Your Cart is Empty
By Stuart Taylor, Jr., President of PFS
Since the University of Chicago paved the way in 1967 with its Kalven Committee Report, some 30 other American universities and colleges have followed suit by insisting on “institutional neutrality” on political and social issues, while also affirming their commitment to the academic freedom of faculty and students in the face of suppression from internal and/or external entities.
The case for institutional neutrality is a broadly shared perception that a university, college, president, dean, provost, or academic department should not take a public position on a political or social issue unless it threatens the very mission of the University and its value of free inquiry. The reason is that the effect could be to deter students and faculty members from expressing their own opinions lest they appear at odds with their institutions.
Campuses that have adopted the institutional neutrality principle include Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, the University of Texas System, Purdue, and Northwestern.
Princeton has not done so. And President Eisgruber has repeatedly rejected calls from groups, including Princetonians for Free Speech, that it adopt institutional neutrality.
In his May 27, 2025 Commencement address, Eisgruber detailed reasons, including this: “Some current-day proponents of the neutrality standard . . . appear to become uneasy when, for example, scholars expose and analyze the role of race, sexuality, or prejudice in society and politics.”
To the contrary, the institutional neutrality standard suggests no limit at all on what individual scholars or students can say or do. It calls for the institutions where they work to avoid taking collective positions lest they chill the freedoms of speech and thought of the scholars and students.
The chill is evidenced by, among other things, responses to our annual PFS surveys of Princeton students, the last of which shows that “52% of Princeton students would be somewhat or very uncomfortable expressing disagreement with a position that Princeton or their academic major’s department has publicly taken, with only 9% being very comfortable doing so.”
In addition, Eisgruber cites no standard to explain why or why not Princeton is taking a position.
As the Kalven Committee report said: “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. [It] cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives.”
In his Commencement address, Eisgruber also saidthat “though I agree with much that is said in the Kalven Report, I have never liked the language of ‘neutrality,’ partly because ‘neutral’ has multiple meanings,” with synonyms including“innocuous,” “unobjectionable,” “harmless,” “bland,” and “colorless.” He added: “‘Neutral’ can mean ‘impartial,’ which is a more precise way to capture what the Kalven Committee had in mind.”
So call it “institutional impartiality,” if you prefer. But please be clear that the principle would impose no limitation on what any individual scholar or student can say.
Comments will be approved before showing up.
Prestigious universities and leading state schools across the nation have embraced viewpoint diversity by building new institutions—civic education centers and the like—which are simultaneously on yet apart from the campus. Harvard has quietly taken a different tack. Over the past several months, the university’s top brass have been asking major donors for $10 million gifts to endow new professorships under the banner of “viewpoint diversity.” Provost John Manning, a scholar often associated with the conservative legal movement, has led the effort, aiming to place between 20 and 30 new faculty across schools and departments rather than siloed in a standalone institute.
Why Harvard would need additional funding for this is an open question, but putting that partly aside, we ought to ask what to make of this unique initiative. It stands a chance of being either the most consequential reform attempt in elite higher education this decade, or a sophisticated piece of reputation management serving double duty as a clever fundraiser. Which one it turns out to be depends on whether Harvard has thought carefully about what viewpoint diversity means, and whether it intends to execute in line with a considered answer.
Are some schools better at fostering intellectual diversity than others? The study clearly reveals that the most elite universities are among those with the least ideological diversity. Princeton is ranked 13 out of the 55 in the study, with its faculty slightly more ideologically diverse than, for instance, UC Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and Harvard, and slightly less diverse than Stanford, Cornell, UCLA or Georgetown.
There is little doubt that this study provides another opening for politicians and critics to attack higher education, perhaps in unfair ways. Princeton could help neutralize this by joining those reform-minded university leaders in the now burgeoning effort to regain the public’s trust in higher education.
A federal judge ruled last month that the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) termination of more than 1,400 grants in April 2025 had violated the Constitution on several counts. Princeton researchers await the effects of the verdict, which ordered that the NEH must rescind its termination notices.
