Harvard will refrain from controversial statements on public policy issues | News

Updated May 28, 2024 at 12:34 pm

After months of struggling with a campus divided by a polarizing debate over the Israel-Hamas war, Harvard announced Tuesday that the university and its leadership will refrain from taking official positions on controversial public policy issues.

The university’s new position follows a report prepared by the faculty-led Institutional Voice working group, which recommended that leadership “not issue official statements on public matters that do not directly impact the core function of the university.” Harvard interim president Alan M. Garber ’76 wrote in an email that he accepted the task force’s recommendations, which were also endorsed by the Harvard Corporation, the university’s highest governing body.

“There will be cases in which reasonable people will disagree about whether an issue is directly related to a core function of the university,” the report said. “The university’s policy in such situations should be to avoid official statements.”

According to the working group, these rules will apply to all University administrators and members of governing bodies, as well as deans, heads of departments and faculty councils.

The new guidelines were published just months after former Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned following sharp criticism of her initial statement following Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. The university hopes to never repeat this new position.

The Institutional Voice’s recommendations bring Harvard closer to peer universities that have adopted a position of institutional neutrality, but the task force’s report and Garber’s statement were careful to emphasize that the University would not be neutral.

“Our report demonstrates that the University is fundamentally committed to a non-neutral set of values, particularly achieving truth through experiment, open inquiry and debate,” said Noah R. Feldman ’92, who co-chaired the working group and serves as a professor at Harvard Law School.

“The university is under regular attack today, as is truth itself,” Feldman added. “This report indicates that the University should not be neutral on such an important issue of the future of universities.”

The announcement is part of Garber’s broader effort to steer Harvard out of the crisis and protect the university from the type of attacks it faced last fall. Garber also established an open inquiry working group and twin presidential task forces to combat anti-Semitism and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias.

The Institutional Voice task force’s report never mentioned the controversy that led to Gay’s resignation or mentioned her by name. Still, the report included several thinly veiled references to last fall’s events, when more than 30 student groups signed a statement holding Israel “totally responsible” for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on the country, forcing Gay to publicly distance himself and the University from the statement.

“Individuals at the university, in the exercise of their academic freedom, sometimes make statements that raise serious disagreements,” the report said. “When this happens, the university should make clear that it does not speak on behalf of the university and that no one is authorized to speak on behalf of the university except university leadership.”

Just as Gay faced backlash from both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian Harvard affiliates, the group noted that any statement on a controversial public issue was likely to anger someone.

“Because few, if any, world events can be completely isolated from conflicting viewpoints, issuing official statements of sympathy runs the risk of alienating some members of the community by expressing implicit solidarity with others,” the group wrote.

In his Tuesday email, co-signed by 17 other top administrators, Garber wrote that “the process of translating these principles into concrete practice will obviously require time and experience.”

The group, overseen by Harvard’s interim president John F. Manning ’82 and led by Feldman and philosophy professor Alison J. Simmons, concluded in less than two months that Harvard officials should not make the statements even though the University was planning to take action to considering institutional neutrality at least from February.

While the report will be a document that Garber and future university leaders can refer to when pressed to issue a public statement, the report’s carefully worded language also gives administrators ample flexibility to issue statements when they deem it necessary.

While administrators should not make statements on behalf of the University regarding external events, the statement explains that some centers and clinics advocating for particular policies should continue to do so, but should not “pretend to speak on behalf of the University or to go beyond their knowledge.” specialized” or “unreasonably expand your area of ​​specialization.”

The institutional voice group is the first of four task forces deployed by Garber to address controversies surrounding the university and make recommendations. Although the co-chairs of the task forces on anti-Semitism and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias said they would release their recommendations in the spring, the groups later pushed the schedule to the fall.

The implementation of an effective neutrality statement is Garber’s first major policy change since he clarified rules and restrictions on protests in January. The relative speed of the working group’s deliberations suggests that the policy of refraining from speaking enjoyed broad support among University stakeholders.

The statement specifically does not address the University’s investment and divestment decisions, which are at the heart of the wave of pro-Palestinian campus protests and the 20-day encampment at Harvard Yard.

In 2020, then-Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow committed the university to phasing out its investments in fossil fuels on the grounds that “climate change is the defining issue of our time.” At an April 30 town hall meeting, Garber told faculty that divesting from weapons is different from fossil fuels because there is no consensus on the issue.

“There is a big difference between an issue where there is near unanimity about whether we should invest in a particular asset class, as was the case with fossil fuels, and the situation we find ourselves in today,” Garber said, according to a transcript from a participant .

Feldman said the task force does not consider financial decisions to be “verbal statements” and that the university could still choose to divest under the new policy.

“It is entirely appropriate for the University to clarify its position on the investment or divestment,” Feldman said. “But we don’t think our recommendations about institutional voice dictate the answer.”

“This is an independent decision of the University,” he added.

Institutional neutrality became a serious topic of conversation in October, with many contributors pointing to the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report as a model for avoiding future controversy.

Feldman said Kalven’s report is more than 50 years old and does not accurately reflect “the way this issue should be considered today.”

“Most people today do not believe it is possible or desirable for a university to be truly neutral,” Feldman said. “The university, by its very existence and by doing what it does, necessarily holds some non-neutral beliefs and values.”

“The university is not value neutral,” Feldman added.

— Staff writer Emma H. ​​Haidar can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @HaidarEmma.

— Staff writer Cam E. Kettles can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @cam_kettles or on Threads @camkettles.