Institutional Neutrality

The answer to the free speech crisis currently on college campuses

By: David Xiong

With the recent 2024 election that showed the colors of a divided nation of citizens, our country has entered an increasingly polarized era. In the aftermath of November’s election, Sunny Hostin, a co-host of The View, suggested that Kamala Harris voters should cut contact with pro-Trump family members over the holidays. Across college campuses, discussions of politically contentious topics have become fraught with the recent controversies surrounding campus confrontations over the Israel-Gaza conflict. Where does the principle of free speech fit into all of this tension? In many ways, the principle of the 1st amendment has become politically charged. What is the role of educators in this situation? How can colleges guarantee a safe environment for all students for free discourse? The answer comes in an unlikely form that some frequently meet with cynicism: institutional neutrality, the idea that institutions should pursue a path of minimal intervention in policing student speech.

Before understanding this proposed solution to the free speech conundrum on college campuses, one needs to understand the history of institutional neutrality. Institutional neutrality first developed in protests over the Vietnam War. In the 1960s, campus sit-ins and protests took off because of the US’s involvement in the war. In October 1963, at the University of Wisconsin, students protested the US military advisor’s support for South Vietnam’s authoritarian President Ngo Dinh Diem. As more protests erupted in 1966, and initiatives like the burn-your-draft-card movement at Cornell spread around, the University of Chicago was tasked with the question of whether to intervene in these protests or remain neutral and protect students’ rights to freedom of expression.

The university rightfully chose the latter with the adoption of the Kalven Report

1966. Instead of favoring adopting policies that would allow the university to make collective, blanket opinions on political and social issues, the policy allowed a forum of open discourse for students and faculty. As the report summarized, “The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic….[but] a community of scholars.” The university’s response was appropriate in the time of a contentious debate over Vietnam. This stance on free discourse has consistently benefited the university in the present day, as they have invited guest speakers from across the political spectrum, including Beto O’Rourke and Mike Pence. The university’s role has become to give students autonomy to critically think about issues and reach their own conclusions, and provide an environment for free discourse where opinions from a variety of perspectives are allowed.  

Regrettably, many universities have run counter to this principle by shutting down conservative speakers on college campuses. Ann Coulter at Cornell and Ian Howarth at SUNY Albany and Stanford Law School are just two examples of students shutting down controversial speakers on these campuses through heckling and administrative pressure. In the case of Coulter, student hecklers became so disruptive and aggressive that the event had to be cut short by 30 minutes. To be clear, many of the opinions such speakers advocate for can be divisive or even abhorrent. Yet, universities as institutions and student bodies must ask how shying away from opinions we disagree with creates opportunities for intellectual discourse. Shutting down a speaker is depriving others of the opportunity who may want to hear their perspective, presumably because they either identify themselves with the speaker’s viewpoint or even disagree with it. Peaceful protest to criticize and speak out against a speaker is permissible; violating the rights of others to hear that speaker’s opinion by effectively shutting down an event is not. Instead, students should engage in dialogue with the administration and the speaker directly. As Frederick Douglass once remarked, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.” Of course, the students had every right to protest speakers on campus, but they did not have the right to deprive others of hearing them.

The recent Israel-Gaza conflict has also shown the potential problems with institutional overreach. The widely criticized performances of three major university heads, Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of MIT, and Liz Magill of Upenn, at a congressional hearing in the past year, set off a wave of fury regarding the lack of concrete action taken against antisemitic conduct on college campuses. In this hearing, the university leaders failed to answer the simple question of whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s code of conduct. While their equivocation was problematic, subsequent administrative crackdowns on protests at major universities like Columbia University brought major questions: What is considered hateful speech? When does speech cross the line into violent and hateful rhetoric? Violent mobs supporting Hamas certainly did not qualify as free speech, but what other parts of pro-Palestinian rhetoric constituted threats to student’s safety and well-being? Though many actions, such as chants in favor of Hamas’s terrorist actions and calls for violence, certainly cross the line, more often than not, universities like Columbia engaged in vast overreach—that ended up doing more harm than good.

Indeed, more enforcement around campus speech brought more of these questions and heated debate. As Columbia tried to enforce crackdowns on protests, confrontations became even more violent. UC Berkeley Law Professor Erwin Chemerinsky criticized institutional overreach in regulating speech—even speech he may have found repugnant. To be clear, students who engage in hateful and violent actions that endanger the safety of others should be disciplined. Yet, in broadly endorsing free speech, Chemerinsky rightly stood up again for free academic discourse.

From these present developments, one hears a clearer picture of why institutional neutrality is the best choice in the short term. Regulating student speech is often counterproductive in fostering respectful discourse by creating more heated confrontations. To empower students to be critical thinkers in our ever-changing world, universities should take the path of minimal intervention when it comes to moderating student expression.