Campuses should embrace political neutrality
Corey Walker
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Universities, which are usually quick to issue statements addressing pressing social concerns such as the death of George Floyd or the Dobbs decision on abortion, kept their lips sealed in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel. Their sluggish reaction to the Oct. 7 attacks, compounded with an unremitting barrage of anti-Israel student protests, incited a wave of anger and backlash by prominent donors and alumni, many of whom are Jewish.
Former U.S. ambassador and billionaire University of Pennsylvania donor Jon Huntsman blasted his alma mater and vowed to stop donating.
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“The University’s silence in the face of reprehensible and historic Hamas evil against the people of Israel (when the only response should be outright condemnation) is a new low,” Huntsman said in a letter issued to Penn President Liz Magill and obtained by the Daily Pennsylvanian. “Silence is antisemitism, and antisemitism is hate, the very thing higher ed was built to obviate.”
Huntsman expected Penn to deliver a public statement in defense of Israel. Given universities’ tendencies to weigh in on the cultural moment, this expectation might not have been unreasonable.
Former Penn President Amy Gutman wrote a letter declaring “Black Lives Matter” in 2016 and then issued another letter lamenting the “tragic and senseless” death of George Floyd in 2020. Penn’s nursing school authored a statement in support of abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Magill released a statement acknowledging the terrorist attacks against Israel a week after the events occurred. But Magill’s statement, which condemned the “terrorist assault” on the Jewish state, did not do much to mollify the donors, who noted that the statement was not forceful enough in its condemnation of the campus problems with antisemitism and the attack on Israel. Penn has continued to suffer from a steady exodus of its financial backers.
Penn is far from the only university facing this problem. Other elite schools such as Harvard University, Columbia University, and Stanford University have seen donors cut support over their tepid responses to Hamas’s attack on Israel.
On the other end of the spectrum, left-wing student groups and faculty have pressured the schools to declare support for the Palestinian cause and Arab students. A group of Harvard students issued a demand to the university to call for a “ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas and declare that anti-Zionism doesn’t equate to antisemitism. At Stanford, a group of students held a sit-in to demand the university condemn Israel’s military operations in Gaza, endorse a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and join the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement.
Universities have found themselves stuck between siding with their progressive student body and donors with more conservative views on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Our higher educational institutions would not have found themselves in this position had they not insisted on consistently taking left-wing political stances. In short, this is a problem they created themselves.
The solution to schools’ headaches is to stop taking public stances on controversial topics. The job of our universities is to teach students how to think, not what to think. When any school signals support for a social cause, it is indicating that there’s a singular correct position on that cause. Schools’ insistence on supporting far-left causes has mistakenly signaled to liberal students that they will jump on the anti-Israel bandwagon to maintain their “woke” credibility.
University administrators are finally facing heat for their hesitation to condemn on-campus antisemitism. On Tuesday, Harvard President Claudine Gay stumbled through a congressional hearing on antisemitism, in which she said that calls for “genocide” against Jewish people require “context” as to whether they violate the school’s conduct policies. Gay released a statement the day following, clarifying that genocidal calls against Jews are “vile” and “have no place at Harvard.”
Perhaps Gay and other university presidents would have easier jobs if they stopped issuing statements altogether. If they stopped weighing in on every societal issue, maybe they would not have been dragged to testify in front of Congress over why they won’t do the same for Jews.
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Universities would be wise to adopt the Kalven Report, a report issued by University of Chicago faculty in 1967, which advised the school to adopt a neutral stance on pressing social concerns. The committee wisely concluded that the institution taking a stance would inadvertently stymie discussion of dissenting or unpopular viewpoints. The university should be the host of all opinions, whether they be liberal or conservative. However, the university should not issue the opinions itself.
The answer to Jewish donors’ frustrations is not to coerce universities into making pro-Israel statements or including Jews in DEI programming. It is to abolish these practices altogether.
Corey Walker is a Washington, D.C.-based reporter who focuses on institutional capture, education, and public safety.