More Universities Are Choosing to Stay Neutral on the Biggest Issues

Instead of speaking out on the hot-button debates of the day, more schools are making it a policy to stay silent as political pressure mounts against higher education.

Just a few years ago, university statements on the day’s social and political issues abounded.

When Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, Harvard’s president at the time called it “senseless” and “deplorable,” and flew the invaded country’s flag in Harvard Yard. After George Floyd died under the knee of a white police officer, Cornell’s president said she was “sickened.” The University of Michigan’s president described the Oct. 7, 2023, violence against Israel as a “horrific attack by Hamas terrorists.”

But over the last year, each of those universities has adopted policies that limit official statements on current issues.

According to a new report released on Tuesday from the Heterodox Academy, a group that has been critical of progressive orthodoxy on college campuses, 148 colleges had adopted “institutional neutrality” policies by the end of 2024, a trend that underscores the scorching political scrutiny they are under. All but eight of those policies were adopted after the Hamas attack.

“We must open the way for our individual faculty’s expertise, intelligence, scholarship and wisdom to inform our state and society in their own voice, free from institutional interference,” said Mark Bernstein, a regent at Michigan, after adopting the policy in October.

He said the university had historically refrained from issuing statements on momentous events, like the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy or during the two world wars.