Harvard University will no longer issue universitywide statements on current events that do not have a direct impact on the institution.
The Institutional Voice Working Group at Harvard University issued its report and recommendations to the university after being established in April to “consider whether and when our institution should speak on public issues.” Harvard confirmed to the Washington Examiner it plans to accept the recommendations from the report and implement them as university policy.
“The university and its leaders should not, however, issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function,” the report said.
The policy change will ease pressure on the university to issue statements on current events, which can be divisive. In recent weeks, higher education institutions have been in the national spotlight for reports of antisemitism on campus and universities grappling with pro-Palestinian encampment protests.
Empathetic sentiments, such as the ones issued following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and sympathies for the victims of the Hamas Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, will no longer be issued by Harvard.
“The main point of the report is that the university’s leadership can and should speak out on anything relevant to the core function of the university, which is creating an environment suitable for free, open inquiry, teaching, and research,” Noah Feldman, a chairman of the Institutional Voice Working Group, told the Harvard Gazette.
“That environment is threatened these days, and we need to defend it,” he continued. “At the same time, the university as an institution should not make official statements on issues outside its core function. Harvard isn’t a government. It shouldn’t have a foreign policy or a domestic policy.”
Feldman said the policy will apply to all those who are authorized to speak on behalf of the university: the president, provost, deans, and other administrative leaders. Faculty members will still be able to speak on subjects on behalf of themselves.
The report set out three reasons for its recommendations. It said that when issuing sympathetic statements, “the integrity and credibility of the institution are compromised.”
The second reason pointed to increasing polarization in “the era of social media.”
“If the university and its leaders become accustomed to issuing official statements about matters beyond the core function of the university, they will inevitably come under intense pressure to do so from multiple, competing sides on nearly every imaginable issue of the day,” the report said.
The final reason said that in the interest of diversity of viewpoints, choosing a side could undermine “the inclusivity of the university community” and “make it more difficult for some members of the community to express their views when they differ from the university’s official position.”
The report also detailed what should happen if the university is pressured to issue a public statement, saying, “The university should refer publicly to its policy.”
“It should clarify that the reason for its silence is the belief that the purpose of the university is best served by speaking only on matters directly relevant to its function and not by issuing declarations on other matters,” the report said.
Harvard is not adopting the University of Chicago’s principle of “institutional neutrality” in which the university commits to staying out of political and social debates. Other schools, such as Stanford University and Northwestern University, announced shortly after the Hamas attack on Israel that they would adopt the “institutional neutrality” policy.
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The report concluded that Harvard as an institution is not neutral, but the new policy will allow the school to “endure and flourish” even when faced with “intense public controversy.”
“[Harvard] values open inquiry, expertise, and diverse points of view, for these are the means through which it pursues truth,” the report said. “The policy of speaking officially only on matters directly related to the university’s core function, not beyond, serves those values.”