After months of heated controversy over the war in Gaza, Harvard University has adopted a policy of “institutional neutrality,” asserting that the core function of the university is to protect free speech and debate and to advance learning, not to take sides. Other universities are considering following Harvard’s lead.

I personally think that this is the proper path for institutions of higher education. They should be places where debates about public policy may occur without intimidation by students or wealthy donors.

The Boston Globe reports:

After months of controversies tied to the Israel-Hamas war, Harvard University said Tuesday that its administration would no longer issue official statements about public matters that “do not directly affect the university’s core function.”

The school made the announcement more than a month after an Institutional Voice Working Group was established to consider the matter. It come as conversations around the country debate whether to issue public statements on divisive issues of the day.

“The integrity and credibility of the institution are compromised when the university speaks officially on matters outside its institutional area of expertise,” the working group said in a report, which was accepted by Harvard’s administration….

Harvard was engulfed last fall in controversies over what to say about the Israel-Hamas war. A growing chorus of professors and administrators proposed a simple solution: silence.

At Harvard and other universities, momentum has been building for “institutional neutrality,” the principle that university leaders should refrain from taking positions on weighty social and political matters. That idea was, until recently, a fairly obscure concept debated within the academy.

But after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel plunged many American universities into turmoil, and thrust their leaders into debates over an intractable conflict, schools from Cambridge to California are considering adopting institutional neutrality as a matter of official policy.

Interim Harvard president Alan Garber assembled the working group to study the matter. Columbia’s University Senate recently adopted institutional neutrality in a unanimous vote. Faculty groups at the University of Pennsylvaniaand Yale University are pushing their leaders to do the same.

Proponents argue that adopting neutrality will make universities more governable and protect their mission of fostering open inquiry. Universities, they say, should be forums for debates, not participants in them. But critics say the idea of a neutral university is a chimera. Endowments invest in fossil fuel stocks and some schools accept donations from representatives of autocratic regimes. Neutrality, critics say, is a way to deflect scrutiny and avoid taking morally correct but inconvenient stands…

However, in its report, the Harvard working group said that “the university is not a neutral institution.”

“It values open inquiry, expertise, and diverse points of view, for these are the means through which it pursues truth,” read the report. “The policy of speaking officially only on matters directly related to the university’s core function, not beyond, serves those values.”