Should academic departments make political statements?

A few weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College posted a statement on its website supporting Palestinian resistance to “settler colonial war, occupation, and apartheid,” decrying Israel’s “horrific genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing,” and listing various educational resources for students. Two days later, college administrators “temporarily unpublish[ed]” the statement, claiming it violated Barnard’s policy prohibiting use of college resources for political activity.

When the department challenged that interpretation, Barnard rewrote its website governance and political activity policies, declaring its website the “sole property” of the college. It insisted that all content on the site “constitutes speech made by the college as an institution,” and prohibited use of any college resources, including email and letterhead, to “post political statements,” broadly defined.

The department then republished its statement on a private website and denounced Barnard’s “act of overt censorship.” The New York Civil Liberties Union challenged Barnard’s action as a violation of free speech and academic freedom.

Similar debates have played out on many college campuses over the past few years. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, hundreds of academic units, including at least 144 political science departments as well as departments in fields ranging from linguistics to agricultural science, issued statements condemning racism. In 2021, 160 academic departments at 120 colleges and universities criticized Israel’s handling of clashes with Hamas. Since the start of the Gaza war, dozens more issued or joined statements deploring Israel’s conduct.

At the same time, college and university leaders have come under increasing pressure to refrain from taking institutional positions on contested social and political issues. In the past year alone, roughly two dozen schools — including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Duke, Cornell and the University of Texas — adopted policies of institutional neutrality.

As the University of Chicago’s famed Kalven Committee explained in 1967, colleges and universities can best foster an environment of unfettered inquiry if they avoid taking positions on issues that do not directly relate to their mission and operations. A university “cannot insist that all of its members favor a given view of social policy” without effectively “censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted.”

The same rationale applies with even greater force to academic departments, where the risk that “voicing disagreement may jeopardize admission, grades, or advancement” is “especially acute,” particularly for untenured faculty, students, and staff, given the close “connections among individuals within those units.” At the same time, departments “are loci of specialized scholarly expertise and academic practice.” Department websites, as the NYCLU argued to Barnard’s president, “serve important scholarly and pedagogical functions” in addition to administrative tasks such as “informing students about the curriculum, course offerings, and academic requirements.”

Limiting departmental statements without infringing on the academic freedom that underpins university teaching and research presents daunting challenges as administrators try to decide what is and is not permitted. Even as Barnard administrators removed the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies’ statement of solidarity with Palestinians from the department’s homepage, they left up an earlier post expressing solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

The best way to square this circle is for administrators to make a compelling case for institutional neutrality while allowing some leeway to faculty. Meanwhile, faculty should recognize that there are occasions when free speech can best be protected and promoted by exercising discretion in testing its limits.

Some colleges and universities are aiming to find a middle ground. Dartmouth, for example, discourages political statements by academic units, but allows them “on matters where the expertise in scholarship and academic practice located in an academic unit is salient,” provided the unit lists the categories of those eligible to vote, the voting is anonymous, the vote tally is public, the statement appears on a page other than the department’s homepage and it includes “a clear disclaimer that the unit is not speaking for Dartmouth as a whole.” The University of California permits “discretionary statements” by departments on matters “that are not part of the day-to-day, term-to-term operations of the unit,” if they do not appear on the unit’s homepage and include procedural protections and disclaimers similar to Dartmouth’s.

Limiting political statements to issues of unit expertise makes sense, but departments often claim such expertise. Barnard’s Women’s Studies Department, for example, contends that its statement on Palestine drew “on the academic expertise” of its faculty, who “have written widely on the intersections of feminism with settler-colonialism, religion and violence.” In a statement issued after the murder of George Floyd, Princeton’s English department announced that “as critical readers of literary texts, we confront firsthand how these values [of racism and white supremacy] are created and defended.”

Procedural protections may mitigate the coercive signaling effects of departmental statements, but it would take a brave untenured faculty member or graduate student to vote against a statement strongly supported by senior faculty, especially in small departments where individual positions may surface despite anonymous voting. Similarly, removing statements from a department’s homepage may reduce their visibility in the broader community, but will do little to moderate the effect on dissenting voices within the department or help students feel comfortable expressing opposing views in class.

Although critics of departmental speech policies worry that they will chill protected speech, universities can and usually do remind faculty and students that they remain free to express their views individually or in groups.

Policies like those at Dartmouth and the University of California are steps in the right direction. At the very least, they clarify and help educate members of the community and the broader society on the risks posed by departmental statements on divisive political issues.

What’s really needed, however, is a shift in campus culture. Critics who attack the lack of viewpoint diversity on college campuses have a point, especially regarding the humanities and social sciences departments most likely to issue political statements. Partisan political statements are not likely to emerge from departments that are not ideologically monolithic. By fostering a culture in which a wide range of views is not simply tolerated but welcomed, colleges and universities can offer a better education to their students — and a less inviting target to their critics.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. David Wippman is emeritus president of Hamilton College.

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