The debate we are having on institutional neutrality is backward. In the university’s listening sessions and on the pages of the Yale Daily News, the conversation shifts between Haitian immigrants, Enlightenment values, the war in Gaza and university endowments. Then, sometimes, “the education of Yale’s students” enters as an afterthought.
It should be the other way around. The decision-making process on institutional neutrality — or any university policy — must begin with the questions: what is Yale’s mission? And does this new policy serve it? Yale’s primary mission is not to end wars or advocate for immigration policies or challenge Supreme Court rulings. It is to educate its students. Institutional neutrality serves this mission; institutional voice undermines it.
Yale’s Mission Statement commits the school to creating a neutral arena in which faculty and students can freely express and debate a wide range of viewpoints. In the hopes of educating “aspiring leaders worldwide who serve all sectors of society,” the university’s mission is to create a “free exchange of ideas in an ethical, interdependent and diverse community of faculty, staff, students, and alumni.”
The statements that Yale releases in response to political events undermine this mission. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Yale released a statement lamenting the reversal of “a landmark ruling that has been upheld for over forty-nine years” and noting that the decision “is deeply disturbing for many in our community and across the country.” This response promotes important values: women’s reproductive rights and freedom over our own bodies. But it undermines others. Free inquiry, intellectual diversity, dissent and “free exchanges of ideas” are not possible when the institution voices its opinions on a political question.
How would a conservative Catholic at Yale feel about voicing her opinion on abortion when she knows the university feels differently? Or, maybe a liberal student thinks the decision is wrong but wants to understand the other point of view to feel more confident in his own. These conversations are crucial to the education of Yale students. They open our minds to new ideas and new people. They create leaders who have conviction in their own values because they have taken the time to listen, challenge and understand others. But this stops as soon as Yale ceases to be home for these conversations and instead becomes a voice in them.
This stifling effect of institutional voice harms not only students but faculty as well. If Yale expresses institutional opinions, the flexibility of academics to develop ideas that oppose those touted by the university is vastly reduced. If Yale takes positions on social and political issues, professors and their research could be or feel threatened by the possibility of punishment or condemnation for expressing opposing views. It is one thing to be a junior faculty member whose opinions contradict those in the mainstream of your department, it is another to oppose those explicitly stated by your institution. Limiting faculty in this way goes strictly against Yale’s mission of education and research and dilutes the unique power universities give to intellectual exploration. Yale should always protect academic freedom and promote dialogue within the community which it cannot do if it has a strong institutional voice.
And as Yale adopts its own voice in these conversations, it welcomes other external, unwanted voices that further distract from the school’s mission. By issuing statements, taking political positions and engaging with cultural discourse on an institutional level, Yale has become a target of politicians and pundits. In a speech to the National Conservatism Conference in 2021, JD Vance LAW ’13 went as far as to say: “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Following the congressional hearing last December where Claudine Gay, Liz Magill and Sally Kornbluth testified on university policy and institutional positions, their universities quickly came under fire from politicians.
Elite universities will never be completely insulated from these political and cultural debates. But Yale’s goal should be to distance itself from them as much as possible. The public perception of Yale as a cultural or political actor in American society drags Yale away from its role as first and foremost an educational institution. The more reporters swarm Yale’s campus and the more politicians deride the school in Congress, the less Yale can focus on its central mission of educating its students.
Then there are the practical problems that institutional voice raises: how should the university decide what issues are worth commenting on? What is deemed big enough? There are global crises happening constantly and Yale could not possibly take a moral stance on all of them. What gives the university license to decide what cause is important enough to take a position? Students have not received emails from the university about the coup in Myanmar, which has displaced over 3 million people, or the civil war in Sudan, which has claimed over 20,000 lives. These aren’t issues as widely discussed in our political landscape, but that doesn’t make them unimportant. It is illogical to demand Yale take positions for morality’s sake, but then filter these positions by their prevalence in the news cycle rather than their moral consequence.
Institutional neutrality would be a strong first step in returning the school to its mission, but it should not be the last. When the Supreme Court rules on a controversial issue, when a politician makes an unpopular statement, when a foreign country invades another, the university should remain neutral. But it should not stop there. When these events do occur, the school should release a statement that rather than “offering condolences” or “recognizing feelings” announces a forum on the issue where students can listen to and voice different viewpoints on the issue. What if each time there is a major political event, Yale convenes the world’s leading experts on the topic — shouldn’t be too hard to find — and invites them to debate in front of and field questions from students? That is a free exchange of ideas. That is Yale living up to its mission.
ALYSE GRAHAM-MARTINEZ is a first year in Saybrook College. She can be reached at alyse.graham-martinez@yale.edu.
AIDAN STRETCH is a senior in Saybrook College. He can be reached at aidan.stretch@yale.edu.