Consider this list of challenges on campuses from recent months:
- Purdue University will no longer distribute its longtime student newspaper, The Purdue Exponent, on campus. The university also revoked parking privileges for student journalists and directed the paper to remove “Purdue” from its name.
- The University of Florida prohibited faculty from using their university email or any other university communications resource to discuss topics that “polarize or divide society among political, ideological, moral, or religious beliefs.”
- The University of Texas at Austin blocked its Graduate Students Union from considering two resolutions that condemn the state’s DEI ban.
These episodes all have two things in common. First, they all threaten academic freedom and free speech.
And second, all of them were in response to state laws mandating the adoption of institutional neutrality.
We raise these examples in response to a recent opinion piece published by Heterodox Academy that takes issue with PEN America’s 2025 America’s Censored Campuses report. In that report, we count state-mandated institutional neutrality policies as “Indirect Forms of Educational Censorship.”
PEN America first articulated our definition of “indirect censorship” in 2023: “Rather than simply taking away faculty members’ right to speak, many conservative lawmakers are going after the support structure that makes faculty speech possible, imposing direct political and ideological control over university governance.” In addition to state-mandated institutional neutrality, we also count as indirect censorship legislation that eliminates faculty tenure, abolishes faculty senates, asserts state control over the process of determining college curricula without faculty input, and so forth.
None of these kinds of bills directly censors faculty or students by prohibiting certain topics, in the way we have seen other laws do, such as those that bar teaching a list of so-called “divisive concepts.” Nevertheless, we assign these provisions to this indirect category because they cast a chilling effect that threatens the freedoms to speak, teach and learn on campuses.
Heterodox, of course, is a proponent of institutional neutrality policies, viewing them as important bulwarks of academic freedom and free speech. By “[l]umping institutional neutrality with other true censorship acts,” it writes, PEN America “collapses a crucial distinction.”
We disagree.
At its core, the concept of institutional neutrality supposes that when academic leaders stake out a position on some controversial topic, they run the risk of silencing those with dissenting views. Therefore, it is in the best interest of both academic freedom and free speech for those leaders to fall silent instead – that is, to be institutionally neutral on matters unrelated to the university and its core mission.
It is unclear whether institutional neutrality policies work as advertised (some of us have our doubts), but Heterodox is quite correct to distinguish between those policies and the outright censorship of faculty and students that it, like PEN America, deplores. When university leaders prevent a professor from discussing a topic in class, that is censorship. But when those university leaders decide, after careful consideration, to refrain from addressing that same topic themselves, that is something else entirely.
However, matters are rarely so straightforward. Modern universities are too complex. What constitutes a “university leader,” and when do we know they are speaking in their official role as opposed to in some other capacity? What about units and individuals further down the hierarchy, like department chairs? And how should universities define what constitutes controversial topics on which they should refrain from speaking, what has been called “matters of public concern” or “issues of the day”?
Heterodox’s position paper on institutional neutrality would allow universities to speak out when their “mission” is at stake. What is that mission and who decides? Can different parts of a university have different missions, for instance an academic department versus a university medical center? These questions have no easy answer. As a result, neutrality policies require careful articulation if they are not to have a chilling effect and cause more problems than they solve.
When it comes to state legislation, our chief concern is that codifying neutrality in law, and imposing this expectation on universities, is a recipe for censorship. Not every such policy will lead to censorship, but they do lead to ambiguity. And when lurking behind that ambiguity is the threat of government funding cuts, civil liability, public jawboning, and loss of employment, universities will censor their faculty and students. This is not hypothetical (see this article’s opening list) and it is not an accident. On the contrary, such vagueness is a deliberate strategy that lawmakers have enthusiastically deployed for many years now, and with terrible repercussions for campus free speech.
The potential for abuse and misapplication is simply too great when laws are vaguely worded and harshly enforced – as they almost always have been for the past four years. We have been consistent on this point, not only concerning neutrality mandates from the Right, but also efforts to mandate vague conceptions of diversity from the Left, such as regulations in California’s community colleges in 2023 that PEN America said similarly posed a “major threat to academic freedom.”
In truth, there are all manner of academic policies that could be compatible with academic freedom in theory. Our position is to treat those imposed at legislative gunpoint with enormous skepticism — not because we oppose all DEI or think institutions cannot set policies concerning when they will or will not speak. We are simply realistic about how universities are likely to respond to the force of law, and are already seeing that unfold in the success some state legislatures are having censoring college teaching.
