Tim Tai

Former University President Peter Salovey penned an essay arguing that university presidents and other leaders should speak out on matters of public importance. The move contrasts University President Maurie McInnis, who last month advised Yale administrators to refrain from such comments.

Salovey wrote that as president of Yale, he wanted to be a thought leader for the country. If university leaders do not share opinions, he argued, leaders in other sectors such as politicians and corporate CEOs will have outsized power to shape local, national and international debates.

“I am concerned that not speaking on contemporary world affairs is an abdication of leadership responsibilities,” he wrote in the essay in Elsevier, a science publisher. “I wanted the university community to know what its president believes. But this is increasingly becoming an unpopular view, superseded by the principle of institutional neutrality.”

Salovey wrote to the News that he met with the Yale committee that recommended restraining institutional voice while they were deliberating, and shared similar views to those in his Elsevier essay. He added that he submitted the essay to Elsevier “well before” Yale’s report was released. He declined to immediately speak further.

Near the end of his presidency, Salovey told the News that he would like to see a committee consider institutional neutrality under his successor, but that he leaned toward believing Yale should preserve its ability to speak.

“He is voicing his views as a member of Yale’s faculty, and I welcome open dialogue from all members of our community,” McInnis wrote to the News about Salovey’s essay. “I accepted the recommendations and report of the Committee on Institutional Voice and that has not changed.”

Throughout the essay, Salovey makes a point to not mention Yale’s committee report or McInnis. For example, in one section, he mentions that the new guidelines of many universities apply not just to the president. To illustrate this point, he chooses the example of Harvard’s new report, even though Yale’s guidelines also apply to administrators other than the president.

Earlier this week, declining to comment for a different article, Salovey wrote that he was “trying to keep a low profile.”

Salovey spent the first half of the essay musing on the Woodward Report — the seminal report that has defined free expression at Yale for the past 50 years — and weighing the balance between free expression and social harmony on campuses. 

Pivoting to how free expression applies to university leaders, he worried that presidents remaining silent on issues of public significance would render universities irrelevant and reduce public trust in higher education. He also disputed the idea that institutional speech would have a chilling effect on debates on college campuses, an assertion made in the report of Yale’s Committee on Institutional Voice.

He wrote that he appreciated when faculty, staff, students and alumni disagreed with him when he would comment as president. He found that his public comments encouraged dialogue, even though his statements were often “parsed word-by-word by the campus community and the media, often leading to days of controversy and little clarity.”

“Quite frankly, I doubt I intimidated anyone into silence; it seemed to be just the opposite,” he wrote. “I believe the philosophical case for institutional neutrality is overdone.”

Although Yale’s new guidance supports leaders speaking about issues that pertain to the University, Salovey wrote that it is not always clear what falls in that category. He noted that he would want to speak about world events such as book-burnings or President-elect Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, which he characterized as connected to the realm of education.

Salovey added that university webpages should not be places to post political statements.  Instead, he urged universities to provide other forums for discussion about important issues and also stressed the importance of attribution and personal ownership of opinions in such forums.

McInnis adopted the report of the Committee on Institutional Voice on Oct. 30.