In the days after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Harvard University’s president declared that “we must use this moment to confront and remedy racial injustice.” The dean of its school of public health wrote to students, “Our community stands united in doing everything we can … to be agents of anti-racist social transformation.” Stanford University’s president emphasized “the shameful legacy of anti-Black racism and how it endures in our communities and our country,” while its medical school leadership wrote, “Collectively, we cannot breathe — not until meaningful change occurs.”
Colleges had been using current events as prompts to promote political causes for years, and the trend reached a crescendo in 2020. Harvard and Stanford joined universities across the country in throwing their full institutional weight behind the progressive racial movement sweeping the country.
But four years later, with campuses in turmoil over the war between Israel and Hamas, both universities have ruled such institutional advocacy out of bounds. A Harvard faculty report released last week and blessed by the university’s administration says: “The university’s leaders are hired for their skill in leading an institution of higher education, not their expertise in public affairs. When speaking in their official roles, therefore, they should restrict themselves to matters within their area of institutional expertise and responsibility: the running of a university.”
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Stanford’s faculty senate adopted a similar resolution: “When speaking for the institution, Stanford University leaders and administrators should not express an opinion on political and social controversies, unless these matters directly affect the mission of the university or implicate its legal obligations.”
In other words, Stanford and Harvard now want to assume a position of culture-war neutrality, with narrowly defined exceptions. On paper, this is a welcome turn away from institutional grandstanding and toward the academic mission. But cynics have to ask if the emerging consensus is permanent — or if it is itself a stance of convenience that will shatter on contact with the next all-consuming progressive social movement.
It’s telling that the official turn toward neutrality is coming amid the ructions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Support for Israel, broadly speaking, is not a topic that divides liberals and conservatives so much as a topic that unites conservatives and divides liberals among themselves. Elite university leaders answer to primarily liberal stakeholders, including activist student organizations and left-leaning faculty, though alumni are probably more politically mixed.
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Institutional statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of the kind university leaders had been offering about other issues — almost always on the progressive side — thus tend to fracture and inflame university politics. Meanwhile, pro-choice statements, or statements in favor of gay or transgender rights, for example, are likely to meet pushback mainly from outside academia. University presidents are inevitably political, and it is in their interest to avoid creating friction within their base (as Israel-Gaza does) and to instead unify it against perceived external threats (as issues like Black Lives Matter do).
The pivot is not all about the Middle East. After all, corporate executives began shedding the overt progressive commitments they had accumulated in the previous years before the Oct. 7 attacks. And Stanford foreshadowed its new policy in March last year. After progressive law students shouted down a conservative federal judge attempting to give a talk, the law school dean (who is now provost) released a statement rebuffing students who expected the administration to condemn the judge’s views: “Our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is not going to take the form of having the school administration announce institutional positions on a wide range of current social and political issues,” she wrote.
Still, it’s clear that the fallout from Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza has made the case for institutional neutrality in higher education seem more urgent. Controversy over the war has contributed to the resignations of two Ivy League presidents, campus protests and new free-speech dilemmas. For universities navigating this political environment, liberal neutrality might seem principled, yes, but also appealing as a matter of self-preservation.
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In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, by contrast, instincts for self-preservation among university leaders cut the other way. At the time, the condemnations of racism and calls for progressive change probably didn’t even seem political, per se. They were universally shared in the academic community.
And the commendable statements Harvard and Stanford adopted contain an escape hatch that university leaders can exploit the next time they feel compelled to make political calls to action. The statements rightly allow that leaders must defend the university’s “core function” (Harvard) or “the mission of the university” (Stanford). Elite universities are rarefied microcosms of American society, so they are affected not only directly by issues such as taxes on endowments but also indirectly by issues including race relations and the war in the Middle East. If an issue seems important enough, deans and presidents could decide it is core to the university’s mission.
If anything good comes of the campus fight over Israel, it might be that universities realize cause-based political advocacy in service of identity groups is an institutional dead end. But principles aren’t ratified when they are convenient to announce. They are ratified when implementing them entails risk and requires courage. If there is another Trump administration, a widespread sense of crisis will return to liberal institutions, and Harvard’s and Stanford’s beautiful commitments to liberal neutrality will become inconvenient very quickly.
