Vanderbilt Uses “Institutional Neutrality” to Protect Against Trump. But Is It Truly Neutral?

Over the last few months, Vanderbilt University has tried to remain calm. After Trump returned to the White House, the school tried to give the impression that it has largely evaded the federal crackdowns sweeping college campuses nationwide. The university has refrained from issuing strong statements about the administration’s policy changes and has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to complying with the law. Vanderbilt was absent^[4] from a letter signed by over 500 leaders in higher education challenging the administration’s actions, as well as from an amicus brief^[5] supporting Harvard in court against targeted federal attacks. Though students have expressed fears^[6] about potential ICE agents on campus, the university has offered virtually no communication^[7] or guidance on the matter.

Despite this projection, Vanderbilt has not been immune from the government’s efforts to reshape higher education. Federal funding cuts^[8] and grant freezes have hit Vanderbilt researchers hard; in a February message to students, the university admitted NIH grant cuts could create a “$40-50 million annual funding gap” at Vanderbilt. The Department of Education began investigating^[9] Vanderbilt in March over its use of DEI principles in graduate student admissions and programming, and Senator Ted Cruz flagged almost $5 million in National Science Foundation grants awarded to Vanderbilt over similar charges of DEI and “far-left” bias. Meanwhile, ICE raids have rocked Nashville, and international students and faculty have faced travel bans and targeted scrutiny at peer institutions.

Privately and internally, Vanderbilt’s administration has responded to these changes largely through compliance. Across Vanderbilt’s websites, references to DEI have been removed^[10], and administrative groups and positions related to DEI have been reorganized or renamed^[11]. International students have received^[12] private messaging from the university regarding international travel, maintaining immigration and visa status, and guarding their social media presence.

In July, covertly recorded videos were leaked^[13] of Vanderbilt employees allegedly saying that DEI programs were renamed but remained unchanged, leading Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn to send a letter to the university urging compliance and the university to hire an outside firm to conduct a legal investigation. The university distanced itself from the video and reaffirmed its commitment to the law.

The Vanderbilt Hustler, the university’s official student newspaper, has closely tracked these developments and raised these issues with administration. In April, during a quarterly interview with chancellor Daniel Diermeier, student journalists pressed him about the administration’s response to federal policy changes. Diermeier was vague about federal lobbying efforts, even declining to “comment on specific litigation strategies.” Student journalists also asked specifically about the role of “institutional neutrality,” which has been a controversial subject at Vanderbilt University.

In the past, Diermeier has defended his position of neutrality, arguing that it is critical to Vanderbilt’s “culture of free expression.” Just after the contentious dismantling of the BDS encampment in 2024, Diermeier wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal titled “Free Speech Is Alive and Well at Vanderbilt University^[14].” Through institutional neutrality, “university leaders refrain from publicly taking political positions to avoid indirectly stifling free thought and expression among students and faculty,” Diermeier wrote. University administration declined to comment for this article.

Institutional neutrality is not new to popular discourse surrounding higher education. In 1967, as the University of Chicago was facing pressure from student protestors over its involvement in the Vietnam War and discriminatory development practices in the South Side of Chicago, the school released the Kalven Report^[15], which outlined the concept of institutional neutrality. The document posits that universities should refrain from taking public stances on contemporary political issues for the sake of protecting academic freedom, its mission of conducting scholarly work, and crucially, its “community of scholars.” Institutional neutrality has a special history at Vanderbilt, especially under Diermeier, who previously served as a provost at the University of Chicago.

But during Vanderbilt’s controversial response to its own student encampment in support of BDS, several students were suspended and three were expelled, making Vanderbilt among the first and only institutions to expel pro-Palestine student protestors. Diermeier has notably used the term “principled neutrality,” rather than “institutional” neutrality, to describe the university’s position on political issues, seemingly preemptively responding to common criticisms surrounding institutional neutrality.

