Tufts Rejected the Word “Neutrality”—and Adopted the Substance | American Enterprise Institute
Heterodox Academy (HXA) recently published an interview with J.P. de Ruiter, a professor of psychology and member of the faculty working group that recommended Tufts University adopt a “Statement on Institutional Pluralism” rather than a statement of institutional neutrality. The recommendation of the faculty working group was then accepted by the Tufts Board of Trustees in August of 2025.
Neutrality has been a favored approach by many schools in recent years, but Tufts rejected that term in favor of a more affirmative vision—pluralism. The HXA interview is fascinating because it tells the story of how the Tufts faculty committee made its recommendation and reveals that Tufts rejected the label of neutrality while essentially embracing the exact same governing principle.
To see this, it is worth looking at the operative language in the Tufts statement. The trustees affirmed that university leaders “will refrain from making statements attributable to Tufts as an institution” on political and social matters that do not bear directly on the university’s core teaching, research, and service mission. Anyone familiar with the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report will recognize this instantly. It is the Chicago principle in everything but name.
The HXA interview even acknowledges that Tufts’s faculty committee recommendation is “precisely what the Kalven Report” prescribes. Both the Kalven Report and the new Tufts approach rest on the same idea: institutional restraint preserves the freedom of faculty and students to speak in their own voices.
If both Tufts and Kalven are so similar, why did Tufts take on the task of explicitly trying to move away from the idea of neutrality? The de Ruiter interview makes it clear that many at Tufts worried that neutrality was impossible—that “even silence is a political stance”—and that refusing to speak would be mistaken for indifference to moral questions. That’s an understandable concern. It just isn’t what the Kalven Report actually argues.
To be clear, the Kalven Report never asked universities, professors, or students to be morally neutral. It states plainly that the university is “the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic,” and that the instruments of dissent and criticism are faculty and students.
The university should not speak for the people who make it up. Tufts’s trustees agreed; they accepted the faculty working group recommendations most likely because this new policy embraced the same institutional restraint Chicago has maintained for six decades. The change at Tufts, in other words, is more about language than practice.
Nevertheless, Tufts deserves praise here for showing how institutional reform should happen. Rather than imposing a policy from above, Tufts’s leadership convened faculty, staff, and students, held listening sessions, opened an anonymous portal, and heard from more than 800 members of the community before making its recommendation, which then moved through the Academic Council to the trustees.
Tocqueville admired institutions that generated legitimacy through participation rather than decree; Tufts deserves credit for doing exactly that. De Ruiter’s advice to other institutions is sound: words mean what their recipients take them to mean, and dialogue is what gives a policy legitimacy. And if this somewhat friendlier language made it possible to secure broad support for a sound principle among the community, it’s hard to argue that this was not a good move.
I do think that two cautions are in order and the first concerns the proliferating vocabulary. Neutrality now travels under a growing list of names: institutional pluralism, institutional restraint, institutional voice stewardship. When a modest principle of institutional restraint can gain acceptance only after being stripped of the word “neutrality,” it tells us something about the political freight that ordinary language now carries on many campuses. The second question is whether it lasts. Tufts chose a guiding principle rather than an enforceable rule. Whether it survives now depends on future leaders.
Declaring principles is easy; sustaining them is hard—I see this in my own school far too often where principles are regularly proclaimed but are rarely protected. At the University of Chicago, neutrality has been embraced and endured because generations of leaders have reaffirmed the principle when it mattered most. Tufts will now have the opportunity and challenge of doing the same.
That test will inevitably come with the next public relations crisis—when the calls arrive demanding that the president say something, this is where institutional practice will become clear. The next controversy will tell us whether Tufts meant what it adopted. If Tufts continues to refrain from issuing official statements on contested political and social questions beyond its mission, then it will have embraced the essential insight of the Kalven Report—a welcome development for academic freedom.
