Universities Are Practicing Neutrality — Even Without Saying So

Some universities are backing away from political statements without formally adopting neutrality. Is that enough?

Many universities have debated whether to adopt institutional neutrality policies in the last two years, but a quieter trend might be emerging: some campuses are behaving as if they are committed to neutrality without ever explicitly saying so.

The University of Maryland, College Park is a useful case study. They don’t have an institutional neutrality policy (no Kalven-style policy, nor an institutional voice framework, nor a formal presidential commitment to neutrality). Instead, UMD has relied on existing free expression commitments and ad-hoc presidential encouragement to remain neutral on controversial matters. It’s worth noting that institutional neutrality is not the same as support for voluntary faculty speech, although they are complementary. This makes UMD an illustrative example of a campus that appears to be flirting with some form of institutional restraint without codifying it.

In previous years, UMD administrators issued overt political statements on national events. President Darryll Pines released a strongly worded proclamation in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, which explicitly framed the event in moral and political terms, and opined on the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol attack, describing the events as “violence, chaos, and dangerous disregard for the rule of law.”

This changed in 2024, when President Pines framed the administration’s role as protecting faculty & students’ speech, while refraining from taking political positions. In August 2024, he sent a message to campus emphasizing that “freedom of thought and expression are the lifeblood of our academic community,“ encouraging faculty, students, and staff to familiarize themselves with the university’s Statement on Free Speech Values and emphasizing that universities exist to allow diverse thoughts and disagreement. Since that point, official communications have shifted toward internal community support. For example, a 2025 message from President Pines and Provost Rice acknowledged that members of the campus community were experiencing hardship due to federal layoffs and reductions in SNAP benefits, encouraging people to support affected individuals and promoting resources such as the campus food pantry.

This kind of mission-connected speech, which focuses on internal community welfare rather than external political controversies, is explicitly permitted by many neutrality policies. It appears that the administration rarely issues moral or political proclamations in their general announcements and communications post-2024. They have avoided direct commentary on national or international politics, taking positions on controversial policy debates, and institutional endorsements of political causes. This aligns with the underlying logic of many formal neutrality policies: the university is a forum for debate, and the administration’s job is to protect the environment for that debate.

So, what effect has this had on UMD constituencies? I recently came across a statement written by a group of faculty members (including active HxA members) at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I worked previously as faculty for over a decade. The statement, “UMD must stand in solidarity with Iranian students [and] colleagues,” was published in the student-run Diamondback newspaper as an opinion piece. The authors, writing before the current U.S.-Israel attack on Iran began, noted “with deep alarm and concern reports of thousands of innocent Iranian civilians who have been massacred by the Iranian regime.”

To me, this opinion piece came across as an excellent illustration of what happens when voluntary groups of faculty members, rather than university administrators, make moral proclamations or political statements. This is exactly what institutional neutrality is designed to enable: the administration steps back from political proclamation, creating space for individual faculty and other members of the campus community to speak freely on matters within their expertise and moral concern. HxA’s Extraordinary U: The HxA Model of Statement Neutrality encourages institutional statement neutrality precisely for this purpose — constraining the institutional voice so that individual voices can flourish, knowing that this often happens in areas of significant disagreement (as is the case with Middle Eastern geopolitics).

With all of this information, UMD appears to operate under a kind of “informal institutional neutrality.” They generally refrain from using their institutional voice to take positions on contested social and political issues while simultaneously supporting free expression and encouraging political engagement by students and faculty. Practically, this approach resembles what would happen under a formal neutrality policy, despite not officially having one.

UMD is certainly not alone in operating this way. I’m speculating a bit here, but this approach may have arisen as many universities grappled with the fraught complications of taking public stances on controversial issues, realizing that they may have been doing more harm than good. Those universities which did adopt formal neutrality policies may have had some downstream, normative influence on other campuses (such as UMD) have not elected to adopt such policies.

But informal restraint is not the same as institutional neutrality. The problems with the informal approach are real and distinct, and they deserve to be named separately.

The first problem is that chilling effects persist. Without a clear, codified policy, students and faculty have no formal guarantee that dissent is protected. Many already keep silent on sociopolitical issues, even those who fall in the political majority on their campuses. Students often cite fear of administrative retaliation for their speech. An informal norm offers no reliable signal that speaking up is safe, but a formal policy would. Even though the faculty group at UMD spoke up about the war in Iran, there may be others on campus who are not yet comfortable doing so due to unclear policy. As FIRE recently showed, Middle Eastern geopolitics is a particularly fraught topic.

The second problem is that informal norms are impermanent. A behavioral pattern, however consistent, is only as durable as the people currently in charge. Norms can be broken, or changed, especially as a new President and Provost eventually take over with their own prerogatives. Such normative changes are more likely to happen in the absence of a clear policy. Institutional neutrality restrains not only the people who currently hold power, but also their successors. Without a codified policy, what looks like neutrality today could quickly give way to the same institution putting its thumb on campus speech tomorrow.

The third problem is that informality requires constant ad hoc judgment. Every time a contentious event occurs (a political crisis, a campus protest, a national controversy), university leaders operating without a policy must decide from scratch whether and how to respond. A formal neutrality policy streamlines that decision-making process, removing the pressure to improvise and reducing the risk of inconsistency or perceived bias. This is why HxA strongly advises colleges to formally adopt institutional neutrality. Such a policy would apply to all non-voluntary sub-units (including academic departments and programs) in addition to the university administration.

These three problems compound one another. Chilling effects can be worsened by impermanence (why speak up if the protection could evaporate?) and impermanence is worsened by ad-hoc decision making, since inconsistent responses erode trust in the norm itself. Codifying neutrality addresses all three at once.

If universities truly want to be the “home and sponsor of critics,” as the Kalven Report puts it, then practice alone is not enough. Neutrality must be made explicit and visible; otherwise, campuses like UMD will continue to flirt with neutrality without ever fully committing to the conditions that make open inquiry possible.

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