John Hopkins University adopts ‘institutional neutrality’ policy after anti-Israel protests

Anti-Zionist students escalated their demands for an anti-Israel boycott by illegally occupying a section of the campus for 13 days.

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

John Hopkins University (JHU) announced that it has adopted a policy of “institutional neutrality” and will not weigh in on topics outside its direct “interest or function,” which ostensibly means it will not issue public statements on contentious political issues.

The decision came after JHU was one of many US universities to experience raucous anti-Israel protests on campus last spring semester.

“The dedication to restraint applies to university statements from the president, provost, and deans,” the university said on Thursday.

“It does not apply to individual faculty members in their scholarly or personal capacity. In fact, one intent of the commitment is to extend the broadest possible scope to the views and expressions of faculty, bolstering faculty in the exercise of their freedom to share insights and perspectives without being concerned about running counter to an ‘institutional’ stance.”

It continued, “Moving forward, in considering whether and when to issue a statement, university leaders will determine whether the issue clearly pertains to the ‘direct, concrete, and demonstrable interest or function of the university.’ Determinations will ultimately fall to an internal working group including senior members of the president’s and provost’s staff.”

Coming just a week before the start of its new academic year, the policy addresses a bitter debate in academia over what stance, if any, universities should take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israel’s war with Hamas.

Anti-Zionist scholar-activists and students have implored administrators to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, while Zionist and pro-Israel forces have insisted on their denouncing anti-Zionist speech that is antisemitic.

In the spring, anti-Zionist students escalated their demands for an anti-Israel boycott by illegally occupying a section of the campus for 13 days.

At the time, JHU pledged that a “petition for divestment will be considered, pursuant to existing policies,” and a committee convened to study it in June.

Thursday’s institutional neutrality statement arrived before the committee announced its recommendations.

With it, JHU follows Harvard University, Vanderbilt University, and other institutions that have opted against becoming enmeshed in interminable debates.

However, some maintain that doing so abdicates the university’s responsibility to stand for principles which hold together the fabric of Western civilization.

“These institutional neutrality policies sound wholesome in the abstract, but I fear they are often just attempts to by college administrators to avoid taking a stand against antisemites, communists, and other radicals who attempt to hijack the university’s credibility to advance their own agendas,” Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), told The Algemeiner on Monday.

Wood, the author of several books and hundreds of articles on higher education, has weighed in on the matter before, most recently in a report titled “The Illusion on Institutional Neutrality” which was published in April.

The concept, he says, dates back to 1915, but it reached widespread popularity during the Vietnam War, when the University of Chicago issued the “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action” in 1967.

The previous year, over 400 university students held a “sit in” to protest president George Beadle’s decision to provide, with permission, the US Army information — class rank and grade point averages, for example — about students who had registered for the draft.

From that controversy emerged what is today known as the “Kalven Report,” the work of a committee chaired by University of Chicago law professor Harry Kalven Jr.

It famously said, “There is no mechanism by which [the university] can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives … The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity.”

While Wood’s NAS and other organizations once supported its conclusion, Wood argues that it is today insufficient for addressing the threat academic antisemitism poses to the university, which, he says, cannot afford to remain neutral on the issue of anti-Jewish hatred.

“Institutional neutrality empowers the mob by giving the activists of popular causes the assurance that the university’s officials will not get in their way,” Wood argued.

“Activists of less favored causes are seldom treated with such leniency. University officials can easily ignore institutional neutrality to run critics of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ off campus, but they seldom if ever stand up to a large group of excited proponents of, say, Hamas apologists.”

He continued, “The ideal has proved delusional, and as a weapon it is easily used against reform as for it. We must call for universities to espouse substantive ideals of truth, liberty, and citizenship, even though they cut directly against the ideological commitments of many of higher education’s administrators and faculty members. This is a challenging task. But Hamas’ massacre of Israelis [on Oct. 7] has stripped us of many illusions … We must say forthrightly what virtues we wish our universities to champion. And if we wish our universities to fight once more on the side of the angels, the swiftest way to that goal is to teach them how to speak with courage by speaking so ourselves.”

As The Algemeiner previously reported, Harvard University followed its adoption of institutional neutrality with several policy decisions which, according to critics, protected those who uttered antisemitic speech.

In July, it “downgraded” disciplinary sanctions it levied against several pro-Hamas protesters it punished for illegally occupying Harvard Yard, where they called for a genocide of Jews in Israel for five weeks and created a sign which depicted President Alan Garber as an antisemitic caricature.

Also, the university has chosen to contest a lawsuit which accuses it of doing little to stop a wave of antisemitic incidents on campus, one of which saw a Jewish student surrounded by a mob students screaming “Shame!” into his ears.

Antisemitisminstitutional neutralityJohn Hopkins University