Tufts’ Institutional Neutrality Working Group hosted a total of five listening sessions to hear input from faculty, staff and students on a potential statement of institutional neutrality. On Jan. 15 and Jan. 16, the working group held two final virtual listening sessions for all Tufts community members to voice their thoughts, questions and concerns.
University leadership began to consider adopting a policy of institutional neutrality last summer. Provost Caroline Genco was then tasked by University President Sunil Kumar to assess whether the university should instate a policy of institutional neutrality. On Nov. 15, 2024, Genco announced the creation of a group focused on this question comprised of two chairs and 10 faculty committee members.
In the university-wide email, Genco described the position of institutional neutrality as “a policy of not taking positions on geopolitical or social matters that do not pertain directly to the teaching and research mission of the university.”
During the listening session on Jan. 15, one of the two co-chairs, Ian Johnstone, professor of international law at The Fletcher School, clarified the working group’s scope and ability to affect university policy.
“We are not charged with recommending whether the university should adopt a posture of institutional neutrality across the board, but whether its leaders should be making statements on political and social matters unrelated to the research and teaching mission of the university,” Johnstone said.
At the Jan. 16 listening session, Colleen Ryan, co-chair and vice provost for faculty, described the initial goal of the working group.
“We were asked to make a recommendation to the president and provost on this topic, and if the committee were to recommend, to draft a statement, or if the committee were to not recommend such a statement, to provide a rationale,” Ryan said. “The charge gave no sense of desired outcomes at the time.”
The co-chairs noted that the term ‘institutional neutrality’ has “generated a good deal of confusion and controversy” and said that they would consider another term to recommend to Kumar.
“Many other universities in producing these statements and policies … have been using a different vocabulary. Some use neutrality in the title, others use institutional voice, institutional restraint, institutional plurality or simply institutional statements.”
At the beginning of the listening session, Johnstone framed the institutional neutrality conversation as a larger discussion about the parameters of academic freedom.
“One of the rationales for refraining from institutional statements is precisely to preserve the academic freedom and the freedom of speech for individual faculty members and students,” Johnstone said. “They should be free to make statements in their individual capacities, rather than university leadership purporting to speak or present a unified university-wide position on their behalf.”
Justin Hollander, an urban and environmental policy and planning professor, said the community should be helping university leadership to make decisions on whether or not to speak out on issues.
“I think that’s really the key — the failure of some of these statements to be effective and to be inclusive is really a failure of leadership,” Hollander said.
Alaina Macaulay, assistant vice provost for inclusive excellence and leadership, explained that the inclusion of different viewpoints may not be protected by neutrality.
“I would really encourage folks to not use inclusion as a way to refrain from statements,” McCaulay said. “I think it would only provide an opportunity for us to be in community around things that are really hard, that we’re unable to move towards and move through together because we feel silenced by them.”
Steve Cicala, associate professor of economics, asked whether the working group has considered adopting the Chicago Principles in the listening session on Jan. 15.
The Chicago Principles are a set of guidelines first established by the University of Chicago and adopted by universities nationwide; these principles allow for freedom of expression on college campuses by enabling a wide range of ideas to be expressed regardless of their offensiveness or accuracy.
One student organization, The Tufts Tribune, is in support of institutional neutrality, according to the editor-in-chief of the paper, senior Samuel Ben-Ur.
“We collaborated with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression to write a petition asking the school to accept the principles of the Chicago Statement and the Kalven Report and become institutionally neutral,” Ben-Ur said.
Ben-Ur said that an institutional neutrality policy should only apply to statements made by university leadership.
“We make the separation between people who work in the administration and faculty,” Ben-Ur added. “Faculty have every right to talk about what they want and give their opinions to their class. …But we just think that school is a place to learn from faculty, not from the administration specifically.”
In a separate conversation with the Daily, Eitan Hersh, a political science professor, also explained his support for a policy of institutional neutrality on issues that are not within the university’s core values.
“Universities should be basically environments that welcome position-taking and are not taking positions themselves,” Hersh said. “So they should be venues for debate, for learning, for argument and not a place where…a dean or a provost or a president says ‘we think as a university X, Y or Z.”
Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled Alaina Macauley's name, incorrectly stated her title and lacked context for her quote. This article was edited to correct Alaina Macauley's name and title, and to add more context surrounding the quote.
