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Dartmouth’s Bottom-Up Approach to Institutional Neutrality

Our principles of restraint apply to academic departments as well as the administration. Other schools should follow suit.

By Sian Leah Beilock. WSJ

Dec. 20, 2024 2:11 pm ET

This year’s campus unrest has led at least 20 American colleges and universities to commit to institutional neutrality. In doing so, they seek to realize the principles of the 1967 Kalven Report, which calls for universities to avoid divisive political and social action in favor of “the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.” But such administrative proclamations aren’t enough to establish American universities as hubs of free and open inquiry. Faculty must embrace institutional neutrality for their academic departments and institutes as well.

The recipe for changing the culture of an institution is well-documented in the corporate world. Mandates from the top rarely lead to long-lasting cultural movements. Rather, true change occurs when employees at all levels of the institution—not only leadership—actively help to define and drive it. This is the same for a university.

It is the faculty, not the president or board of trustees, that defines the culture and values of an academic institution. Faculty often commit their entire careers to one institution, whereas presidents now average less than six years in their jobs. Trustees regularly rotate, spending on average three to five years in their roles. Undergraduates typically spend four years on campus, and while alumni and donors are connected for a lifetime, they certainly aren’t the face of an institution or involved in the daily teaching and mentoring of students. An institutional commitment to teaching students how to think—not what to think—won’t emerge via top-down proclamation. It requires the support and participation of the faculty.

A president’s embrace of neutrality—or restraint, as we call it at Dartmouth—is a good thing. When presidents make statements about something unrelated to the academic mission of the university, they advance politics, not education. Not only do such statements have a chilling effect on discourse and intensify polarization on campus; they jeopardize an institution’s credibility and autonomy. Presidents often aren’t authorities on the situation at hand and have little of substance to offer on issues that trained experts have spent lifetimes studying.

But ending political statements by presidents isn’t enough. Dartmouth’s Principles of Institutional Restraint, developed by a faculty-led committee and rolled out on Dec. 10, spell out clear guidelines on restraint for academic departments and institutes that choose to speak as a unit. This is key to ensuring that our students, faculty and staff feel free to voice opinions contrary to the majority, creating the kind of brave learning environment where the best ideas prevail.

Consider a student interested in majoring in a certain subject. Upon going to the department homepage to discover course offerings, the student is slapped in the face with an official statement excoriating his own political ideology. How comfortable would that student feel taking a class in that department, let alone sharing his perspective in a class discussion or paper? Our Principles of Institutional Restraint permit departments to issue public statements only on limited issues directly related to their academic expertise. Rather than publishing these proclamations on their homepages, departments must create new webpages specifically dedicated to public statements and endorsements. This ensures that departments promote their academic missions, not their social or political beliefs.

Now consider a junior faculty member who doesn’t agree with the viewpoints of some of his senior colleagues. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression finds that untenured faculty face greater risk of termination when they express views or pursue research that is unpopular, compared with their tenured counterparts. Faculty in these vulnerable roles may feel pressure to sign department statements even if they disagree with them. Dartmouth’s Principles of Institutional Restraint limit department statements to topics that directly relate to their academic fields. Moreover, faculty voting on any department statement must be anonymous and result in a clear tally of the number of votes for and against.

A university needs to create a learning environment in which campus community members grapple with and debate difficult issues. The Kalven Report said it best: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” But it will take more than a top-down decree for universities to realize this mission. Only when institutional neutrality and restraint are embedded throughout American higher education will it be possible for campuses to become true havens of constructive dialogue and free inquiry.

Ms. Beilock is president of Dartmouth College.