Dartmouth president explains institutional neutrality policy

Dartmouth College’s president recently explained the school’s decision to adopt institutional neutrality, meaning the school will not officially opine on potentially controversial matters. 

Sian Leah Beilock, the Ivy League school’s president, wrote on Friday in the Wall Street Journal to explain the school’s choice. 

Beilock notes that the anti-Israel campus protests that rocked schools in 2024 have “led at least 20 American colleges and universities to commit to institutional neutrality,” but notes that “such administrative proclamations aren’t enough to establish American universities as hubs of free and open inquiry. Faculty must embrace institutional neutrality for their academic departments and institutes as well.”

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“A president’s embrace of neutrality—or restraint, as we call it at Dartmouth—is a good thing. When presidents make statements about something unrelated to the academic mission of the university, they advance politics, not education. . . . But ending political statements by presidents isn’t enough. Dartmouth’s Principles of Institutional Restraint, developed by a faculty-led committee and rolled out on Dec. 10, spell out clear guidelines on restraint for academic departments and institutes that choose to speak as a unit,” she added. 

Beilock emphasized that individual academic departments must also adopt the school-wide “institutional restraint” policy to promote academic inquiry over promoting certain political viewpoints. 

She wrote: “Consider a student interested in majoring in a certain subject. Upon going to the department homepage to discover course offerings, the student is slapped in the face with an official statement excoriating his own political ideology. How comfortable would that student feel taking a class in that department, let alone sharing his perspective in a class discussion or paper?”

“Only when institutional neutrality and restraint are embedded throughout American higher education will it be possible for campuses to become true havens of constructive dialogue and free inquiry,” she concluded. 

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Dartmouth announced its new “institutional restraint” policy in December. In its announcement, the school noted: “To provide space for diverse viewpoints to be raised and fully considered, Dartmouth should exercise general restraint in issuing institutional statements.”

Dartmouth is one of several schools that have adopted institutional neutrality in 2024, including the Universities of Michigan, Yale, and Pennsylvania. 

Campus Reform has reached out to Sian Leah Beilock for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.