Let Students Think for Themselves 

A n academic institution committed to truth-seeking and open inquiry should foster an environment in which students feel welcome — even encouraged — to speak up on controversial issues about which reasonable people of goodwill disagree. But as Princeton students and frequent critics of the ideological orthodoxy that pervades our campus, we’ve witnessed our peers retreat from conversations, opportunities, and even friendships out of fear that their deeply held beliefs will cost them academically, socially, and professionally.

A university hinders its truth-seeking mission when it — unintentionally or otherwise — prompts students to think twice before expressing unpopular but reasonable points of view. This can occur when officials violate the basic institutional neutrality required for the university to be a home for the free marketplace of ideas. When an educational institution adopts official stances on controversial issues not directly connected to its core mission, it suggests parameters around an otherwise liberated discourse. This effect is enhanced when such pronouncements are morally tinged; in these cases, the university would appear to have decided that such parameters are morally requisite. By implication, those who defy them are morally suspect.

The “basic neutrality” ideal isn’t new. The most famous defense of the principle was offered by faculty at the University of Chicago during the height of the Vietnam War. Chicago’s Kalven Committee made the point succinctly: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” The Kalven Report, long celebrated, is still operative at the University of Chicago. Universities everywhere should consider adopting the report’s guidance, as well as the university’s famed Free Speech Principles, which Princeton formally did in 2015.

Recently, universities nationwide have begun to abandon any pretension to neutrality. Princeton has been no exception. Dean Amaney Jamal of its School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) issued a statement (under the header “Our Moral Duty”) to the entire student body of her department, decrying Kyle Rittenhouse’s not-guilty verdict. She lamented with a heavy heart the “incomprehensib[ility] . . . of a minor vigilante carrying a semi-automatic rifle across state lines, killing two people, and being declared innocent by the U.S. justice system.” Furthermore, she situated the verdict within the context of the racism embedded “without a doubt . . . in nearly every strand of the American fabric,” thus implying that defenders of a not-guilty verdict are defenders of racism.

Along with 60 of our peers, we sent a letter of concern to the university president, Christopher Eisgruber. We criticized neither the embarrassing factual errors polluting Jamal’s statement nor her position on the trial’s outcome. Rather, we vehemently objected to the fact that she took advantage of her official position to broadcast her own stance on a controversial public issue — a maneuver that can only harm, not aid, a culture of bold, open truth-seeking.

Because Jamal’s statement was issued in her official capacity, it effectively articulates a departmental position on the Rittenhouse case. It thus risks pushing students to confine their thinking and speaking to bounds pre-approved by their dean, a powerful figure. Students be warned: If we vocally disagree with Jamal by celebrating — or simply not condemning — what we consider a just verdict, our perspective is no longer merely subject to normal and healthy peer criticism. Now, it’s a perspective that challenges the very institution that houses our studies, and the articulation of it stigmatizes us as moral outcasts in the eyes of a powerful leader.

To our dismay, President Eisgruber responded to our complaints by denying that Dean Jamal had spoken in her official capacity. He suggested that the dean “quite clearly stated that her views about the Rittenhouse verdict were her own opinions” and that “she framed her comments in very personal terms.”

We wonder whether President Eisgruber read the same statement we did. Nowhere did Jamal clearly state that she was speaking in a personal capacity. To the contrary, she qualified her views by writing “As dean of a School of Public and International Affairs . . .” She promulgated the message on her school’s official email server. What’s more, she employed her institutional authority to summon SPIA’s resources, offering a space for affected students to “process” the outcome of the trial in the company of a counselor. Was Jamal writing as an academic or as a dean? We believe she provided a clear answer.

It’s not as though university officials who know how to speak neutrally on issues like the Rittenhouse case don’t exist. Administrators everywhere would do well to have a look at an official statement released by Professor Robert P. George, director of Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. In a Thanksgiving message to the program’s undergraduate affiliates, George recognized the profound national divisions highlighted by the Rittenhouse trial but clarified that “it is not the job of any professor, or of any unit of the University, or the University itself to tell you [students] what to think. Our role in your lives is to encourage and empower you to think deeply, to think critically, and to think for yourselves about important issues, such as those dividing our nation today.” Unlike Jamal, George offered sound educational and pedagogical guidance free of haughty moral exhortation.

To students who frequently dissent from campus orthodoxy, statements like Jamal’s are as frustrating and alienating as they are inappropriate. All university officials — especially those at Princeton — have a duty to facilitate an environment conducive to the full realization of the institution’s truth-seeking mission. Reasonable neutrality provides a starting point for the fulfillment of that responsibility.

Abigail Anthony is a junior studying politics and linguistics at Princeton University. Myles McKnight is a junior studying politics at Princeton University and the president of the Princeton Open Campus Coalition.