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

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 that is apolitical. A claim of institutional neutrality serves an explicitly ideological purpose: to make invisible the power structures at work and depoliticize the deeply political functionings of elite educational institutions like Columbia.

Roberts’s critique is not exceptional; it is diagnostic. His argument is crucial because it names what the discourse of neutrality attempts to erase: the university is not a passive observer of power, but an active participant in its reproduction. Neutrality does not suspend this role; it obscures it, allowing institutions to present politically charged decisions as if they were merely administrative or procedural.

This is what makes the current invocation of neutrality so dangerous. It emerges precisely at a moment when universities are being openly targeted by authoritarian forces. When political leaders such as Trump and J.D. Vance cast professors as the enemy, when dissent is criminalized, and when entire fields of study are subject to political surveillance and control, the call for neutrality does not defend academic freedom, it disarms it. Neutrality, in such a context, is not a refusal of politics; it is a form of complicity. This broader erasure of power sets the stage for a second move: recasting the crisis in higher education not as political control from above, but as excess politics from below.

It is against this backdrop that recent critiques of higher education, particularly those emerging from influential platforms such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, must be understood and addressed. When Len Gutkin, in his essay “When Professors Mistake Themselves for Revolutionaries,” insists that “the price of academic autonomy has always been a measure of distance from politics proper,” he reproduces the very illusion that sustains the current crisis. By framing political engagement as a threat to academic freedom, Gutkin not only misidentifies the problem, he redirects attention away from the far more consequential structural transformation reshaping higher education. This misdiagnosis has consequences

What Gutkin overlooks is that the crisis in higher education does not arise from an excess of political engagement, but from a long history of structural abandonment and an intensifying right-wing assault. Universities have not been “radicalized” by faculty; they have been reshaped by forces far more consequential and coercive. Over the past four decades, higher education has been steadily colonized by the logic of capital, redefining knowledge as a commodity, students as consumers, and research as a revenue stream. He is strikingly indifferent to the reality that this market-driven transformation is now being fused with a right-wing political project that imagines the university not as a democratic public sphere, but as a laboratory for ideological indoctrination, a vision openly advanced by the Trump administration. In this context, the call for neutrality does not protect academic freedom; it disarms it, functioning as a cover for the very authoritarian forces that seek to narrow, regulate, and ultimately suppress critical thought.

As Will Bunch observes, “the problem for roughly three-quarters of U.S. college students in public universities and community colleges is that since the so-called ‘Reagan revolution’ of the 1980s, state tax-dollar support for higher education has plummeted, by a staggering 42 percent.” In this context, as Chris Newfield has argued, when public funding erodes, tuition rises, adjunct labor proliferates, and corporate governance hollows out democratic commitments, fields that address history, race, inequality, and justice are not becoming politicized, they are rendered visible. They give language to conditions the neoliberal university would rather recast as technical, managerial, or neutral. This broader landscape is crucial because the forces reshaping higher education are not confined to internal disputes over activism; they are driven by powerful external political agendas whose reach and consequences far exceed the boundaries of the university itself.

In doing so, such arguments lend intellectual legitimacy to a deeply troubling project. They do not remove politics from the university; they help to replace one form of politics, rooted in critique, dissent, and democratic possibility, with another grounded in control, conformity, and the policing of thought. The real question, then, is not whether universities are political, they always have been, but whether they will align themselves with the forces that seek to narrow the space of critical inquiry or with those that insist on its expansion.

The Far Right Attack Is Not Peripheral

More troubling is the article’s relative silence regarding the escalating, coordinated assault on higher education by the far right. Universities are no longer merely criticized; they are being methodically reshaped through a politics of intimidation and erasure. Institutions are pressured to conform or face defunding. Books are banned and histories rewritten to purge structural critique. Diversity initiatives are dismantled or criminalized. Faculty are surveilled and publicly vilified. Legislatures arrogate themselves the power to determine what can and cannot be taught about race, gender, colonialism, and the meaning of democracy. Even student protest is recoded as disorder. This is not a culture-war skirmish; it is a struggle over whether higher education will sustain and defend democracy as a democratic public sphere or be reduced to an instrument of ideological control.

In that context, calls for “depoliticization” function less as principled critique than as a form of retreat. When authoritarian movements seek to transform universities into instruments of nationalist myth-making and civic illiteracy, neutrality becomes complicity. Appeals to “learning for its own sake” ring hollow if they ignore the political forces actively attempting to dismantle the conditions under which such learning is even possible.

Higher education matters precisely because it holds the promise of cultivating historical consciousness, ethical reasoning, and critical literacy. These capacities are crucial democratic public goods, equipping students not simply to enter markets, but to interrogate power. More importantly, they equip students with the knowledge and skills they need to be informed and active citizens, without which democracy dies. When critics lament that higher education has embraced advocacy, they often overlook the deeper question: advocacy for what? If the advocacy in question is the defense of civil rights, democratic memory, and human dignity, then to cast it as contamination misunderstands the democratic vocation of higher education itself.

Funding Is the Structural Question.

Higher education did not become politically expressive in a vacuum. It was starved. Public investment declined. Philanthropic foundations became lifelines. Universities outsourced their missions to development offices and branding consultants. Under such conditions, grant priorities inevitably exert influence. But the solution to concentrated funding power is not to frame social justice as the problem or to claim that higher education should free itself from politics or from addressing social issues.

The deeper coercion in higher education is not that scholars occasionally tailor language to political issues. It is that entire institutions have been reorganized around the curse of neoliberal market metrics, rankings, revenue generation, donor appeal, and return on investment. That transformation predates and far exceeds any shift in foundation priorities. It undermines the role of the university as a public good and offers no vision for how to educate students.

If we are concerned about intellectual independence, we must confront the corporatization of the university, the exploitation of contingent faculty labor, and the financialization of research. Otherwise, critiques of politicization become selective,  aimed leftward while ignoring the pervasive political economy that governs universities from above.

Democracy Is the Unspoken Horizon

“What ultimately troubles me about Gutkin’s attack is not that it questions funding strategies or ignores the escalating assaults by the far right and the Trump regime on public discourse, including efforts to restrict what books can be read, what histories can be taught, and what values can be affirmed. Debate is healthy. What troubles me is the normalization of the idea that higher education should retreat from explicit engagement with democracy at a moment when democracy itself is under siege.

When authoritarian forces attack universities as enemies of the nation, when they weaponize white nationalist narratives, when they seek to replace historical reckoning with myth, the call for restraint sounds eerily like an invitation to stand down. Students should not be trained to endure the dismantling of democratic institutions as spectators. They should be equipped to analyze, resist, and transform unjust social arrangements.

Higher education, and the humanities in particular, are not ornamental culture. They are public memory in action. They are the spaces in which societies interrogate their past, imagine alternatives, and cultivate civic courage. To reduce them to apolitical contemplation in the name of restoring public trust is to misunderstand both the crisis and the cure.

The question is not whether politics or social justice enters the classroom, it is already there, woven into every syllabus, every silence, every claim to neutrality. The real question is whether the university will defend its role as a crucible of critical thought and democratic possibility, or submit to the twin forces of market fundamentalism and resurgent authoritarianism. This is not a debate over pedagogy, it is a struggle over the conditions of agency itself: whether education will cultivate the courage to question, to remember, and to resist, or be hollowed out into a training ground for conformity, amnesia, and obedience. The university is not a refuge from these forces, it is one of the primary terrains on which they are fought, and what is decided there will echo far beyond its walls, shaping whether democracy endures as a living project or fades into a managed illusion.

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