The 2023-24 academic year was one of the most tumultuous years for American higher education in recent history. As anti-war protests swept across college campuses following the outbreak of war in Gaza, American colleges experienced a long overdue reckoning with their identities. The ensuing Republican-led congressional hearings on antisemitism and their dramatic aftermath exposed a fundamental weakness in higher education’s foundation: institutions that for decades proclaimed themselves bastions of both free expression and emotional safety now found themselves unable to coherently defend either.
The Gaza protests and subsequent political fallout have been a high-profile example of a years-long struggle at the heart of higher education. Over the past decade, universities have increasingly fallen under pressure to take stances on various social and political issues. As this shift in campus culture took hold, faculty and students have felt the need to align themselves with their institution’s expanding set of stated values. The resulting monoculture has fundamentally altered how freely members of university communities feel they can speak, teach and explore ideas — those who question the prevailing wisdom often find themselves isolated or exposed to other consequences.
The Scholars Under Fire report issued by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) offers a sobering look at the consequences of this shift. From 2000 to 2022, there were 1,080 documented attempts nationwide to sanction scholars for constitutionally protected speech. Nearly two-thirds of these attempts resulted in some form of sanction. In 2023, 91% of professors reported that they would likely self-censor due to their university’s political climate, compared to 9% during America’s Second Red Scare. FIRE also observed 156 attempts at canceling speakers on college campuses, the highest recorded number in American history.
This chilling effect extends beyond faculty to students. FIRE’s 2022 College Free Speech Rankings paint a troubling picture of campus discourse: 63% of students fear reputational damage from misunderstood speech, 22% regularly self-censor on controversial topics, and 10% have faced disciplinary threats for expression. Most strikingly, 38% of students now classify certain campus speech as acts of violence — a trend that, if we truly believe prejudice and bigotry can be unlearned through education, threatens to drive harmful views underground where they will fester unchallenged rather than be exposed to well-reasoned correction.
While Macalester’s numbers likely do not mirror these figures exactly, we’ve witnessed numerous challenges to open dialogue from within our school community. In 2022, a group of students attempted to shut down Macalester’s Congress to Campus initiative on the grounds that debating the Dobbs v. Jackson decision was inappropriate and traumatizing to students. The following year, Macalester temporarily censored an Iranian-American artist’s exhibition to shield students from ‘non-consensual viewing’ of harmful content. Last month, administrative pressure led to the cancellation of a divestment panel scheduled to coincide with feedback sessions. Macalester has seen many threats to free inquiry even as we might tell ourselves that this problem doesn’t exist here.
What we’re witnessing at Macalester reflects a broader crisis of mission drift in American higher education: Institutions are systematically abandoning their foundational principles as they capitulate to special interests. College presidents have found themselves besieged by acrimonious political factions demanding apologies, endorsements, policy changes or whatever else the winds of the moment demand. Without a dependable set of principles to stand on, the figureheads of higher education have nowhere to turn. Some give in to protest demands, some silence their critics, but many ultimately face resignation. This is not a sustainable state of affairs. So that Macalester may continue to fulfill its mission of truth-seeking, we should seriously consider adopting a clear stance of institutional neutrality as our first line of defense.
Institutional neutrality is a principle that guides colleges and universities to refrain from taking official stances on controversial political, social or economic issues that do not directly relate to their educational mission. This concept, first articulated in the 1967 Kalven Report from the University of Chicago, argues that the university’s mission to discover, improve, and disseminate knowledge is best served when the institution remains neutral on most socio-political issues. Colleges that have adopted similar statements echo the belief that only by remaining neutral can they fulfill their purposes as knowledge-generating and truth-seeking institutions.
The principle of institutional neutrality does not mean that individual members of the college community — students, faculty or certain staff — should remain silent on important issues. On the contrary, it serves to encourage robust debate and individual expression within the college community. When a university maintains a neutrality stance on contested social and political issues, students and faculty know they can express minority viewpoints or challenge prevailing orthodoxies without having to contradict their institution’s formal positions. By stepping back, institutions create the space for members of their community to step forward.
A policy of institutional neutrality would serve as both an internal compass and an external shield. FIRE’s comprehensive data reveals a clear pattern in challenges to academic freedom: internal pressure often originates from students and faculty, while external attacks increasingly come from conservative governments and activist groups, as evidenced by recent draconian legislative interventions in Florida, Texas and Tennessee. While these factions employ different tactics in their assault on open inquiry, the threat they represent to higher education is the same, and institutional neutrality provides our strongest defense against both. Academic freedom must remain principled rather than partisan.
The principles I defend here are neither conservative talking points nor reactionary backlash. They are foundational tenets of the liberal tradition that gave birth to the modern university. As a proponent of advancing social justice through higher education, I argue for institutional neutrality precisely because it protects the freedom to push for meaningful social change. Those who would dismiss calls for reform as partisan attacks misunderstand both the history and the stakes. From John Stuart Mill to the authors of the Kalven Report, the strongest advocates for unfettered academic discourse have been liberals who recognized that truth-seeking cannot be subordinated to any ideology — even ones we are personally drawn to. The movement to reform higher education today is led not by external critics, but by concerned insiders who have witnessed firsthand how enforced orthodoxy hollows out the very institutions we cherish.
What I witness daily on our campus fills me with profound sadness — not as some detached observer, but as a young adult wrestling with the same moral imperatives as my peers. I see bright, open-hearted students fall victim to a culture that transforms their genuine desire for justice into something unrecognizable. I watch in horror as compassion curdles into contempt, as devotion to noble causes transforms into savage righteousness that devours empathy and poisons dialogue. This is not the work of ill-intentioned people, but rather idealists who have lost their way, seduced by the intoxicating certainty that silencing dissent serves a higher good. But in embracing tactics of intimidation and exclusion, we betray the very values that once allowed the liberal arts to flourish: our commitment to genuine dialogue across differences, to seeing the humanity in those who disagree with us, to pursuing truth through reason instead of force. I cannot remain silent as we weaponize our highest principles against ourselves. We need to put this monster out of its misery before it’s too late. We need institutional neutrality now.
