AAUP: Academic Freedom Doesn’t Require Institutional Neutrality

Amid public campaigns urging universities to commit to “institutional neutrality,” the American Association of University Professors released a lengthy statement Wednesday saying that the term “conceals more than it reveals.”

The statement, approved by the AAUP’s elected national council last month, says it continues the national scholarly group’s long commitment to emphasizing “the complexity of the issues involved” in the neutrality debate. “Institutional neutrality is neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it,” it says.

The push for universities to adopt institutional neutrality policies ramped up as administrators struggled over what, if anything, to say about Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israelis and Israel’s swift retaliation in the Gaza Strip.

The AAUP statement notes that “institutional neutrality” has varied meanings and that actions—not just words—convey a point of view. For instance, some argue that to be neutral, institutions shouldn’t adjust their financial investments for anything other than maximizing returns. But the AAUP says that “no decision concerning a university’s investment strategy counts as neutral.”

The AAUP asserts that by taking any position on divestment—which many campus protesters have asked for—a university “makes a substantive decision little different from its decision to issue a statement that reflects its values.”

“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 AAUP statement says. “The defense of academic freedom has never been a neutral act.”

Steven McGuire, Paul and Karen Levy Fellow in Campus Freedom at the conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni, called the statement “another unhelpful document from the AAUP.”

“Institutional neutrality is a long-standing principle that can both protect academic freedom and help colleges and universities to stick to their academic missions,” McGuire told Inside Higher Ed. “It’s critical that institutional neutrality be enforced not only to protect individual faculty members on campus, but also to help to depoliticize American colleges and universities at a time when they have become overpoliticized” and are viewed as biased.

This article was published by Inside Higher Ed on February 13, 2025.