CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Myth of the Apolitical University: Education, Power and the Lie of Neutrality

Photograph Source: Samschoe – CC BY 4.0

In a time of war, resurgent authoritarianism, and an escalating assault on higher education, the language of “institutional neutrality” has emerged not as a safeguard of academic integrity, but as one of the most effective ideological weapons in the campaign to depoliticize the university. In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the genocidal destruction of Gaza, and the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, universities have come under intense pressure to demonstrate their “balance” by retreating from political engagement. What has followed is not a principled defense of intellectual independence, but a quiet alignment with power, as institutions rush to adopt policies that prohibit them from taking positions on political and ethical issues deemed external to their “core functions.” Reports suggest that more than 150 universities have embraced such measures, while proposals such as the Trump administration’s “Compact for Higher Education” threaten to make institutional neutrality a condition for federal funding. Under these conditions, neutrality is no longer an abstract ideal; it is fast becoming an instrument of coercion.

The appeal to neutrality, of course, is not new. It draws its legitimacy from the 1967 Kalven Report, which famously asserted that “the university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” Yet this formulation depends on a fiction that collapses under historical and political scrutiny: that can stand outside the conflicts that actively constitute the wider society. In reality, there is no dimension of higher education that is not already political. Universities continuously make decisions about what knowledge counts, whose voices matter, which histories are preserved, and which forms of dissent are tolerated or punished. These are not neutral acts; they are structured by power, shaped by ideology, and embedded in larger struggles over the meaning and direction of public life.

What the language of neutrality does, then, is not remove politics from the university but conceal it. More precisely, it functions as a form of political cover, allowing institutions to disavow their own agency even as they engage in deeply political practices, disciplining student protest, sanctioning faculty for dissent, and in some cases, collaborating with state power in ways that endanger those who challenge injustice. Under the current political climate, this posture has taken on an especially troubling form. As universities such as Columbia, Northwestern, and Brown move to accommodate the demands of an increasingly aggressive right-wing agenda, neutrality becomes indistinguishable from capitulation. It serves to normalize a broader project aimed at cleansing higher education of dissenting voices and remaking it as a site of ideological conformity.

At a more fundamental level, the claim that universities can be apolitical is neither naïve nor innocent; it is a disingenuous fiction. There is no institutional decision, from the allocation of research funding to the design of curricula, from hiring practices to the governance of student life, that exists outside relations of power. To invoke neutrality in this context is to render those relations invisible and to legitimize decisions that would otherwise have to be defended as political choices. As McKenna Roberts, a student at Columbia University, makes clear in a striking indictment of this fiction:

Columbia has never been a neutral institution. From the University’s progressive displacement of West Harlem’s Black and Latinx residents and expansion of its spatial and economic domination in the neighborhood, to its storied history of brutalizing anti-war student protestors, one thing has remained clear: This University has never operated on an axis that prioritizes the interests of its students, faculty, staff, or the broader community. While the debate regarding whether or not colleges and universities should function as spaces of apolitical higher learning continues to swirl, there is nothing about education........

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