Photojournalist Gary Caldwell shot this photo for East Lansing Info, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, local news organization I founded and ran for a decade. While that East Lansing protest on June 2, 2020, was ignited by Officer Derek Chauvin’s slow, defiant, brazenly public murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, it was also an explicit response to what my investigative journalism team had recently reported about the East Lansing Police Department: two cases of alleged police brutality against black men by the same officer and data showing black people were far more likely per capita to be stopped, arrested, and subject to the use of force compared to whites in our college town.

When Gary turned in his photos from the event and I opened that photo of protest leader James Henson, rationally I knew that Henson had been staring at the camera lens. But I could not shake off the feeling that Henson had been staring at me—that he was still staring at me. The sensation came from the juxtaposition of the sharp gaze with the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu captured on the sign in the background:

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

The protests of June 2020 represented a handful of countless moments when, as a local journalist and news publisher, I had to be as nonpartisan as possible. But it was not easy at these events.

I had watched the tape of Floyd’s murder up until the point where I felt I could not physically continue; I was shaking and crying too hard, on the verge of vomiting. My younger brother is multiracial, and under America’s One Drop of Blood rule, he has counted in the eyes of many cops as black. By the day where Floyd died calling hopelessly for his mother, my brother had been stopped more times than we could count for DWB (Driving While Black), repeatedly called the N word by men who had sworn to protect and serve. I knew our mother feared for his life as she never had to mine.

Still, I didn’t put down my notepad and take up a sign. I didn’t give up on trying to understand the police’s perspective. By then I knew very well that nonpartisanship in journalism matters not just because people ought to have the right to know what’s really going on. It matters because a news organization’s commitment to nonpartisanship helps to intellectually discipline its reporters’ and editors’ minds.

My news team inevitably leaned left. (You try finding Republican reporters in a town so blue it might as well be the Carribean sea.) But that was all the more reason to ask them regularly to work on ascertaining what people who disagreed with the majority might want to know, what they might see differently from us. I could see how that exercise of nonpartisanship opened my reporters’ ears, their eyes, their minds.

In a truth-seeking endeavor, the nonpartisanship of the process matters even more than the nonpartisanship of the product. We built trust with the people of our city through nonpartisanship. It was the reason our politically conservative firefighters’ union called us when their EMTs needed adequate time to heal after a mass shooting left three Michigan State University students dead and five mortally wounded. It was why a pipe mechanic from our wastewater treatment plant trusted us with his harrowing evidence of health and safety violations at the plant.

A chief reason I decided to shift from serving on Heterodox Academy’s Advisory Council to the new staff position of managing editor was the extraordinary opportunity to promote and protect HxA’s stated commitment to nonpartisanship. The critically important work we’re doing to make higher ed safer for varied viewpoints can only be done in cooperation with academics, administrators, and legislators across the nation and across the political spectrum. I know from my own experiences you don’t get to that cooperation without trust, and you don’t achieve broad-based trust with partisanship.

When we’re doing our work at HxA well, we’re looking closely at legislation regardless of which party originates it. We’re aiming to protect faculty’s academic freedom regardless of their personal politics. We’re hoping our partners in this nationwide work take seriously our suggestions, even when they lean hard one way.

HxA’s current dedicated work to promote institutional statement neutrality strikes me as a critical reflection of our nonpartisanship. The basic concept is the same–to lay the groundwork for freedom. It’s why the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan voted on Thursday to adopt institutional statement neutrality. “I hope this is the first step in a long process to update bylaws and procedures that will make our campus a place that is welcoming to all voices,” Regent Sarah Hubbard said about the vote.

I’m aware that, just down the road from Ann Arbor, Oakland University President Ora Pescovitz has objected to “using institutional neutrality as a crutch,” writing, “I oppose absolute institutional neutrality because I believe it can be used as a crutch by leaders to excuse their silence on matters precisely at those times when their institutions should hear their voices.”

But as HxA’s Director of Communications Nicole Barbaro–who herself attended Oakland, ultimately earning a PhD –said in her published op-ed response to Pescovitz, “At worst, official positions distort the purpose of the university and undermine trust in our public institutions by being seen as a political actor. By not taking positions on the political controversy of the day, universities don’t close down debate and discussion, they open it up.”

Switzerland’s cowardly, greedy, self-serving “neutrality” during World War II is certainly not what we have in mind when we work as a nonpartisan institution pushing for institutional statement neutrality. Instead, what we’re going for is an understanding among university leaders that, like journalists, they have a special role to play.

We’re not asking university leaders to be morally barren. We are asking them to protect the soil so others can plant and eat. Because the real work of a university isn’t done by a handful of regents, trustees, presidents, and provosts. It’s done by the rank and file faculty–who themselves, to be clear, should never be under a neutrality order.

Although it’s sometimes missed by critics, HxA’s model policy on institutional statement neutrality specifically states that, “On rare occasions when a public issue arises that directly affects the mission of this college or university, institutional leaders may issue statements that articulate the significance of that issue to our campus community.”

Our policy acknowledges that, because academic missions vary–there are women’s colleges, community colleges, faith-based colleges, land grant universities–“the application of the principles of neutrality will vary across different colleges and universities.” Empathy in times of tragedy is also appropriate.

But university leaders must understand how easy it is, in the expression of political opinions, to accidentally become the face of oppression—to intimidate students, staff, and faculty who may not agree with the expressions of the people with the real power.

I know personally how frustrating–even sickening–it can feel to stand in a position of power at a trusted institution and not deploy the bully pulpit in the face of brutal oppression, governmental corruption, human greed, and plain old stupidity.

But sometimes you have to realize that you have to serve the people by shutting your mouth and opening the door.