This approach has drawn condemnation from Vanderbilt’s campus community. Most recently, a group of mostly graduating seniors who had served as editors of the student newspaper published an op-ed^[16] calling for Vanderbilt to “stop playing both sides.” The article criticizes Diermeier’s practice of principled neutrality as a convenient defense mechanism to protect the university, with inconsistent application and support of political agendas.

The article was largely written by Brina Ratangee, a graduate student and former editorial director of The Vanderbilt Hustler, who also attended Vanderbilt as an undergraduate before graduating this spring. Ratangee explained that she had been planning on writing the piece for over a year, reflecting on how the issues surrounding institutional neutrality had persisted throughout her time at Vanderbilt. She noted that as each class of students cycles through and graduates, administrators have opportunities to revise or reframe their approach to neutrality, and she wanted to leave a record of its impact during her years on campus.

“I especially felt like I had a good understanding of where neutrality fits in our university’s history, and having spoken to Diermeier on so many occasions, I recognize what his justification is, and I have felt that it is flawed, but I’ve never been able to counter that in discussion. I wanted an opportunity to dig deeper into our university’s past to frame all that is going on,” Ratangee said.

Even among faculty, the issue of institutional neutrality has become contentious. Two professors, granted anonymity due to fear of retaliation, shared concerns mirroring those raised in the Hustler op-ed.

Both professors mentioned the Kalven Report and discussed the broader history of institutional neutrality, taking issue both with the report itself and with its specific application at Vanderbilt. One professor emphasized that institutional neutrality is “not something that is carved in stone or delivered from a mountaintop. It’s a direct product of an extremely contentious set of historical events and circumstances.” The other similarly remarked that “the history of institutional neutrality is not a neutral history, and it’s not a neutral concept.”

Ultimately, the professors questioned the premise of neutrality altogether, expressing skepticism that true neutrality is even possible for institutions with financial interests and relationships with the military and powerful corporations. “It’s pretty dramatic, and I don’t think a particularly sustainable claim to say that any powerful institution is neutral. Institutions have histories. They own land, they are based on wealth that frequently comes from deeply exploitative processes.”

One professor described neutrality as a “convenient discourse for justifying whatever the chancellor wants to do” and noted that it is “not often explicitly grounded in the history of what that term was intended to mean.”

Professors have raised concerns about the erosion of faculty governance and the administration’s responses to federal policy changes. “If you’re going to articulate institutional neutrality in the way that they are, you also have to have very robust support for faculty rather than totally gutting faculty governance and leaving us to fend for ourselves,” one professor argued. Another added that shared governance is supposed to be a fundamental principle accompanying institutional neutrality, yet “we do not have robust mechanisms of faculty governance at Vanderbilt,” explaining that faculty “are not empowered to actually weigh in in any meaningful way around a lot of the most consequential policy decisions that the university makes.”

One professor specifically noted that as new rules regulating student protests and expression during the pro-Palestine protests and encampment last year arose, faculty, who were traditionally involved in creating or at least vetting these rules, were excluded from the process. “Vanderbilt is not going to stand up for democracy because it is not a democracy,” the professor remarked.

In the context of the Trump administration’s targeted attacks on vulnerable groups, the professors also noted that one of the primary harms of institutional neutrality is its failure to adequately protect minorities and marginalized members of the campus community. As one professor put it, “from the perspective of people who are being targeted by the administration or are marginalized, especially international students, staff, and faculty, [the university’s response] does not seem sufficient.”

Much of the contentiousness surrounding institutional neutrality largely rests in the tension between Vanderbilt’s, and many universities’, conflicting identities as a university and a corporation, with an endowment, investment portfolio, and assets. “It’s really not about what anyone personally believes. They’re really just trying to shield the university’s assets,” the professor continued.

The professors ultimately expressed that “everyone has the sense that it’s only a matter of time” before these policies escalate to a point of targeting Vanderbilt more directly. “I do believe that they are trying to protect us. Whether I agree with how they’re doing that is a totally different thing.”

