On October 8, 2025, PEN America wrote to the University of Minnesota Regents to state our concern regarding the Board’s March 14, 2025 resolution, which barred institutional statements from academic departments and other centers on campus, “addressing matters of public concern or public interest.” The resolution followed pressures on the University from state legislators to adopt a form of ‘institutional neutrality.’
PEN America believes that colleges and universities should choose institutional policies for themselves in consultation with faculty, staff, and students. The concept of institutional neutrality is something that requires careful articulation, and the adoption of such policies, what they should encompass, and how they should be implemented are challenging questions that require nuance and care on the part of administrators, if such rules are not to become de facto forms of censorship.
PEN America urges the “Board and President to re-engage with the findings of the Task Force, and work collaboratively and transparently toward developing clearer guidance for unit statements, rather than letting the status quo continue. Unquestionably such policies will be improved by the input of multiple stakeholders, and grounding their development in shared governance practices is the best way to do so.”
What follows is the content of that letter in full.
October 8, 2025
Dear University of Minnesota System Board of Regents:
We are writing from PEN America regarding the Board’s March 14, 2025 resolution on unit statements. We read with great concern a report recently published by the UMN Twin Cities Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (UMTC AAUP), which attests how the resolution’s vague language has led to selective enforcement, and concerns from faculty about a chilled climate for academic speech on campus.
Our intention in writing is to be constructive. We acknowledge the immense pressures universities are under, and the varied attacks we are seeing on the foundations of scholarly knowledge. In this context, we believe it is vital that institutions like UMN continue to protect their faculty’s academic freedom, and maintain robust channels for public engagement. As such, we are urging the Board to revisit and revise this policy at the earliest opportunity.
At PEN America we have been working on campus free speech issues since 2016, with a focus on how institutions advance freedom of expression and inclusion in tandem. We partner with colleges and universities to help ensure they remain vibrant sites for the exchange of ideas and the production of knowledge, consulting widely to develop practical professional guidance and educational resources, and advocating for political and intellectual independence of academia from the state.
In the past two years, we have watched as decades-old debates about “institutional neutrality” have reanimated across the sector, in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Our concern is that while the theory of public communications articulated in the Kalven Report and elsewhere offers one way to support viewpoint diversity on campus, its implementation is rarely so straightforward, particularly given the sheer complexity and diversity of functions, units, programs, centers, etc., that exist in today’s universities. How institutional leaders delineate ‘matters of public concern’ or ‘issues of the day’ about which their institutions will refrain from commenting, is something that requires careful articulation, if such rules are not to become de facto forms of censorship, owing to the abstract and vague nature of “institutional neutrality” as a concept. Further, it is inevitable that introducing blanket restrictions concerning both faculty speech and institutional speech will alter previous practices, and require considered guidance.
Unfortunately, the report from the UMTC AAUP, based on testimony received from faculty, staff, and students across the university, makes clear that these very challenges have been unfolding at UMN this year. According to the report, there has been what appears to be a pattern of selective enforcement of the Board’s resolution, including the removal of a range of previously published unit statements by faculty from UMN websites, the cancellation of some academic events, and opaque processes of review that have not been well-documented, and have left no room for appeal. As the UMTC AAUP report explains, the vague language of the resolution and lack of documented policies or transparency has led to fear of reprisals and the chilling of faculty expression, particularly when it comes to applying the resolution to different kinds of academic work products. The facts presented mean that while the resolution may have been rationalized as a way to support the expression of diverse viewpoints, in practice it is often having the opposite impact.
As an organization that has been acutely concerned about rising political and legislative intervention in higher education in recent years, it is also especially troubling that a key catalyst for the review of the issue of institutional speech overall at UMN came from state legislators, 26 of whom wrote to Interim President Ettinger last year, expressing “frustration” that the university had not removed statements critical of Israel from official university websites at their request. From our view, it is dangerous for university leaders to craft policies at the behest of individual legislators to censor faculty speech, as it violates the political independence of the academy that is a hallmark of American democracy.
Finally, it is also apparent that in adopting the resolution in March, the Regents acted contrary to the report by the President’s Task Force on Institutional Speech, which Interim President Ettinger had formed in May 2024 to make policy recommendations for the university on these issues. The Task Force recommended that unit statements be allowed, albeit with detailed procedural guidance and transparent policies. It remains unclear why the Regents did not engage with the Task Force’s recommendations at its March meeting, which had been developed through wide consultation with university stakeholders.
At present, we urge the Board to take seriously the concerns raised by faculty in the UMTC AAUP report. The infractions and ambiguities documented there should be enough to give you significant pause about the impact of the March resolution. The way forward, we believe, is for the Board and President to re-engage with the findings of the Task Force, and work collaboratively and transparently toward developing clearer guidance for unit statements, rather than letting the status quo continue. Unquestionably such policies will be improved by the input of multiple stakeholders, and grounding their development in shared governance practices is the best way to do so.
We recognize that these issues can be fraught and that universities and their Boards must balance multiple considerations. However, it is our strongly held conviction that all universities, including UMN, must resist political pressures to adopt policies of ‘neutrality’ that serve to muzzle faculty speech. Our universities, and our democracy, will be better served by policies that create more space for speech, not less, recognizing that knowledge and the interrogation of ideas can only flourish in an environment of openness. We do not advocate that campuses and units issue statements on every public controversy, however we do believe that scholars should be able to express germane points of view through university channels, which showcase their expertise and inform the public.
We believe UMN can still be a national leader on this issue, and chart a better path forward. If we can be of assistance in this matter, we hope you will not hesitate to be in touch.
