Harvard steps back on taking position on politically turbulent matters

Amid growing uproar over the war in Gaza, Harvard University on Tuesday (May 28) said that it would now avoid taking a positionon matters that are not "relevant to the core function of the university" as it accepted the recommendations of a faculty committee that urged the varsity to reduce its messages on the prevailing matters of the day.

"Issuing official statements of empathy runs the risk of appearing to care more about some places and events than others," a Harvard readout said. "And because few, if any, world events can be entirely isolated from conflicting viewpoints, issuing official empathy statements runs the risk of alienating some members of the community by expressing implicit solidarity with others," it added.

What does it mean?

It simply means that Harvard would no longer issue official statements of empathy. The University issued such statements for Ukraine when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the 'special military operation' against Ukraine. It also issued a statement for the victims of the October 7 Hamas attacks in Israel.

The university’s Institutional Voice Working Group, made up of eight faculty members, issued the report, with a set of principles and a recommended path forward, which the administration and governing board accepted.

"Harvard isn’t a government," Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor and a co-chair of the committee that developed the recommendations, said in an interview with The Harvard Gazette.

"It shouldn’t have a foreign policy or a domestic policy."

Feldman said though the recommendations had some overlap with institutional neutrality, there were also differences.

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A key difference, Feldman said to The Gazette, is that "as an institution with values, we have a responsibility to promote our core function as an educational institution and defend ourselves against forces that seek to undermine our academic values. In that sense, we aren’t neutral, and we can’t be."

(With inputs from agencies)