As the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks against Israel nears, a handful of elite colleges have announced that they plan to refrain from issuing any official statements recognizing the more than 1,200 Israelis killed in the massacres, urging a cease-fire in the war between Israel and Hamas or calling for a two-state solution. And as the academic year progresses, they likely won’t be weighing in on any pressing or controversial issues — at least those that extend beyond the university’s own gates.

Over the summer, Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University and several other colleges adopted a policy called institutional neutrality, which is the commitment of a university and its leaders to refrain from taking public positions on contentious matters unless the issue directly impacts the campus.  

Academic leaders are divided over whether institutions remaining neutral on essential issues helps or harms Jewish students, while some question the timing of rolling out this policy at the same time that universities have become the center of heated debates over Hamas and Israel.

The principle of institutional neutrality first rose to prominence in the 1967 Kalven Report on the University of Chicago’s “Role in Political and Social Action” amid Vietnam War activism on college campuses. The report stated that neutrality is necessary to maintain a university’s fidelity to its core mission of education. 

Since then, at least a dozen universities, including Harvard University, Vanderbilt University, Stanford University, Columbia University and Syracuse University have adopted the policy. Some have enforced it for years, while others, such as Harvard, embraced neutrality amid a turbulent 2023-24 academic year. Proponents of university neutrality argue that it does not hinder free speech because the policy only applies to universities and their leaders speaking in official capacity — not to students or faculty. 

But Ora Pescovitz, the president of Oakland University, a small, public university in Rochester, Mich., told Jewish Insider that she would not implement the policy — although she does see its advantages — because doing so would “mean that then [I could] never weigh in on issues that do not directly impact the institution, and I fear that there are times that as an institution we will want to weigh in, as we have.” 

Pescovitz referenced a statement the university released in 2021 after the Oxford High School mass shooting in the Detroit suburb of Oxford Township, just miles from Oakland University.  According to Pescovitz, many graduates of the high school go on to Oakland. 

“That was a national event but for us it was local,” she said. “We’re embedded in our community and pride ourselves on being deeply engaged in our community.” Under an institutional neutrality policy, Pescovitz would not have been permitted to comment on the shooting. “I received many comments that people were appreciative that I weighed in,” she recalled, adding that “I worry that institutional neutrality prevents us from being able to speak out when we need to.”  

Pescovitz was among the first to strongly condemn Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities, releasing a statement just hours after the attack and differentiating herself from counterparts who waffled over a response. “We are shocked and horrified by the unprovoked acts of brutality by Hamas terrorists in Israel,” Pescovitz wrote on Oct. 7 to Oakland University, a school with a diverse student body where Arab Americans make up a significant share of attendees.

At the same time, Pescovitz emphasized that “a president’s voice is precious.” She said she’s careful not to weigh in on outside issues frequently or else students will become “desensitized” to statements. 

“The advantage is that it does help institutions have an approach when they have to address big issues like the ones we are tackling right now, and it does not prevent them from continuing to uphold clear issues like academic freedom within their institutions, but it does make it easy for them to have a consistent approach,” Pescovitz said. 

Because she won’t implement the policy on her campus, Pescovitz said that she frequently struggles with asking herself, “When do you draw the line?”

“It’s difficult to decide when the institution does come out with statements,” she said. “When should we make a statement? Why should we make a statement about one topic and not another? Sometimes people have questioned why I made a statement about one issue and not another. Knowing when to draw the line is a slippery slope.”  

Mark Yudof, chair of the Academic Engagement Network and the former president of the University of California system, echoed the “iffyness” of enforcing a neutral campus. 

“If something happens on your campus, or has a direct impact on your campus, then you may want to discuss it in the context of what the university plans to do,” Yudof said. “I don’t think there should be abstract statements but you can as university leadership say this is what we intend to do on our campus.” 

“Institutional neutrality would say the president should make statements which are focused on the impact of campus,” he continued. “If you’ve had assaults of women, racist misbehavior, if Jewish students can’t cross campus safely, I expect presidents to speak out about that and I don’t want institutional neutrality to say they can’t look out for the best interests of students, faculty and staff.” 

