The FIRE & Co. Open Letter Calling for Institutional Neutrality at Universities

​The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, in collaboration with the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Heterodox Academy, has penned an open letter urging the trustees and regents of American universities to “put neutrality above politicized institutional statements that threaten open debate on college campuses.”
 
The letter is specifically addressed to the trustees of universities, who wield considerable power to set institutional policy.
 
“It is time for those entrusted with ultimate oversight authority for your institutions to restore truth-seeking as the primary mission of higher education by adopting a policy of institutional neutrality on social and political issues that do not concern core academic matters or institutional operations,” the letter says. “In recent years, colleges and universities have increasingly weighed in on social and political issues. This has led our institutions of higher education to become politicized and has created an untenable situation whereby they are expected to weigh in on all social and political issues."
 
The letter specifically calls on every university to adopt an institutional neutrality policy, much like that espoused by the Kalven Report of the University of Chicago authored in 1967. The letter quotes that report, noting that institutional neutrality is necessary “to pursue truth through ‘the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.’ And to accomplish this mission, ‘a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.’”
 
Greg Lukianoff, President and CEO of FIRE, said that “a top-down, father-knows-best mentality is absolutely no way to support the next generation of free thinkers. Students and faculty deserve the freedom to experiment with different perspectives and explore entirely new ways of thinking without the college claiming to have done all the thinking for them.”
 
The open letter follows on the heels of FIRE’s annual college free speech index, in which not a single university received a score higher than 79 out of 100. If this were a college class, that would be a C+ ranking. Many of America’s most prestigious institutions receive abysmal rankings. Harvard received a score of zero, which was rounded up because the index couldn’t accommodate negative numbers.
 
Protect The 1st applauds FIRE’s open letter to university trustees and regents. The state of free inquiry in American universities is dire. We need bold leadership to right the course. We look forward to further developments in this story.