Courtesy of Theo Andres ’27
As student and government tensions clash and vary, colleges and universities across the country are struggling to find an all-encompassing response to ongoing campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Here at Conn, attempts to form productive dialogue through trainings offered by Mediators Beyond Borders International and through student events continue, though compared to other institutions– even as close by as UConn and Wesleyan– campus disagreement has been quiet.
This semester, CC Students in Solidarity With Palestine, the same organization that led the solidarity event and protest in the spring, began to publicize their divestment demands in line with continued movements at many colleges and universities across the globe. Named after the organization that led anti-Zionist campaigns in 2015 and 2016, as well as being an active participant in the 2016 Fanning occupation, their organization represents a continued activism for Palestine at Connecticut College rather than a new cause. Their demands, public on the organization’s Instagram page, pressure the College to disclose their investment portfolios and to clarify whether or not the College invests money into weapons manufacturing companies, and also ask that the College divest from companies that do business in Israel.
Throughout the past year of activism from the group, the College has met some demands, including beginning the hiring process for a Muslim chaplain and working towards establishing a Muslim student cultural center and prayer space in Knowlton. In a May 10 email from Interim President Wong, he addressed student demands and gave updates on progress on these projects. Additionally, he publicly acknowleded student academic freedom and right to protest, as well as touching on the ongoing meetings between student pro-Palestinian organizers and the Board of Trustees. This year, however, President Chapdelaine introduced herself to campus with a different approach from Interim President Wong, who issued multiple statements last year in response to the events of Oct. 7th, 2023.
President Chapdelaine’s September 5th email to students takes a stance of neutrality– though not indifference, as she clarifies– in relation to domestic and world events, while clarifying that she advocates primarily for productive conversation between differing opinions, and for adequate support for impacted students. Though not, as she makes clear, a statement of neutrality from the entire college, President Chapdelaine’s email, for many, places Conn in the long history of institutionally ‘neutral’ colleges and universities– a status that student organizers are, historically, deeply resistant to.
Where does institutional neutrality come from?
Most policies– statements adopted by the entire university, usually, rather than the president or spokesperson– date back to one University of Chicago committee’s decision in 1967, commonly referred to as the Kalven Report. This statement was adopted by UChicago in response to the anti-Vietnam War protests that swept campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The report states clearly that it believes the primary “instrument of dissent and criticism [to be] the individual faculty member or the individual student” and that as the university has a responsibility and obligation to free speech, it must “encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community.”
Today, a great majority of institutional neutrality policies follow the Kalven Report to a heavy degree, with most citing it and abiding by it directly and wholly. Though an objectively noble concept, the controversy arises from the fact that most universities don’t actually end up following it as much as they say. The University of Chicago, in particular, has made plenty of political statements as a university since enacting the Kalven Report as a north star, particularly in response to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-DACA policies, both controversial topics for the country that the University president and provost issued public statements on.
Many institutions adopted neutrality policies at the beginning of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and many more are now adopting these policies in an attempt to distance themselves from protests against the Israeli war in Gaza. Particularly as federal investigations into campus antisemitism progress, many universities are chiefly concerned with not losing essential federal funding. Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier supported institutional neutrality by more optimistically saying that the point was “not to shut down debate, but to create room for it by not having a party line from the university.”
This, as many student organizers as well as other university administrators have pointed out over the years, doesn’t necessarily work when institutions like the University of Chicago and Vanderbilt take non-neutral stances by responding to student demands with arrests and censure. As the 2023 Forbes article “The Kalven Report and the Limits of University Neutrality” points out, institutional neutrality is not necessarily a guarantee of academic freedom. As they see it, not only do political statements from a college or university not prohibit students and faculty from continuing to write and research their points of view, but some neutrality policies “might infringe on faculty’s academic freedom, while others would likely have no effect whatsoever.”
Student protestors on both sides of the current conflict are, truly, conflicted about neutrality statements and their implications on their respective causes. Some champion the ability of the neutrality statements to be used to ignore issues of antisemitism and islamophobia or to prioritize one over the other, and many pro-Palestinian protestors worry over what this means for divestment movements. As the Forbes article points out, in the case of divestment in the 1980s and 1990s from South African apartheid, this did not limit the ability for productive discussion on both sides of the debate on apartheid– but this doesn’t indicate whether divestment counts as explicitly non-neutral act. With protests moving forward, both university administration and protesting students must contend with what exactly policies of neutrality covere in relation to both divestment and issues of academic freedom.
The tempestuously non-neutral road forward:
Some universities, amongst intense and differing demands from incompatible student opinions, find themselves at a loss for just what neutrality actually looks like in physical practice. Protests, mostly from pro-Palestinian student organizers, continue this semester much as they did in the spring, with students occupying buildings, most recently at the University of Minnesota, and continuing to establish encampments in reaction to administrations that will not acquiesce to divestment demands. At the University of California system, their president Michael V. Drake attempted to use preventative measures to halt all attempts at establishing new encampments, and gave the university reasoning to clear encampments and identify and arrest students by banning all face masks that conceal identity– which many Muslim students worry will be used to target women who wear niqabs– and tents.
Other administrations have been accused of stifling student autonomy, especially at universities where protests have been particularly strongly supported by student government and organizations. At the New School, their Student Senate halted all funding to RSOs until the administration agreed to divestment– according to the New School’s SJP instagram page, the administration then “seized roughly $400,000 in collected student fees from students and their elected representatives, and is now unilaterally managing this fund without any student input.”
In September, Barnard College, which has seen intense protests over the past year in conjunction with pro-Palestinian Columbia students, issued a statement of neutrality as part of an updated community expectations page, proclaiming that they will not comment on “matters of public concern except to offer sentiments of support for those who are directly affected or grieving.” Barnard students, particularly those protesting, have accused the College and the larger University of hypocrisy in espousing neutrality while updating community guidelines to severely suppress student opinion. Most controversially, their updated expectations list Israeli and, particularly, Zionist students as protected classes among ethnic and religious groups, where protesting students, including anti-Zionist Jewish students, oppose equating Zionism– in its most basic definition, a political belief and movement– with Judaism as a whole, as the community guidelines do.
Updated guidelines have trended towards harsher dicilipline for protesting students, where the Barnard administration, as alleged by many students, is able to remove students from their housing and meal plans if put on disciplinary probation for protesting. Examples of students left without accommodation surfaced again from last year, made even more precarious now with much stricter demonstration guidelines and restrict the location, time, and noise level of protests to extremely narrow and, to many, ineffective windows. This semester, the NYPD arrested students on the first day of classes. According to the Columbia Spectator, the university had hired private investigators to look into student activities. Students on either side of the debate, including students that take no stance at all, express discomfort at the surveillance and heavy police presence by public safety and NYPD officers on campus, effectively at all times.
Student organizations and collectives, at Barnard and nationally, have questioned whether or not these stances align with Barnard’s new neutrality policy– and if a university amidst the protests we see this semester can ever really be neutral. In relation to President Chapdelaine’s email, protesting students now question how productive a stance of neutrality from the president is at a school like Conn, where protest and politics seem to be an implied policy of their own. In the shadow of the 2023 Fanning occupation and former president Katherine Bergeron’s resignation, the role of the president in issuing political statements on behalf of the college seems to be, at best, a touchy subject for the campus administration and community.
