Two Yale University professors have come out against what they say is the latest threat on their campus: institutional neutrality.
In a piece for The Yale Daily News on Friday, Law Professor Amy Kapczynski and American Studies Professor Daniel HoSang denounce such policies as attempts to “chill speech.”
[RELATED: 5 universities that adopted ‘institutional neutrality’ in 2024]
”The central argument for ‘institutional voice’ restrictions is that they will protect speech,” the professors write. “There is an irony here that should not escape us: rules that literally restrict the speech of academics by prohibiting some forms of collective speech are being described as protecting academic speech.”
”What does chill speech are rules against speaking — rules, unfortunately, like those narrowing the use of institutional voice,” they continue. “Those rules, unlike official statements, do come with an implicit promise to punish. They also create a new weapon for those who don’t like university speech: the argument that the speech is not just substantively wrong or misguided, but that it’s breaking the rule against ‘institutional’ speech.”
Kapczynski and HoSang also state that the push for institutional neutrality coincides with a “recent wave of partisan attacks on higher education,” including “profound attacks” on the “teaching of critical race theory and gender studies.”
”These include a broad conservative campaign for so-called neutrality rules and nearly 100 new bills around the country directly targeting higher education, including seeking to curb speech on campus, particularly about race and gender,” the professors argue.
Last month, Yale President Maurie McInnis organized a committee of seven professors to explore the possibility of adopting institutional neutrality and to submit recommendations by the end of the fall semester.
Within the past year, prominent schools around the nation such as Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania have adopted institutional neutrality in the wake of campus protests concerning the Israel-Hamas war.
A former clerk to Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Stephen Breyer, Kapczynski pursues research in “law and political economy, and theorizes the failures of legal logic and structure that condition contemporary inequality, precarity, and hollowed out democracy.”
A member of the Yale faculty since 2017, HoSang has “co-edited [a] volume with Kimberlé W. Crenshaw on attacks on Critical Race Theory and race conscious education, and a practice-based project on anti-racist curriculum and pedagogy for K-12 educators,” according to his university biography.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
