Institutional Neutrality Is Not Censorship

PEN America’s inclusion of institutional neutrality in their censorship report is a mistake

PEN America’s new report, America’s Censored Campuses, sets out to document real and growing threats to free expression in higher education after a banner year for legislative control over universities. While such tracking and reporting is vitally important, in its effort to map the landscape of campus speech restrictions, the report makes a fundamental mistake: it classifies institutional neutrality as a form of censorship.

This is not a minor disagreement over policy preferences. It is a conceptual error that risks weakening the very cause PEN America seeks to defend.

PEN America defines institutional neutrality in its report as “provisions that prohibit academic institutions or their subsidiary parts (e.g. academic departments) from adopting or expressing views on an issue or set of issues.” This is grouped under “Indirect Forms of Educational Censorship,” defined as state-level measures that “erode academic freedom and institutional autonomy,” and which “undermine their ability to fulfill their institutional missions free from political interference.” But institutional neutrality, properly understood, does neither of these things. In fact, institutional neutrality is one of the most effective tools universities have for protecting free expression in extremely polarized times.

At Heterodox Academy, institutional neutrality is a central component of our Open Inquiry U vision for universities, and is a critical policy for fostering free expression on campus. Neutrality does not silence members of the university community, and it is certainly not censorship. It is instead restraint only by those who wield institutional authority and speak as representatives of their university in their positions to speak on only matters that are directly related to their university mission. As we put it, an extraordinary university “does not take official positions on the political and social issues of the day, except where doing so is necessary to fulfill its core academic mission.” The reason is simple: universities exist to foster inquiry, not to settle contested social, political, or moral issues on behalf of the members of their campus.

When a university, senior administrator, or a department issues an official moral or political declaration, they do not speak as a lone participant; they speak with authority. And presidents who are critical of institutional neutrality, in fact, know this. In public statements against the policy, they claim “moral clarity, comfort, direction and leadership are required of a university president.” Some critics will object that neutrality amounts to “cowardice” at the hands of universities in moments of moral urgency. But universities are not moral actors in the same way individuals are. They are complex communities composed of people who profoundly disagree.

Although leaders have a well-intentioned compulsion to morally lead their communities, often the result is instead an environment in which dissenting students, faculty, or other campus members feel less free to speak up. As HxA’s institutional neutrality model emphasizes, “The university best serves society not by declaring moral verdicts, but by ensuring that moral, political, and scientific claims can be rigorously examined.” Institutional speech that forecloses debate in the name of urgency ultimately undermines that purpose.

Institutional neutrality is designed to prevent exactly this dynamic. By declining to assert authoritative viewpoints on contested issues, institutions and their leaders create the conditions under which constructive disagreement is welcomed and intellectual risk-taking is less costly.

Lumping institutional neutrality with other true censorship acts such as topic bans in classrooms, a free expression policy is touted as if it were indistinguishable from state censorship, as though a university choosing not to speak is equivalent to a politician deciding what may not be said. That collapses a crucial distinction.

There is an obvious difference between a government dictating orthodoxy and an institution choosing not to impose one. The former is censorship. The latter is institutional humility.

To be sure, neutrality can be abused or implemented poorly. As institutional neutrality becomes increasingly normative across major universities, growing pains are inevitable and it’s important that missteps are called out.

In an ideal world, institutional neutrality as a policy would be implemented solely as an internal effort led by the institution itself, which is the case in many instances. There are many state legislatures who have in fact imposed this policy on their state institutions, however. A state legislature can cynically impose “neutrality” rules as a way to control outcomes, punish disfavored viewpoints, or intimidate universities. That is a real danger, and PEN America is right to oppose this type of political interference in higher education. But that is an argument against inappropriate state control of individual free expression and academic freedom, not against institutional neutrality as a principle. Treating neutrality itself as censorship misidentifies the problem.

There is also a practical irony in putting institutional neutrality into the censorship bucket: universities that routinely issue political pronouncements make themselves look like partisan actors, inviting backlash and external control that results in actual censorship of individual expression. Neutral institutions, by contrast, are better positioned to say — credibly — that their mission is inquiry, not advocacy. That credibility is a real bulwark against the “web of control” PEN America rightly fears.

Defending free expression requires conceptual clarity. Lumping institutional neutrality together with censorship blurs the line between coercion and restraint, between silencing individuals and institutions declining to speak with authority. It weakens opposition to genuine viewpoint suppression and undermines a proven strategy for sustaining open inquiry.

Institutional neutrality is not censorship. It is a recognition that authority chills dissent, and that the university’s greatest contribution to a free society is not telling people what to think — but protecting their ability to think, speak, and disagree for themselves.