Editor’s note: Below is a preview of an opinion piece published Tuesday, January 27, 2026 at The Chronicle of Higher Education. To read the full article, click here.

Brian Soucek’s recent defense of “institutional counterspeech” — the idea that colleges should speak out to mitigate harms they themselves helped cause — is a thoughtful and well-meaning critique of the ideal of institutional neutrality. As recent events in Minneapolis highlight, college leaders continue to face pressure to issue public statements in response to political events unfolding around them. In such moments, silence can be viewed as moral failure, and official statements as necessary moral leadership. Such moments may make Soucek’s appeal for institutional counterspeech seem appealing.

But there is more at stake than the public reputation of universities in responding to this, or any, immediate public crisis. What’s at stake is the enduring ideal of the university as a special type of community: a community where students, faculty members, and administrators are committed to learning together. Soucek’s case against institutional neutrality is ultimately perilous to this ideal.

Where Soucek argues for institutional counterspeech, I would argue for institutional humility — especially in moments of political contestation and crisis. That’s because the university is not a moral agent like other institutions. The core mistake made by critics of institutional neutrality is that they treat the university as a unitary moral actor, analogous to a corporation, a church, or a political association. The university, however, is not bound together by substantive moral agreement, but by specialized procedures and norms designed for the pursuit of knowledge.

Faculty, students, and staff disagree — often deeply — about justice, equality, truth, harm, and social progress. Institutional neutrality recognizes this fact and refuses to resolve disagreements by administrative fiat. When a college issues an official moral judgment on a contested issue, it inevitably does more than “add speech.” It reassigns moral authority, signaling which views are legitimate and which are disfavored within the institution.

This is not a neutral act. It is a reordering of power.