America’s higher-education leaders have gotten into a number of bad habits, including the issuing of public statements about all kinds of developments in the country and even the world. That seems to be part of the incessant virtue signaling that leftists enjoy so much.

But there are good reasons why our higher-education institutions should not take public stances on such issues. In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Mark McNeilly makes the case for institutional neutrality.

He writes:

For decades, Chicago was the sole university that had committed to institutional neutrality. That changed in 2022 when University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill trustees passed a resolution adopting institutional neutrality. That action raised the visibility of the subject in academia, as it ran counter to the usual flurry of political statements being made by university leaders on what seemed like every political and social event or issue. Nevertheless, there are a myriad of good reasons for university leaders to follow UNC’s lead and adopt institutional neutrality, as I laid out in this article on the Heterodox Academy blog.

The big reason for institutional neutrality is that it allows faculty members and students more security to speak for themselves. If, e.g., Professor Smith wants to declare that Hamas is right in wanting to reclaim the land it says has been “colonized” by Israel, fine, but the university that employs him should not take a side.

Read the whole thing.