President McInnis has appointed a committee to study the question of institutional neutrality. Should Yale express an institutional view on matters of general public concern — the murder of George Floyd, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the war in Gaza? With rare exceptions, the answer is no. 

It is appropriate, indeed necessary, that Yale take a position on matters that touch its academic work directly. Yale should speak up in support of funding for basic research and protest against government intrusion in the hiring of faculty and design of curricula. In an extreme case, when the country is at mortal risk, it would be irresponsible not to speak. In December 1941, Yale had a duty to condemn Japanese aggression and German totalitarianism. A university like Yale can only exist in a free society. When the very existence of the society is threatened, Yale must take a public stand.

But these moments are rare. Great caution should be exercised in declaring that a social problem, however grave, rises to this level. Caution requires judgment. There is no formula to tell us when the line has been crossed. And good judgment in turn requires a clear understanding of what Yale is for, together with the strength to defend it. 

Yale is defined by two pursuits. These set it apart from other, non-academic institutions. They give Yale its distinctive character and special claim to honor and respect. They are the only lasting source of public trust, which falters when Yale and schools like it cease to be true to themselves. 

The first pursuit is the older of the two. It is as old as the American college. It might be called the pursuit of self-knowledge or the search for an answer to the question of the meaning of life. The question is personal — excruciatingly so — and there is no orthodox answer to it. But in whatever direction a young person pursues it, the search has value only to the degree that it is unbound by worldly expectations and vocational plans. To have the kind of effect that will last for a lifetime, it must be untethered from all such mundane concerns. It must be “liberal” or free.

The second pursuit has also been present from the start but grew in prominence when Yale became a research university with graduate departments and faculty devoted to the advancement of knowledge in their various fields. The object of this pursuit is the truth. Like self-knowledge, the truth is an unworldly good. It cannot be settled by a vote. It has a compulsive force that transcends all political parties and a timelessness that outlasts every program of reform, however urgent it seems at the moment.

If a college or university is to be true to itself, it must honor and protect these two pursuits, since it is for their sake that colleges and universities exist. Among other things, this means that worldly pressures and demands must be kept off campus to the greatest extent feasible. When politics intrudes, it corrupts the spirit of academic life, which ceases to be responsible to its own wonderful and eccentric calling when it is harnessed to worldly ends of one kind or another. I should add that academics who use their positions to advance their preferred political goals are irresponsible in a second way as well, for they are largely free of the duties and constraints that weigh on real political actors. They are politicians on the cheap, which it is easy to be in the cloistered and charmingly naïve precincts of a college or university campus.

This is not to say that faculty and students should not concern themselves with the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. The world in all its aspects is the primary object of academic inquiry. But the inquiry itself must be conducted in a spirit free from worldly commitments. That is what makes it an academic pursuit rather than a partisan conclave.

Nor is it to say that those on campus ought to be politically disengaged — to suspend their attachment to the causes they support. That is neither possible nor desirable. Even as they teach and study, faculty and students remain political beings. They have convictions and want to express them — and to persuade others to adopt them. A healthy college or university provides ample room for such expression, subject to reasonable restrictions and the basic presumption that political action on campus ought not to compromise the school’s defining pursuits, which even in the heat of the angriest hour retain their unworldly character. Institutional neutrality is necessary not only to provide a fair forum for political debate among faculty and students. That is an important but secondary goal. More fundamentally, it is needed to preserve the integrity of the two pursuits that define the essence of university life.

In the last decade or so, there have been far too many pronouncements by college and university presidents about all manner of political issues — too quick a readiness to take a stand in the world. But this misuse of academic authority is less the result of an appetite for politics than of the astonishing absence of a genuine appreciation of the unworldly calling of the institutions on whose behalf they speak. For a generation, we have listened to speeches from college and university presidents who seem no longer to hear the music of academic life or to be swept along by its glorious, unworldly aspirations. Will this change anytime soon? If it does not, the retreat to statements of institutional neutrality, issued earnestly by our newest college and university presidents, will be what it sometimes seems: a self-interested strategy for avoiding trouble and sidestepping the greater challenge of defending a way of life that from the standpoint of the world will always seem suspect, if not downright dangerous. That would be a misfortune for higher education and a worse one for America, whose greatness has always depended, in part, on the greatness of its colleges and universities.

ANTHONY T. KRONMAN is a Sterling Professor of Law and former dean of the Yale Law School. He received a PhD in philosophy from Yale in 1972 and graduated from Yale Law School in 1975. He can be reached at anthony.kronman@yale.edu.