Harvard said Tuesday it will no longer take positions on issues not “relevant to the core mission of the university,” accepting recommendations from a faculty committee that urged the university to drastically reduce its reporting on current affairs.
If put into practice, Harvard would no longer issue official statements of empathy, as it did, for example, for Ukraine after the Russian invasion and for the victims of the October 7 Hamas attacks in Israel.
“By issuing official statements of empathy, the university risks appearing as if it cares more about certain places and events than others,” the report said. “And because few, if any, world events can be completely isolated from conflicting viewpoints, issuing official statements of empathy risks alienating some community members by expressing implicit solidarity with others.”
The university’s Institutional Voice Working Group, consisting of eight faculty members, published the report with a set of principles and a recommended path forward. The board and the board of directors agreed to this.
“Harvard is not a government,” Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor and co-chair of the committee that developed the recommendations, said in an interview with The Harvard Gazettereleased Tuesday as part of the university’s announcement. “It should have no foreign policy or domestic policy.”
However, the report did not fully embrace “institutional neutrality” — a principle promoted by the University of Chicago, in which universities commit to staying out of political and social issues. Some universities, including Stanford University and Northwestern, announced they would adopt the policy shortly after the Hamas attack.
Mr Feldman said that while the recommendations had some overlap with institutional neutrality, there were also differences.
A key difference, Mr. Feldman told The Gazette, is that “as a values-based institution, we have a responsibility to advance our core function as an educational institution and to defend ourselves against forces that seek to undermine our academic values. In that sense, we are not neutral, nor can we be.”
In an interview, Mr. Feldman gave examples of when Harvard should get involved in political issues. He mentioned a proposal by former President Donald J. Trump to raise “billions and billions of dollars” by taxing large private university endowments. Advocating such a plan, he said, “would be entirely within the function of the university.”
Mr. Feldman also noted that Harvard advocated for affirmative action in the courts, and that its admissions policy “would count as a core function of the university.”
Tom Ginsburg, faculty director of the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression at the University of Chicago, said none of these examples conflict with Chicago’s stance on neutrality. Still, he said, he supported Harvard’s new position.
One of the first sentences in the Harvard report states that the university is not institutionally neutral, but the rest of the report describes its commitment to institutional neutrality, Mr. Ginsburg said.
“Their policies seem to be converging in the direction that many other schools have gone,” Mr. Ginsburg said. “But they don’t want to admit that.”
One reason for that, Mr. Ginsburg said, is that some parts of the academy view neutrality as a misleading term, with many believing that silence itself takes a stand. Others consider it an impossibility.
“There is no such thing as institutional neutrality,” Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, said Tuesday. “Those who claim they will comply find a multitude of fallback positions saying, ‘but not in this case.’ When it comes to matters of political relevance, universities will do what they have always done. Institutional neutrality is a false flag.”
For years, universities have reported, mostly without controversy, on a range of global and local events, from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to racism at home. But perhaps unlike any other issue, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has divided academic communities and highlighted the harms of such statements on highly contentious topics.
Harvard has faced fierce criticism for the way the university communicated following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7.
According to some critics, such as former university president Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard was woefully slow to condemn a pro-Palestinian letter from a student coalition that “held the Israeli regime fully responsible for the unfolding violence.” Dr. Summers suggested that the void left by Harvard’s slow response had allowed the student’s statement to stand in some people’s minds as the university’s official position.
After then-Harvard President Claudine Gay issued a series of statements, including one condemning “Hamas’ terrorist atrocities,” calling them “horrific,” the administration was accused of capitulating to influential alumni and wealthy donors. She eventually resigned, in part over her handling of protests over the war between Israel and Hamas.
Mr Feldman said the transition would not be easy. It would take a culture change before people inside and outside the university would accept that “the university really has a ‘say less’ policy,” he told The Gazette.
Susan C. Beachy contributed to research.