“The judgment call,” Yudof continued, “is what directly affects your campus.”

“When Congress is considering legislation that directly impacts your campus, I think they can speak out on that.”  

Yudof said he’s supportive of institutional neutrality if it “helps to clear away some of the departments around the country that on their official website have come out in favor of various forms of social justice and have criticized Israel and made pro-Hamas statements.” 

“Faculty can speak however they want but not on the website of the English department or history department,” Yudof said. 

He does not see the sudden widespread implementation of institutional neutrality necessarily as a “cop out” to addressing Israel’s war because “this could also involve the elections and other things coming up.” 

The “strongest defense of neutrality,” according to Yudof, was a letter the president of Northwestern University, Michael Schill, sent to the campus on Oct. 12 – five days after Hamas’ massacre in Israel.  

Schill wrote that under Northwestern’s institutional neutrality policy, he would not issue a university statement on the matter, but clarified that “as individuals in a democracy, we do not give up our rights to have and express our personal political and social viewpoints. We just need to make clear we are speaking for ourselves and not for all our students, faculty, staff and trustees.” 

“Kidnapping, beheading, murdering people — children and adults, civilians and people in the armed forces — is horrific and inhuman, pure and simple,” Schill said in the message. “This sort of behavior is entirely unacceptable regardless of one’s political convictions or grievances.” Despite his decision not to issue a statement on behalf of Northwestern, Schill wrote “that is the view of Mike Schill, citizen, Jew and human being. I didn’t give up those parts of me when I assumed the presidency of Northwestern.”

Harvard University adopted institutional neutrality in May, at the end of a school year marred by antisemitic unrest resulting in a federal civil rights lawsuit. Jewish leaders on the campus are divided over how beneficial the policy will be, and the motive behind its implementation. Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, executive director of Harvard Hillel, called it “a significant and positive step for Harvard as a whole, and the welfare of its Jewish community in particular.”

“We do not expect or want everyone on campus to agree with our positions on Israel or the current war – our community itself is very diverse – but we are clear that academic programs and extracurricular life must be wholly committed to their important work, and not be used as platforms to marginalize or stigmatize Zionists, Israelis, Jews or any other group,” Rubenstein told JI. “While no single change will make a decisive difference in a place as large, complex and decentralized as Harvard – the adoption of neutrality is necessary, though not sufficient.” 

Shabbos Kestenbaum, who graduated in the spring with a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School and is suing the university over its handling of campus antisemitism, said that the timing of the university adopting the policy was “quite telling.”

“Harvard adopted a policy of institutional neutrality after its inability to clearly and quickly condemn the rape of Jewish women, the kidnapping of Jewish babies and the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust,” Kestenbaum told JI. 

Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, who leads Harvard Chabad, told JI in February, when implementing institutional neutrality on Harvard’s campus was still under consideration, that a benefit of the policy is that “when you have leadership that is profoundly ignorant on moral issues, or worse lack a moral compass, you certainly don’t want them opining on moral issues and we’ve had some sad manifestations of that.” He referred to ​​the Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Bridget Terry Long, blaming both “Hamas and the Israeli government” for Oct. 7 and the resulting war. (Long later apologized for her statement.) 

The problem with university neutrality, Zarchi said, is that it does not address “the purpose of an educational enterprise.” 

“If the purpose is to educate ethical humans, how dare we be morally neutral,” Zarchi said. “Do we want institutions meant to educate to be neutral on genocide or massacre? Is that how little faith we have in our leaders that we want them to be morally neutral?” 

As Cornell follows Harvard, having announced its adoption of institutional neutrality last month, Menachem Rosensaft, an adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, welcomed the policy – so long as it adheres to two conditions.  

“I am comfortable with a policy of institutional neutrality as long as it is observed across the board and not selectively, and accompanied by a scrupulous insistence on the observance of applicable codes of conduct and behavior,” Rosensaft told JI. 

He continued, “I don’t know that it’s the task of university or college presidents to comment on current events unrelated to their institutions, however newsworthy such events might be.”