Among the most quietly invidious developments occurring in US colleges and universities over the last two years is the consolidation of the Right’s appropriation of the language of “institutional neutrality.” This novel appropriation takes the form, most visibly, of an attack on a fundamental aspect of academic freedom—its associational nature. Recent developments at the University of Minnesota illustrate what is at stake in the struggles over associational speech. On March 25 of this year, the assembly of the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts (CLA), the college’s main policymaking and legislative body, voted unanimously, with three abstentions, in support of a resolution on “Associational Speech and Academic Freedom.” The resolution states that CLA community members engaged in academic activity will continue to assert their “constitutional rights of free speech not only as individuals in isolation, but as groups of individuals freely associating both within and across academic and non-academic units.”
The CLA assembly resolution was a fitting and necessary rejoinder to a resolution by the UMN board of regents. On March 14, the board voted 9–3 in favor of a resolution prohibiting departments, centers, and other university units from making statements about public issues without authorization from the president. From April 1, the university administration began implementing this resolution, first seeking to take down statements on unit websites about the Gaza genocide, and then, slightly later—likely in response to a caustic observation from a faculty member to senior administrators about this being a classic case of the “Palestine exception” to academic freedom (which historian Ussama Makdisi has recently analyzed brilliantly)—also about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The latter action led to a resignation in protest by Howard Louthan, the director of the Center for Austrian Studies.
The board’s resolution and the subsequent actions by the university administration are not as headline-grabbing as the Trump administration’s harsh attacks on universities. But structurally, and in the long-term, such changes may be as consequential: While the Trump administration’s attacks on the university are from without, the board resolution and similar initiatives are attacks on the university from within. Indeed, the resolution is an especially restrictive manifestation of the current trend among universities to adopt institutional neutrality policies.
By itself, as the AAUP’s February 2025 statement On Institutional Neutrality underscores, “Institutional neutrality is neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it.” What matters are the specifics of the “various choices that get lumped together and often obscured under the heading of institutional neutrality.”
And the specifics in this case are especially troubling, as in most other cases where institutional neutrality has been adopted in the last few years. Until recently, most policies have, in the spirit of the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, focused on limiting the speech of administrators. Critics have long pointed out that to describe this as “institutional neutrality” is already to mischaracterize it; as Shannon Dea notes in a recent essay, institutional neutrality supports the status quo.
But a far greater danger is posed by the much more restrictive version that the board of regents has pushed through and by similar measures that other institutions have been adopting. Such policies are closer to the weaponized form of institutional neutrality that neoconservative or libertarian organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression have been seeking. They would bar also the associational speech of the academic units (departments, centers, and other institutionalized communities of scholars) that constitute the modern university.
This version of institutional neutrality is dangerous on two counts: It threatens academic freedom within the university and, thus, the role that universities have played historically in sustaining healthy democratic cultures.
Associational Academic Freedom
If we take their statements at face value, the UMN regents who supported the resolution seem not to have comprehended that they were undermining academic freedom. As they justified their votes, many of them insisted that they cherished academic freedom, since the resolution does not prohibit individual academics from making statements either as scholars or as citizens. The claim that statements by academic units such as departments or research centers risk “chilling dissenting speech and research” within the unit has become increasingly prevalent across much of the political spectrum. Board members echoed this nostrum when they asserted that limiting speech by academic units “provides the widest latitude for individuals across the University to debate or dissent.”
But such assertions reveal a muddled understanding of how academic freedom works. Academic freedom is never only individual; it is best described as fundamentally associational, with an individual dimension arising out of and impossible without the associational dimension, as the CLA assembly resolution stressed when it reaffirmed the right to “associational speech.”
Why recognize academic freedom as associational? First, this is part of what distinguishes academic freedom as a form of free speech. What makes some speech or writing part of the exercise of academic freedom is that it is recognized as drawing on and appealing to the protocols of a conceptually bounded association of scholars, even if only to challenge those protocols fundamentally. By contrast, free speech, while obviously social even when exercised by individuals, does not necessarily have to be associational. So, as the legal scholar Adam Sitze notes, while professors can, as part of their First Amendment right of free speech, claim that the earth is flat, the moon is made of cheese, or that Toni Morrison’s Beloved makes no mention of slavery, “it is a mistake to suppose that any First Amendment claim could persuade any court to compel any academic institution to hire or retain any professor who proposed to transmit any of these claims, as truth, in the classroom.” In this sense, he says, academic freedom is an unfree form of free speech.
