Mindful of the spring protests in 30 states — that led to the arrests of 3,100 students at 70 schools — it’s reasonable to be concerned about what may be coming as students return to campus in September. Recall that the protests and, particularly the encampments, brought increasing pressures on campus administrators, including a shocking attack on the presidents of four private institutions and three public universities, including New Jersey’s prominent public university, Rutgers.

There is an abiding sense that it’s not over, not with the war raging on in the Middle East, the war that prompted some of the most volatile campus protests in decades. Reportedly, student organizers are rethinking strategies, as are counter-protestors and college administrators.

One of the demands students repeatedly made — that the college or university take a position on the conflict at the heart of the protests — is critically important. Institutional neutrality, then, is the focus of this short essay.

The context

Proud of their past as the places where campus protests have led to positive academic and social change, colleges and universities hold out the promise that protest will not only be protected but that it will be championed.

Unsurprisingly, then, students pressed for a say in “the positions” of their institutions and promised, if they were denied, that the encampments would stay.

As it was, academic leaders were already trying to navigate on complex terrain as competing demands and pressures from donors, alumni, politicians and advocacy organizations intensified. Rules and policies proved inadequate as situations became fraught, some students expressed feeling threatened, allegations of antisemitism and Islamophobia surfaced, normal campus activities were interrupted; and, as noted, on some campuses, protestors were removed by force.

And, then, the presidents who were summoned to appear before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce faced a coordinated and expansive inquiry by its Republican members, subjecting them to barely veiled threats to the financial well-being and independence of their institutions and unrelenting questioning regarding their “positions” and plans for dealing with the campus strife.

The hearings are expected to continue. It’s an election year after all and higher education had already become a target of the GOP, and, so as “the inquiry” continues, it will add fuel to campus unrest.

The roots of institutional neutrality at Rutgers

Whether a college or university can actually have an opinion is doubtful, frankly, given the various constituencies that make up the institution. Nonetheless, leaders are pressed to take “a position,” forcing them into a no-win situation, becoming targets for one side or the other.

For Rutgers, though, turning to precedent can provide a decided advantage. During the height of the campus outrage in the1960s and ’70s, over American involvement in the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa, resistance to ROTC and other issues, Mason Welch Gross, the president of the university, together with the institution’s governing board, declined to take a “university position” but made it clear that individuals were free, indeed encouraged, if they wished, to express their own views.

In his commencement speech to the university on June 3, 1970, Gross said, “The university itself as an entity is not so constituted that it can take an official position on great public questions,” which would be limiting to those within its walls.

The university’s next president, Edward J. Bloustein, a lawyer and First Amendment scholar, took a similar position, while joining a group that was heading to Washington, D.C., to protest American involvement in the war, and, again, in 1985, joining protests against apartheid. Presidents Gross and Bloustein were also following the lead of the university’s board, agreeing that no institutional position would be taken, but no limit would be placed on the freedom to speak, as individuals, whether one is president or a first-year student.

While Jonathan Holloway, the current president of Rutgers University, has not been pressed on this point, he is fortunate to have clearly established university precedent to follow if he is.

Rutgers may be ahead of many of the nation’s higher education institutions in this regard but some are catching up, primarily aligning with a standard set by the University of Chicago, in 1967, with its adoption of the Kalven principles that endorsed institutional neutrality. The following quote from the “Kalven Committee Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action” sums up the thinking of the committee: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”

Harvard, under attack for its handling of campus protests, recently adopted recommendations of an eight-member group of faculty, to avoid taking positions on matters that are not relevant to the core functions of the university. The group’s chair, Professor Noah Feldman, observed that the university “shouldn’t have a foreign policy or a domestic policy.”

The university was urged to dramatically reduce its messages on issues of the day, to avoid the “risk of appearing to care more about some places and events than others and because few, if any, world events can be entirely isolated from conflicting viewpoints, issuing official empathy statements runs the risk of alienating some members of the community by expressing implicit solidarity with others.”

Student protestors seeking guidance on what demands can realistically be made would benefit knowing that an institution’s commitment cannot be given.

As I see it, this stance protects students as it frees them and others in the academic community to develop and articulate their own individual ideas and opinions unconstrained by an “institutional position.” An official position that did not reflect the views of all the institution’s constituents would be a threat to the integrity of those it did not include. As President Gross put it so well, “what is essential is that all members of the university must be free — free to dissent protest, agitate within the limits of civilized behavior.”

When causes ignite protests, and particularly, as today, in highly polarized political environments, we need to embrace, protect and support free expression, particularly within protests, conducted responsibly, that can reach the heart of society. And, we do so, in college communities, as individuals, or as collective voices, free of any official college or university “position.”