs.
Students do not speak for their universities merely because they speak on campus, or even because they are part of an official student group. And therefore none of these actors wields the institutional voice that neutrality policies are designed to govern.
The problem is not neutrality itself, but the failure to define its scope. When universities fail to define what institutional speech actually is and who is authorized to speak for the institution, well-meaning administrators fill the vacuum with their own judgment, often badly. The result is that ordinary student and faculty expression gets treated as though it were official university speech.
Universities have always been places where disagreement thrives and where debate is the point. That mission depends on protecting individual expression, especially in moments of genuine controversy. Getting institutional neutrality wrong strikes at the heart of what a university is for. This makes clarity essential. Other recent controversies show what happens when universities lack those clear guidelines.
Consider what happened at the University of Michigan earlier this month: The Faculty Senate chair went off script at commencement to praise pro-Palestinian student protesters, setting off an immediate firestorm. University president Domenico Grasso responded, apologizing, that same day. The remarks, he said, were “inappropriate and do not represent our institutional position.” (The Faculty Senate chair, for his part, has disputed that he deviated from the approved text of the speech in a meaningful way.)
Some of the pushback from faculty that followed argued that the administration had no business disavowing a colleague’s personal speech—and that, by doing so, the president violated principles of institutional neutrality. That misses a critical distinction: A university commencement is not an open forum. The institution plans it, controls its content, selects its speakers and reviews remarks in advance. A faculty member who goes off script in that setting is not exercising personal academic freedom; they are commandeering an official university platform in front of a captive audience. The university was well within its authority to clarify that the Faculty Senate chair’s remarks did not represent its position. What Michigan lacked was not the right to respond, but a clear written policy that would have prevented the confusion in the first place.
The Michigan incident showed the confusion created by unclear boundaries. Another recent controversy at the University of California, Los Angeles, presented a different question: When should the institution itself speak?
When the Undergraduate Students Association Council, which claims to represent UCLA’s 29,000 undergraduate students, denounced an on-campus event with Omer Shem Tov, a former Oct. 7 hostage, university leadership did not invoke neutrality as a shield. It spoke up.
In a statement, the university said, “The condemnation of such a peaceful event to share a story of resilience in the face of extreme suffering is antithetical to the values of our Bruin community.” UC regent Jay Sures spoke for many in the campus community when he argued that student leaders would have benefited from hearing Shem Tov’s perspective, rather than dismissing it outright. UCLA leadership deserves credit for recognizing that neutrality does not require institutional silence in every circumstance. This is precisely the kind of moment when the campus community needs to hear its leaders affirm shared institutional values.
The UCLA and Michigan cases together illustrate a principle too often lost in debates about institutional neutrality: The policy governs what the institution says, not what students and faculty say. When those lines blur, something has gone wrong. And when universities fail to define those boundaries in advance, confusion becomes inevitable.
Some cases are clear: Universities should take positions on Pell Grants, student safety or threats to academic freedom. Others are not—foreign wars, reproductive rights, police violence: These are all areas where reasonable people disagree and the risk of institutional overreach is real. What matters is that the lines are drawn deliberately, not by default.
The central question is not whether universities may ever speak on controversial issues. It is who has authority to speak for the institution when they do. And the answer should govern the policy’s reach.
During my time as president of the University of California, I was frequently criticized for speaking out against campus antisemitism on the grounds that doing so could chill dissenting views. To this I’d respond that moments of crisis are precisely when campus leaders should weigh in to reinforce institutional values and serve as a moral compass for the campus community.
However, that responsibility must be clearly assigned. Departments at many universities have taken sides in the Gaza war, condemning Israel, sponsoring one-sided anti-Israel speakers or events, implicitly excluding dissenting viewpoints and refusing to hire or promote Zionists. When a department posts a statement on a matter of public concern on its official website, it strongly suggests that it is making an official statement, distinct from the constitutionally protected speech rights of individuals and private associations.
I’d prefer that departments be prohibited from making such statements. But what’s most important are clear guidelines.
In my view, the president, the Board of Regents or both should be responsible for official university pronouncements. As a matter of institutional policy, individual professors, centers, departments and college deans should not speak for the entire university. Dartmouth and the University of California have adopted this standard: Dartmouth, for example, stipulates that the only “recognized institutional spokespeople” are its Board of Trustees, as well as one of a small number of senior leaders (or their designees): the president, provost, senior vice president for communications, director of media relations and the general counsel.
And the University of California policy identifies a set of standards that statements from departmental and other academic units must meet, including the requirement that they “be accompanied by a disclaimer expressly stating that the statement should not be taken as a position of the University, or the campus, as a whole.”
Few, if any, universities formally authorize departments to speak on behalf of the institution, though many quietly permit it in practice. The same principles apply to students: A student government resolution or a campus production is not the institution speaking. Campuses should clearly specify when departments and other campus entities may speak for the entire university, and those rules should be written down, not implied.
For public universities, there are no significant First Amendment issues regarding official speech. The government itself gets to decide who speaks for it and what to say. For private colleges, their boards and presidents should decide, and the government should stay out of it. The First Amendment rights of a private entity are quite extensive. But as a matter of institutional governance, they must determine who speaks for them and enforce those decisions consistently.
None of this works without explicit rules. University leaders owe their communities explicit, written guidance on what institutional neutrality means in practice. That means designating a specific person or body—such as the president, the board or both—as the sole legitimate institutional voice, and making clear that everyone else, from departments to student councils to Faculty Senate chairs, speaks only for themselves. This is the first thing universities owe their communities. Without those distinctions, neutrality becomes not a safeguard for free expression, but a rationale for suppressing it.
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