Second, this is a distinctive unfreedom. It can be governed only by a bounded association of scholars, a disciplinary or quasidisciplinary community—not externally by an administrative entity such as a university dean or president. Within this community, unfreedom is not an already given set of rules; rather, it is about specific principles of research within the field. The Indian political leader Bhimrao Ambedkar famously described the distinction between rules and principles, drawing implicitly on Ethics by John Dewey and James Tufts: “Rules are practical; they are habitual ways of doing things according to prescription. But principles are intellectual; they are useful methods of judging things. Rules seek to tell an agent just what course of action to pursue. Principles do not prescribe a specific course of action. Rules, like cooking recipes, do tell just what to do and how to do it. A principle, such as that of justice, supplies a main heading by reference to which he is to consider the bearings of his desires and purposes.” Principles, in other words, allow for an even wider spectrum of disagreement than rules. Such disagreements are central to the disciplinary world, and sometimes they become so intense, and sometimes the principles diverge so much from one another, that new disciplines emerge. So, the unfreedom involved in a discipline is best understood as a grammar that is constantly being challenged and refashioned rather than as a rigid set of rules. And this refashioning is impossible without individual academic freedom: This is why such freedom is part of the very exercise of associational academic freedom.
Third, the simultaneous occurrence of the individual and the common or dialogic is why academic freedom is best described as associational rather than collective—the latter term allows us to forget the individual dimension more easily. In other words, to describe academic freedom as associational is to recognize its nested nature: As the political scientist Jacob Levy has written, it “encompasses not only the liberty of the university against (most typically) the state and (sometimes) non-state actors ranging from churches to donors, but also the self-governing freedom of each internal scholarly association, each faculty or school or disciplinary department.” And because it is nested in this way, even when an individual scholar’s academic freedom is violated, “it is still the violation of a[n] . . . associational freedom.”
Statements by Academic Units
Recognizing the associational nature of academic freedom allows us to see more clearly the first danger: how the UMN board’s resolution undermines associational relations within the university. The associational exercise of academic freedom will often need to be institutionalized. After all, it is through the institutionalized engagement with one another that faculty decide whom to hire, which projects to foreground, which graduate students to admit, and much more.
And sometimes, inevitably, there will be public matters so essential to the identity of a discipline or a unit that its members must speak up as an association. A department of immunology, for example, will necessarily be supportive of the principle of vaccinations, even if colleagues may disagree strongly on the efficacy of some specific vaccines. A department of history, like most others in the humanities and social sciences, will inevitably insist on factually oriented understandings of the past and present, even if its members disagree on what shapes facts or which facts are relevant in a particular situation.
In the wake of the George Floyd killing or the Russian invasion of Ukraine or Israel’s bombardment of Gazan civilians, it was precisely such a perception—specifically, the perception by some units that their disciplinary and associational commitment to affirming the dignity of human life in the face of racism or ethnocentrism was at stake—that led some departments and centers at UMN to issue unit-based statements about these matters. And when a university administration polices the capacity of academic units to issue such statements, it attacks the associational aspect of the principle of academic freedom itself.
What about the charge that statements by academic units chill the academic freedom of individuals who are part of these associations? Again, the converse is more likely true: that the chilling of individual academic freedom is at its most invidious when an unspoken consensus governs what is or is not researchable, teachable, or speakable. It is precisely such unspoken consensuses that are held up to critical light when scholars debate matters in a departmental context and have to provide explicit reasons for a unit statement. Moreover, as the AAUP’s statement On Institutional Neutrality insists, “faculty who dissent” from unit statements “must be protected.” In this sense, explicit unit statements will only further strengthen the protections for the individual freedom of faculty members who dissent.
Spaces for Thinking
The second danger of the new emphasis on institutional neutrality lies in the way it threatens the work the university does in sustaining democratic culture. We have long recognized that the modern university has a public role and is indeed a public institution even if it is privately owned. That public role has two aspects. One is that of providing expertise on specific subjects. This role has been increasingly important since the mid-twentieth century. Right now, it seems as though expertise, too, will be threatened by the attacks on higher education. This trend need not per sist in the long run—authoritarian societies like China, with limited academic freedom, seem to have universi ties that are very competent at supplying expertise.
