New AAUP Statement on Institutional Neutrality

Today, the AAUP released the new statement On Institutional Neutrality, which reaffirms that institutional neutrality is neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it. The statement explores the history of the concept of institutional neutrality and the interpretation of the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, produced as protests swept campuses nationwide over the Vietnam War and long cited as the authoritative work on institutional neutrality. 

“A commitment to neutrality,” the new statement declares, “is not some magic wand that conjures freedom. Calls for neutrality instead provide an opportunity to consider how various practices of an institution—not only its speech or silence but also its actions and policies—might promote a more robust freedom of teaching, research, and intramural and extramural speech.”

Related content: FAQs on Institutional Neutrality

The statement calls for principles of academic freedom and shared governance to be chief considerations in the issuing of institutional and departmental statements as well as decisions on financial investments and campus protest policies. 

As the statement’s conclusion notes, “A university’s decision to speak, or not; to limit its departments or other units from speaking; to divest from investments that conflict with its mission; or to limit protest in order to promote other forms of speech are all choices that might either promote or inhibit academic freedom and thus must be made with an eye to those practical results, not to some empty conception of neutrality. The defense of academic freedom has never been a neutral act.”

In the context of the second Trump administration’s numerous assaults on academic freedom in higher education, the AAUP urges universities, whose educational mission is to serve the public good, not to hide behind the pretense of remaining neutral.