Institutional neutrality is a common-sense policy, yet some students still don’t get the point.
Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. (Credit: Buckley Institute)
Hannah Owens Pierre
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
On Wednesday, President McInnis sent an email to the Yale community announcing findings from the Committee on Trust in Higher Education, a coalition she convened to examine “declining trust in higher education.” The results are damning: The committee admits that Yale bears responsibility for this lack of trust, due to rising tuition costs, lack of clear standards for admission, and, most importantly, promoting political bias and censorship.
This last point has been the focus of much student discourse, from myself included. To combat the clear partisan lean at Yale— with registered Democrats outnumbering Republicans 36 to one, according to a recent Buckley Institute report— the committee supports the “institutional voice” policy McInnis adopted in 2024, which restrains university officials from taking public stances on political issues.
This policy is perfectly reasonable and necessary. After all, a university’s role is to educate students and foster free discussion, not to act as a political advocate by selecting what speech to platform. Unfortunately, some of my peers still don’t get it. Last Friday, the Yale Daily News published a column by Manu Bosteels ’28 titled “Yale’s Institutional Contradiction.” In it, Bosteels criticizes McInnis and Yale’s adoption of institutional neutrality, calling the policy a contradiction.
The argument, at its core, is that Yale and McInnis have used institutional neutrality as an excuse to placate conservatives. His primary evidence is that the president selected former New York Times columnist David Brooks as Yale’s inaugural Presidential Senior Fellow.
Let’s be clear: institutional neutrality does not mean that Yale wouldn’t appoint fellows who happen to be conservative— or, in Brooks’ case, a known never-Trumper who sits ever so slightly right of center. It has to do with university public statements, not appointments. Brooks’ hiring merely signals an openness to ideological diversity at a historically left-leaning university.
Bosteels’ criticism of Brooks is that he has pointed out hypocrisy among the opinions of elite liberals. “To be progressive is to be against privilege,” Brooks writes. “But today progressives dominate elite institutions like the exclusive universities.” It is hard to see what is objectionable about the simple fact that many progressive students at elite universities, who themselves come from privileged backgrounds, are hypocritically speaking out against their own disproportionate wealth and status.
He also cites Brooks’ characterization of universities as pushing ideological activism in the form of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and pro-Palestine narratives affirmed by administrators. Yet this, once again, is merely a reflection of reality. Through its courses, faculty, and student body, Yale tends to promote a broadly progressive outlook.
Consider the American Studies department, for instance, which was founded to defend American ideals such as free markets. Its focus has since shifted towards “culture, national identity, and the construction of local, indigenous, borderland, and diasporic communities,” according to the department’s website. Almost all of its course offerings center on race, disability or LGBTQ+ studies. It bears almost no resemblance to the original department’s intent.
Everyone knows that such a major is designed for training progressives. A student who takes one of these courses cannot expect to hear a sincere defense of an opposing view. A past syllabus of American Studies 3314, “Gender and Transgender,” for instance, contains no mention of important issues such as transgender participation in female sports or controversies surrounding the use of puberty blockers on minors. It does, however, dedicate two weeks to “Transness and Blackness” and “Trans Liberation.”
Bosteels is inadvertently proving Brooks’ point: rather than engage with this concern, Ivy League students like Bosteels dismiss it outright. He then proceeds to direct empty and baseless character attacks toward Brooks, criticizing him for once being photographed at the same event as Jeffrey Epstein. He fails to mention that there is no evidence that Brooks has ever met or spoken to Epstein. This attack is deliberately designed to disqualify Brooks in an absolutely baseless manner. Brooks’ employer at the time clarified that this interaction with Epstein was in the regular routine of his work.
From Brooks’ appointment, Bosteels concludes that “McInnis is appointing a conservative professor to placate conservatives who think Yale is too lefty.” There is no indication that Brooks was selected for his political views as opposed to his venerated journalism career. But even if this were true, it is unclear why an attempt to expand Yale’s intellectual range by welcoming a single voice barely outside of the campus ideological spectrum is somehow a step too far, especially given that the stated goal of the Presidential Senior Fellow is to “foster respectful debate.”
Ironically, Bosteels’ piece shows why we need institutional neutrality: political dissent and criticism of the Trump administration should be left up to students to debate, not to Yale itself. A university serves its students by creating space for disagreement, not taking a side. Yale’s administration deserves credit for attempting to bring an atmosphere of free expression to our campus by hiring Brooks, welcoming guest speakers, and staying out of the business of political speech.