Universities are trying a new strategy on Israel and Gaza: Say nothing

When universities issued statements about Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks and the war in Gaza last year, many led to intense blowback, donor revolts and — in some cases — high-profile leaders resigning. No statement, it seemed, was good enough to avoid criticism.

So going forward, many of them won’t say anything at all.

“The practice of issuing statements supports some members of our community while disregarding others, intentionally or otherwise,” Maud Mandel, the president of Williams College and a Jewish Studies scholar, wrote in a letter to campus last week explaining her own decision to remain neutral after Oct. 7 — a decision she has now codified into college policy. “It makes some issues visible while leaving many more unseen.”

She wasn’t the only one opting to opt out. This week the University of Pennsylvania, Barnard College and the University of Alabama’s campuses were some of the latest schools to announce they would institute a broad policy of “institutional neutrality” on world events that do not directly affect the populations of their universities. Yale University, too, announced it would be exploring whether to adopt a similar policy, convening a committee of seven professors to conduct listening sessions and collect feedback on the question.

These schools join around two dozen others that already have codified some policy of political neutrality, according to the campus free-speech organization FIRE, which supports adopting such policies. Most of them have only been implemented within the past few months. And Jewish leaders, many of whom pushed for strongly-worded university statements in the wake of Oct. 7, are divided on the issue.

In a statement to JTA, Hillel International CEO Adam Lehman called institutional neutrality “a good step forward in returning campuses to their core missions of education, learning and research.”

But, he said, the policy “is not a panacea that solves the problems of harassment, intimidation and discrimination directed at Jewish students.”

The list of schools that adopted a neutrality policy this year includes elite universities such as Harvard, Columbia, Stanford and the University of Southern California, all schools that faced significant unrest over campus responses to Oct. 7. It also includes some large public universities and systems, including Syracuse, and the University of Texas. The University of North Carolina adopted such a policy in July 2023.

“First, the integrity and credibility of the institution are compromised when the university speaks officially on matters outside its institutional area of expertise,” read Harvard’s statement, published by a task force co-chaired by law professor Noah Feldman, a prominent commentator on American Jewish affairs.

“Second, 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 statement said.

Neutrality is also the word of the moment for closely-watched university investments in Israel. The University of Minnesota recently said its investing strategy would “adopt a position of neutrality” and that “investment decisions continue to be based on financial criteria already defined in policy.”

The statement explicitly rejected a student activist-led campaign to divest from Israel, with Jane Mayeron, the board chair, saying “it is clear our community is divided on the topic.” The board resolved it would pursue divestment policies “in very rare circumstances” and only when “there is broad consensus regarding the request within the University community of students, faculty, staff and alumni.”

In announcing their embrace of neutrality, many of the schools did not explicitly mention Israel or protests over its war in Gaza. Many cited the Kalven Report, a 1967 University of Chicago paper that provided the framework for modern academic neutrality, arguing, “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”

Yet the context is undeniably the university responses to the Oct. 7 attacks. Those were closely scrutinized and often vilified by Jewish and pro-Palestinian stakeholders alike, who contrasted them with far less ambiguous statements the same schools made on other matters, including support of Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

At Harvard, for example, then-president Claudine Gay was harshly criticized for waiting two days to put out a statement condemning the attacks. In the meantime, several student groups issued a statement blaming Israel entirely for them. Gay would put out several more statements and videos condemning Hamas and vowing to fight antisemitism, including one condeming the phrase “From the river to the sea,” which pro-Palestinian activists say is a call for liberation and pro-Israel activists charge is a call for Israel’s destruction. That statement by Gay led to its own backlash from pro-Palestinian faculty.

After months of sustained criticism and a widely derided appearance before Congress, Gay stepped down from the presidency in January. In May her Jewish replacement, Alan Garber, announced the university would no longer “issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.”

Jewish groups alongside Hillel aren’t speaking in a unified voice on institutional neutrality. The Anti-Defamation League, which has factored university statements on Israel into the group’s controversial “report cards” on campus antisemitism, is maintaining its own form of neutrality: It declined to comment when contacted for this article.

But other Jewish activists in the campus space are against institutional neutrality. Speaking to Jewish Insider, Mark Yudof, chair of the pro-Israel Academic Engagement Network and former president of the University of California system, said the idea had “iffyness” when it came to Israel because what happens there does directly affect Jewish members of campus.

“If you’ve had assaults of women, racist misbehavior, if Jewish students can’t cross campus safely, I expect presidents to speak out about that and I don’t want institutional neutrality to say they can’t look out for the best interests of students, faculty and staff,” Yudof said. At least one Jewish college president, Oakland University head Ora Pescovitz, said she opposed neutrality.

Many pro-Palestinian campus voices, meanwhile, are also opposed to institutional neutrality. Some argue that universities have already declared themselves not to be neutral on Israel because of their refusal to divest from it.

“It has enabled college presidents to foreclose public debate, while draping themselves in the mantle of a lofty moral principle,” Anton Ford, a University of Chicago professor who has advocated for his school to divest from Israel, wrote in an op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education in May. “In the midst of a national protest movement, nothing could be more convenient.”

Some schools have paired their newfound neutrality with other initiatives that support Jewish students. Days before announcing its own neutrality policy, Penn announced the creation of an Office of Religious and Ethnic Inclusion. It is designed to respond to Title VI complaints such as the ones filed against the university on behalf of Jewish students in recent months, in addition to instances of Islamophobia.

Even schools that had already embraced institutional neutrality before Oct. 7 found themselves wading into the dialogue on Israel. Notably, Michael Schill, the Jewish president of Northwestern University, condemned Hamas after Oct. 7, even as he used the same statement to endorse a policy of institutional neutrality.

At the time, Schill said he was speaking as a “citizen, Jew and human being. I didn’t give up those parts of me when I assumed the presidency of Northwestern.” Months later, Schill was pilloried by Jewish groups including the ADL, who called for his resignation for brokering a deal with his school’s pro-Palestinian encampment; Northwestern this week announced an investigation of a faculty member who took part in the encampment, and said it is canceling his classes for the semester.