The other aspect involves the way higher education sustains democracy. Healthy democratic cultures recognize that, while an elected government must of course represent majority opinion, we also need legally institutionalized spaces for what is outside that majority opinion. Some such institutionalized spaces are well recognized in democratic societies—those provided by the rule of law, due process, or individual rights, including rights of free speech and association. These institutionalized spaces permeate the university, too, which is why we can assert that the UMN board resolution is likely illegal, since it threatens the rights of free speech and association.
But the modern university also aspires to institutionalize a different sort of space—one that is outside opinion itself, whether majority or minority. This is why, as we can retrospectively discern, academic freedom is itself founded on a distinction between opinion and argument, or, to describe the latter more precisely, taking a cue from Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, thinking. As I argue in my recent article “Gaza and the Unsettling Equality of Academic Freedom,” thinking is more than rationally produced knowledge, though the latter is one of its products. It is the articulation, on the one hand, of the principle of reason and, on the other, of a critical engagement with that very principle from the perspective of what reason excludes; both these exercises end up challenging existing consensuses in different ways.
At one time, thinking—by its very nature aspiring to be critical, questioning both other views and its own limits and exclusions—challenged the rational consensus that women and people of color lacked reason; today, thinking is at stake in debates about how to respond to climate change, articulate trans rights, and define terrorism, or whether to describe the recent student protests in the United States, including at the University of Minnesota, as antisemitic or anti-Zionist.
Healthy democratic societies have long recognized—if usually only inchoately—that, given the centrality of thinking to modern societies, spaces for it need to be institutionalized, and that the right to academic freedom is the way that these societies institutionalize the university as such a space.
Perhaps there is no more striking symptom of the UMN board resolution’s failure to recognize the role of the university in a democratic society than its stipulation that all unit statements must be authorized by the president. If that stipulation was driven by a prudential calculation of keeping the university safe from the depredations of the current government, then it was simply magical thinking, as the board members should have known already from the demands that had been issued to Columbia University just the night before they met to consider their own resolution.
But quite apart from being a poor prudential calculation, that stipulation rests on a rudimentary intellectual error. In the modern university, each academic unit articulates a distinctive disciplinary or quasidisciplinary engagement with and responsibility to the principle of reason (perhaps nowhere more so than when it is attentive to what is marginalized by the emphasis on reason). That engagement and responsibility proceeds through intense disagreements or consensus—internally and with other disciplines— around what they share in common.
To choke this plurality by insisting instead that all the disciplines speak with one associational voice—the voice of the president—is to fail to comprehend the principle and task of the university itself. It is to mistake the university for a private company, for which such an insistence may indeed be appropriate.
The Fate of the University
When, as in the UMN board resolution, academic freedom is rendered primarily or purely individual, we slip into what my colleague Vinay Gidwani in a text message described as “the ideological fiction of the individual, magically disembedded from the associational ties that shape her,” and we diminish the “solidarities and forms of commoning that are the cement” of our associational life.
In our times, or more precisely since the 1980s, this ideological fiction has increasingly taken the form of neoliberalism. Where liberalism places its thumb on the public side of the public-private divide, neoliberalism thumps its fist on the private side, emphasizing especially the market. Over the last thirty years, a neoliberal ideology has become pervasive among boards, donors, administrators, and even a large swath of faculty. It is surely the pervasiveness of this ideology that has led so many regents not only to mistake a university for a private corporation but also to reduce academic freedom to something exercised only by individuals.
When academic freedom, and by extension thinking, is thus rendered into primarily an individual activity, two profound changes follow. The most evident change is social. The thinking a scholar might offer no longer has the same heft outside the university, for an individual statement by a scholar is more easily dismissed as merely an opinion.
But perhaps the greater and more insidious damage is conceptual, or more precisely epistemic. It becomes more difficult to recognize the university as a distinctive democratic space, one aspiring to be governed not by opinion but by thinking. From the neoliberal perspective, the work of the university is not so much that of articulating another democratic principle as that of providing “expertise” to established political power. And when a neoliberal perspective celebrates or defends the humanities, it does so by making them into a source of private aesthetic pleasure—a position well articulated by Stanley Fish, who has repeatedly insisted that the humanities have nothing to do with democracy or politics.
