The 10/7 firestorm made clear that Harvard needed to revise its approach to public statements, a member of the Institutional Voice Working Group told NR.
Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Harvard University leaders issued a statement professing to be “heartbroken” over the October 7 Hamas massacre and expressing hope that the university could play a role in fostering dialogue around the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
That statement — roundly criticized as lacking moral clarity — contrasted sharply with the righteous indignation the university displayed in response to the 2016 presidential election, the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, the killing of George Floyd, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those statements, of course, drew furious criticism from Americans who don’t happen to share the political commitments common in Cambridge.
Having learned that these statements satisfy very few and anger many, the university has now decided to stick to matters of higher education and abstain from weighing in on politically charged developments in the wider world.
Harvard announced late last month that its Institutional Voice Working Group, established in April, had released a report containing a series of recommendations for when the university should issue statements, a report university leadership accepted. Those who drafted the report held that the university has a responsibility to address matters that directly affect the business of running an institution of higher education but should not take official positions on current events with no bearing on academics.
“The immediate factor, was, of course, the events of the fall of 2023, starting with Hamas’s terror attack on Israel, then Israel’s response, and then the incredibly convoluted set of processes that led from there to Professor Gay’s resignation from the presidency of Harvard in January,” law professor and working group co-chairman Noah Feldman told National Review. “We’re talking about a very short period of time — three months — and what that did was stimulate the thinking of everyone on campus, regardless of their political orientation, on what I would call the deeper structural question.”
That deeper structural question, Feldman said, was under what circumstances Harvard should announce an institutional position on some event of public concern. After the turmoil on campus last fall, “It was pretty obvious that we needed a policy.”
Harvard is not the only university moving away from publicly enforcing a political orthodoxy. Syracuse University recently adopted its own statement on free expression and announced that it would refrain from commenting on political matters that do not directly impact its campus, a move vice chancellor, provost, and chief academic officer Gretchen Ritter told NR came from “a need to clarify and reaffirm our commitments.”
That move away from institutional adoption of progressive politics can also be seen in recent decisions by elite universities such as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to end mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements in hiring.
American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Beth Akers told NR that the increasing politicization and progressive capture of colleges and universities had grown as a subject of interest for the American public before this past academic year but that — as the reactions to anti-Israel protests on campuses across the country demonstrate — October 7 was a sort of tipping point.
“I think that there started to be a bigger cost to institutions in playing that role,” Akers said. “My sense is that it just becomes a liability and distracts from the central missions of these institutions.”
And the public scrutiny isn’t limited to the political positions taken by universities. A growing share of the American public and their representatives in Congress are beginning to ask whether colleges and universities are even fit for purpose any longer.
“This is happening at a time when Americans are becoming skeptical of higher education at greater rates, as are lawmakers. Even the student-loan bailout is itself an acknowledgment that higher education is failing in a certain way,” she told NR.
As with so many other industries, social media has had a profound impact on the way universities conduct themselves, obscuring their official positions on a given issue, or lack thereof, beneath a flurry of public argument.
“On social media, anyone with any claim to any kind of Harvard affiliation — even, honestly, a tenuous one — can appear and say, ‘Oh, I speak for the university,’” Feldman told NR. “And if you’re an ordinary person reading social media, how would you know who did or didn’t speak for the university? It is difficult or impossible to know if you’re not at least somewhat conversant in how the university works.”
Martin West, a professor of education and the academic dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, explained that the events of October 7 raised the stakes of a long-running debate over how universities should engage with the public in the social-media age.
“Obviously, the events of October 7 and the challenges Harvard had as an institution in finding the appropriate way to respond to those events played a role,” West said. “But I think it’s important to emphasize that the conversation around institutional voice long predates those events. It was well underway in advance of those events as a result of the rise of social media and the trends in partisan polarization that had made this question even more salient.”
The new policy, Feldman explained, is meant to “create a really clear guideline” for when Harvard should issue a statement — when the underlying issue has something to do with the core mission of the university — and when it should not.
“We made a point of saying in the report that we’re not neutral,” Feldman said. “We believe in the truth and we believe in expertise and we believe in reason based on evidence. And yet, at the same time, there’s a lot of overlap between this and an institutional neutrality policy because of the punchline, which is that when the university’s administration is not expert — namely on something that has nothing to do with the core business of running a university — it shouldn’t speak out.”
The desire to create an optimal learning environment for students drove the decision of another institution of higher education — Syracuse University — to adopt its own, similar statement.
Syracuse leadership announced its adoption of the “Syracuse Statement” last week in a document that opens by stating that the university “unequivocally affirms its commitment to free expression and free inquiry.”
Those who drafted and signed that statement argued that the practice of adopting institutional positions has the potential to stifle open discourse on campus.
Allen Groves, senior vice president and chief student experience officer at Syracuse, told NR that the process of working on a statement on free expression began immediately after his tenure began in the summer of 2021.
“One of the earliest conversations I had with the chancellor when I started was that he and the trustees wanted us to come up with a unique Syracuse statement,” Groves told NR. “It took a while to get a committee formed and to actually get it off the ground, but we talked about it from the first moment I came here.”
Gretchen Ritter, who joined Syracuse as its vice chancellor, provost, and chief academic officer in October 2021, similarly entered her role with ideas about expanding a sense of free expression on campus.
“There have been conversations going on for at least a decade, all of which are quite relevant, about free expression and higher education and whether or not we’re truly encouraging free expression in the classroom,” Ritter told NR. “The last year has demonstrated a need to clarify and reaffirm our commitments, but for us, it was something that was rooted in a much bigger set of interests and concerns.”
Both Groves and Ritter acknowledged that simply issuing a statement will not immediately ensure the flourishing of a culture of open discourse on Syracuse’s campus, but they hope that students and faculty will respond to the lack of institutional positions on matters of importance by adding their own voices to the conversation on campus.
“You shouldn’t have folks like us making statements on big public issues outside of the university so that you have more room for discussion and dialogue from faculty, students, and alumni, but we also have to encourage folks to get into that dialogue.”
Groves, who operates on the non-academic side of student affairs, said it was clear from his conversations with students that faculty must make clear that positions with which they disagree are still welcome in classroom discussions.
“Part of what students were saying in these listening sessions was that the faculty could help by saying, ‘Let’s debate a lot of ideas. You don’t have to parrot my perspective, you don’t have to repeat the perspective of the person who just spoke, and you don’t have to fear that you’re going to called out somewhere because your view might be a minority view, even if you have a strong argument,” Groves told NR. “One of the things we’re going to talk about with new students coming in the fall is this document; we’ll tell them we want them to read it and we want them to think about it as they spend the next four years here.”
The Syracuse statement says that the university will not isse public pronouncements “except under the most extraordinary circumstances and with the sole purpose of protecting its mission of discovery.” Ritter told NR that the omission of examples was intentional, that those particular exceptions would need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
However, she said, that category would include “something that threatens the well-being of the institution at a foundational level” and directly affects the business of the university, like, for instance, the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard Supreme Court case or a hypothetical law taxing university endowments. It is important, Ritter told NR, for the university to get “out of the business of saying things about big public controversies and crises that don’t directly touch the institution.”