The doctrine of institutional neutrality asserts that universities ought not to make public statements on matters of public controversy, or in its newer iterations, matters of public controversy not “directly” related to “their core mission of teaching and research.” One exception, present from the start, is what I call the self-defense exception. In the words of the Kalven Committee Report:

From time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.

More crisply: if a threat arises to the “core mission” of the university, every threatened university is morally obligated to respond in a non-neutral fashion.

It’s obvious that every university in the United States is currently on the receiving end of such a threat. The Trump Administration wants to direct the core missions of American universities by threats of brute force, and ICE wants to harass, detain, and deport foreign students, faculty, and staff to whatever extent it can. If you haven’t figured this out, you’re living in a hallucinatory dreamworld. The issue isn’t reasonably up for debate any more. The evidence is in. The threat isn’t “imminent.” It’s actively here.

Further, the threat isn’t a momentary phenomenon. It isn’t just here, but threatens indefinitely to remain here. No one knows what will be required to neutralize it, or if it can be neutralized. This means that American universities are under indefinite threat, just like Palestinian ones, or Hungarian ones, or Russian ones, or Egyptian ones, or South African ones under apartheid, or Pakistani ones under Zia ul Haq, or Filipino ones under Marcos, or American ones under McCarthyism, Jim Crow, or during the Red Scare. Or like intellectual life generally under the Spanish Inquisition, or the medieval universities under the repression of the Church. Pick your own favorite historical example. The similarities are there. 

We’re not talking about a few rough days or weeks or even years. Nor are we talking about salvation at the hands of the next Democrat who will miraculously win the next election. We’re talking about decades of repression of the kind that academics elsewhere have had to spend their whole lives fighting. Get used to it, gringos. You’re not special. 

Bullethole fired by Israeli military into academic building at Al Quds University (AQU), June 2016 (photo credit: Irfan Khawaja). This was a live M-16 round fired directly into the building while I was teaching at AQU, one of several incidents of indiscriminate shooting by the IDF, both on campus and just off. There were no armed threats anywhere in the vicinity. Such attacks were a commonplace, but almost never reported in the Western press. 

This means that the supposed “exception” to institutional neutrality is indefinitely in abeyance. There is no way, consistent even with the founding document of institutional neutrality (much less plain old common sense), to uphold institutional neutrality under current or foreseeable political conditions. In other words, by the argument of the Kalven Committee Report itself, universities now have an indefinite obligation to override institutional neutrality.

Anyone–any idiot–could have seen this coming, whether in 1967, or 2025, or 1915, or 1229. Anyone with even minimal knowledge of history and common sense could have predicted that universities would at some point come under threat, hence under Kalven’s supposed self-defense exception. Anyone could have seen that the threats might persist, and demand sustained non-neutral opposition (in both speech and action) that de facto overturned or swamped the doctrine itself. In fact, anyone with even that much knowledge would have seen that what life requires is vigilance toward the emergence of such threats that turns the whole idea of “institutional neutrality” into a dead letter from the outset. Threats are always developing. You can’t wait for them to achieve tidal dimensions before you respond. You have to pre-empt them before they become that big. But then the self-defense exception was never an exception to begin with. It’s a standing fact of life called politics.

It’s telling that contemporary discussions of institutional neutrality abstract almost entirely from historical issues or comparative politics, perpetually fixated on the fake “anti-Semitism” and “disorder” said to arise from the Gaza Solidarity Encampments of 2024. Set aside the wholesale mendacity of these accusations. Surely the doctrine of institutional neutrality should have broader application than a few elite universities in the US ca. 2023-2025?

If so, ask how plausible it is to apply institutional neutrality to other places, times, societies, and political circumstances. Should institutional neutrality have been practiced at the University of Paris in 1229? Or Fisk University in 1960? Or the University of the Western Cape in 1976? Or Punjab University in 1984? Or any of the elite British or American universities during the campaign for co-education? Or the Islamic University of Gaza today? The advocates of institutional neutrality, for all their empty talk about “viewpoint diversity,” aren’t interested in any of that. Their obvious aim is to shut activism down and preserve the cloistered, mummified “neutrality” to which they’ve become accustomed. 

Any idiot or collection of them could have grasped the practical unsustainability of institutional neutrality–with one notable exception. That exception is academics, or more precisely centrist academics. Leave it to them to sit around pretending that institutional neutrality made good, safe sense, to affirm the self-defense exception as a small concession to reality, but somehow not to figure out that reality might actually trigger it and require a sustained, non-neutral defense of academic life. People surrounded by the best libraries, librarians, databases, laboratories, and researchers–all of the infrastructure and trappings of the very best knowledge at humanity’s disposal–ended up being too dull to figure out that real-life political threats were developing on the Right and coming straight for higher education, demanding a response.

No, they were worried about the impending doom promised us by the Army of Trans Bathroom Users, the Legionnaires of Cancel Culture, and the Militias of Woke Talk and Safe Spaces. A recrudescence of right-wing fascism just seemed too hypothetical and alarmist to them to evoke comparable concern. Well, here we are facing a right-wing President, Executive, Congress, judiciary, federal law enforcement apparatus, military, most of the state legislatures, large swatches of the press, and large swatches of academia, none of which developed yesterday, last year, or the year before that. Now what?

I realize it’s probably too much to expect these people to figure out that once they confront the direct threats to their own institutions, the next obvious question concerns those institutions’ complicity in threats to others. But that is the next obvious question. Just today, a report has come out detailing Cornell University’s participation in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This follows a report by one of the same authors describing Princeton’s participation in the same, and Francesca Albanese’s report on “the economy of genocide,” describing widespread corporate complicity in the Israeli genocide, including corporations that fund and do business with major American universities.

I can see why people who thought they could remain institutionally neutral about Trump or the Right might want to be institutionally (and personally) neutral about their institutions’ complicity in Israel’s genocide. But once they finally grasp that they can’t remain institutionally neutral about Trump or ICE (and they obviously can’t), rest assured that we–we activists–have every intention of shoving the rest of the unpalatable truth down their throats. They’re going to have to learn the lesson that they can’t be neutral about genocide, either.

Illustration of an epicycle (credit: ML Watts, Wikipedia)

Institutional neutrality is a doctrine of self-willed collective stupidity of a kind tailored to the delusions and vanity of academics. There are days when I find myself mortified to be “working” on–taking seriously–a topic so devoutly dumb. Every element of the defense of institutional neutrality has holes in it large enough to fire a missile, drive a tank, or fly a drone through. I’ve made my way through the “literature” on the subject at this point, and have not encountered a single argument in defense of institutional neutrality that makes even minimal sense. The arguments one finds are simply the equivalent of Ptolemaic epicycles added to the epicycles previously in place to avoid the obvious: the doctrine has no clear rationale, makes no clear sense, and is susceptible of a long series of exception clauses that render the whole thing otiose.

What it has is institutional backing and a strong attachment to motivated reasoning. That’s it. But none of that can change the fact that as a matter of argument, there’s nothing there. The question is how long it will take for the academy to see that. It’s too late for Gaza. The further question is whether it’s too late as such, a topic on which I remain neutral. 

Thanks to Edwin Milan for useful conversations about academic life under Marcos, and to my cousins Saad and Salman Rafiq for having immersed me (however briefly) in Punjabi student activism under Zia. Thanks also to Sari Nusseibeh for wisdom on the Palestinian experience, and to Mich Ciurria for inadvertently inducing clarity about better and worse ways of writing about academic politics. None of them is responsible for anything I say here.