More than 120 faculty members at Duke University in North Carolina have recently published a petition urging the school’s leadership to adopt institutional neutrality.
This petition was initiated following other universities’ commitments to similar neutrality policies. The recent wave of schools adopting neutrality statements comes after months of division and anger caused by anti-Israel student activists, the Duke Chronicle noted.
[RELATED: Yale becomes latest university to adopt institutional neutrality policy]
Such student activists frequently call on their respective universities to divest from Israel and adopt official statements condemning the Jewish state.
The petition was launched by the group Duke Faculty for Institutional Neutrality and Free Speech. The group claimed in its petition that “more than 60% of Duke faculty support institutional neutrality.”
More specifically, the faculty member group called on the university to the policy that “[w]hen a contested social issue arises that does not directly concern the academic mission of our university, Duke’s leadership will not issue a position statement on that issue.”
The petition does give some leeway to Duke’s leadership, stating that the university can address any “public issue . . . that directly affects the mission of this university.”
The faculty also called on Duke to not censor freedom of speech and thought because some might consider certain ideas “to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed”; to approve of “non-disruptive protests” as “legitimate means of free expression,” and to reject “[d]isruptive protest or other means of limiting the rights of others to engage in free expression, work, and open discourse.”
Campus Reform has reached out to Duke University for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