Now that neoliberal ideology is regnant in the mainstream of the Democratic Party and the “liberal media,” they, too, are intolerant when the university invokes another democratic principle, as so many students did by describing the Israeli attack on Gaza as genocide. It was striking how little difference there was between the Democratic and Republican Parties, or The New York Times and Fox News, when it came to their understanding of the student protests: All converged in misunderstanding—misrecognizing, perhaps, for they likely did not have the intellectual where withal to think otherwise—the primarily antigenocide protests of the students as primarily antisemitic.
These neoliberal proclivities have been transformed, especially in the last two decades, by the increasing dominance of neoconservatism and authoritarian populism. And while all three tendencies are deeply intertwined, part of the same broad ideological formation, the differences between them are especially relevant for the university as a principle and as an autonomous institution. Where a neoliberal vision accentuates the private aspect of the public-private divide, neoconservatism and authoritarian populism emerge from a different genealogy. Both reify a self-other divide, celebrating a “self” and identifying an “other” that they presume threatens their “self.” But they also diverge in how they conceive self and other.
Neoconservatism (closely related to what Greek sociologist and philosopher Nicos Poulantzas called “authoritarian statism”) reifies a self centered around a “civilization”—for example, an implicitly white “Western civilization” in the United States or Europe, and an implicitly racialized Hindu “Indian civilization” in India. These civilizations are assumed to be threatened by uncivilized or less civilized others—the non-West in the case of “Western civilization,” and in the case of “Indian civilization,” “Islam” especially but also “the West.” Othering on the basis of civilization is of course as old as the modern construction of the West, but neoconservative traditions refashion this othering in the face of the increasing refusal of those formerly cast as uncivilized to accept their secondary status. In wider society, the Never Trump movement exemplifies this neoconservative ideology.
Within higher education, neoconservatives usually wish to accord a vanguardist role to the university in cultivating the civilizational self—hence their emphasis, for example, on the “great books.” Neoconservatives have been increasingly drawn to the originally neoliberal language of “institutional neutrality.” They have long claimed to be seeking “balance” and “viewpoint diversity” within the disciplines themselves, and the muzzling of speech by academic units is congruent with this long-term vision of neoconservatism.
By contrast, authoritarian populism, to build on cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall’s depiction, constructs the self-other divide around an authentic people. Unlike the neoconservative vision of civilization, which allows at least for some internal diversity, “the people” are one, without division. Precisely because of this, authoritarian populism does not have even the limited space for the university that neoliberal and neoconservative traditions have. The authoritarian populist vision emerges clearly from Vice President JD Vance’s 2021 speech “Universities Are the Enemy” and his 2024 interview with The European Conservative, where he expresses admiration for Viktor Orbán’s handling of Hungarian universities. These and other pronouncements by Vance, as well as the ongoing interventions by the Trump administration, reveal clearly that for authoritarian populists, the task is to destroy universities themselves as an autonomous space, as the space where we can aspire to sustain another democratic principle. Authoritarian populists thus have a more instrumental relation with “institutional neutrality”; for them, even institutional neutrality is not enough if it does not serve their purpose of dismantling the autonomy of the university.
Given the way some leading university administrations have responded so far to pressures from the current regime, it seems unlikely that we can expect them to support aspirations for the university as the space for another democratic principle. How, then, to proceed? In part, surely, by fighting to preserve the institutional spaces that we do have; this is what the CLA assembly resolution seeks to do. But if these institutional spaces are to be preserved, and maybe even renewed, then two other sorts of initiatives are needed.
First, we need to actively support and participate in organizations within the university that strengthen faculty and other employee rights. Trade unions are a part of this, but we need unions that recognize the specificity of the university as an aspiration for a democratic sociality different from that at work in the broader society. Second, we must also recognize that there is no way that the university as such a space can thrive, or perhaps even survive for long, where the broader democratic culture of our society is under threat. To be committed to the university as a principle, in other words, is also to push for a democratic culture in the society of which the university is part. The survival of the university as a principle and a promise may well depend on our success on these two fronts, and the second even more than the first.
I thank Cesare Casarino, Sarah Chambers, Michael Gallope, Vinay Gidwani, David Perry, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Simona Sawhney, J. B. Shank, and Shiney Varghese for conversations and suggestions about this article.
Ajay Skaria is a professor in the Department of History and in the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. His email address is [email protected].