After a 2023-2024 school year that can only be described as an “annus horribilis,” Harvard has taken a major step in shoring up its institutional reputation with an announcement that it will no longer weigh in on issues outside the university.
In a recent letter to the Harvard University community, interim President Alan Garber and other university administrators announced that the institution’s leaders would no longer make public statements “‘that do not directly affect the university’s core function’ as an academic institution.”
The decision came at the recommendation of an Institutional Voice working group set up by Garber to study the issue after the institution was entangled in national controversy due to its public statements following the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israel.
“It reasons that when the University ‘speaks officially on matters outside its institutional area of expertise,’ such statements risk compromising the ‘integrity and credibility’ of our academic mission and may undermine open inquiry and academic freedom by making ‘it more difficult for some members of the community to express their views when they differ from the university’s official position,'” the university leaders wrote, quoting the working group’s report.
For Harvard to come to this conclusion is a monumental step. A major folly of discourse on current events has been the expectation that institutions and organizations must weigh in on every single salient political issue and event.
In 2020, colleges and universities, companies and corporations, professional organizations, and religious groups all lined up to offer their words of support for the riots that plagued the country following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It was an expectation that all must offer words of support, and if this expectation was not met, it led to public outcry and calls for boycotts.
Three years later, as campus protests erupted in support of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack against Hamas, Harvard and then-President Claudine Gay again felt obligated to issue a public statement on the matter that only succeeded in embroiling the Ivy League school in further controversy.
Harvard has never been under any obligation to issue a statement in response to current events. It is not a government institution, political party, or policy think tank. It exists to provide students with an education that empowers them to succeed in life, not share its musings over riots and terrorist attacks halfway around the world.
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To provide institutional comment on an issue of public interest typically requires the institution to align itself with one side or another in a given conflict of ideas. It is a fundamentally political action that opens the institution up to political criticism. And for a school that markets itself as an institution open to all ideas and viewpoints, issuing political statements severely undermines this image.
By holding its institutional tongue and refraining from speaking out on current events and issues, Harvard may yet rehabilitate the partisan image it has cultivated for years. It is a policy that other colleges and universities would do well to emulate.