As Andy Hines, senior associate director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College, explained in an interview with The Nation, Vanderbilt has made a concerted effort to brand itself as a beacon for neutrality, a concept that has become more attractive to other universities over the last few years. “I think neutrality is a tactic university administrations deploy to enact their own political visions of what the university and what broader US and global society ought to be, so it very much is a political tool,” said Hines. “But on the other hand, I think it’s also worth noting that there are many times where it doesn’t make sense for university administrations to comment on political events.” Hines emphasized the importance of faculty senates, unions, and other groups on campus engaging in this discourse with administration.

Historically, the American university has been closely entangled with the federal government, making it rare for institutions to fully resist state policy. However, from the “Palestine exception” in academic freedom to close relationships with the military and Department of Defense, the increasingly critical gaze on universities from their own communities is revealing the ways in which these relationships belie the spirit of institutional neutrality. “Neutrality is becoming more visible in the present, because that consensus has evaporated and it isn’t exactly clear what is and isn’t neutral,” Hines said.

By rebranding neutrality as “principled,” Diermeier implies that there is a moral dimension to neutrality, according to Hines. But this framing has also served another purpose. “He uses it as a way to brand himself, and the university more broadly, as a national leader in this neutrality space,” Hines says.

In a recent Vanderbilt Hustler interview, Diermeier appeared to signal a slight break from his longstanding commitment to neutrality. He remarked that there are instances when universities should take a stance, such as on federal regulations, research funding, and Pell Grants. Yet whether Vanderbilt has truly stepped away from neutrality is another question. If the university is acting to influence federal policy, it has not made a public display of those efforts, and it has not extended support to peer institutions facing stronger and more targeted attacks from the Trump administration.

In the past, neutrality has put Vanderbilt in a position to comply with conservative Tennessee legislation around DEI and transgender care, serving as a “strategic buffer.” The university is uniquely positioned to appease Tennessee’s Republican legislature and more Democratic Nashville and left-leaning student body and faculty. In this regard, Vanderbilt’s compliance with the Trump administration’s attack on higher education may simply be a matter of “muscle memory” from complying with older Tennessee laws regulating similar topics, such as dismantling DEI and banning BDS. Though Vanderbilt may see a benefit in seeking to be “on the vanguard of student repression,” Hines says, the strategy might not work out in the long run.

While neutrality inherently prioritizes stability and self-preservation, Hines hinted at another path, one that lends itself to the kind of democratization needed in higher education. “The American university needs to be something different than what it was, and at this moment is an opportunity to build that other thing. Maybe that is a way to preserve an institution’s future, in a way that I think many university administrators haven’t yet imagined.”

Of course, Vanderbilt is not removed from the community it occupies. It is the biggest employer in Nashville and contributes billions of dollars to Tennessee’s economy. Nor is it isolated from the broader national community of scholars and academic institutions now collectively under attack. The university’s actions will have implications not only on its own campus but also for Nashville at large, and even nationally. Yet professors and students alike expressed hope that Vanderbilt’s campus community would persevere through this complicated era and that the values of free speech and moral action would endure.

“There is still this legacy of protest and activism at Vanderbilt,” Ratangee said. “Students will still find ways to voice their concerns and be meaningful agents of change in their communities.”

More from The Nation

A conversation with the author about her new book, “From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary”.

Amy Littlefield^[20]

The right-wing influencer did not deserve to die, and we shouldn’t forget the many despicable things he said and did.

Joan Walsh^[21]

A secretive plan for a new state lockup angered people in a deep-red corner of rural America—and changed how some see incarceration.

Lauren Gill^[22]

A conversation with P.E. Moskowitz about the chemical imbalance theory of depression, the false schism between prescription and recreational drugs, and collective psychic pain.

Emmeline Clein^[23]

Wide-open gun culture and hyper-polarization are bringing the “years of lead” to the USA.

Jeet Heer^[24]

In “Searches”, Vauhini Vara probes the ways that we rely on the Internet and how we periodically attempt to free ourselves from its grip.

Books & the Arts / Laila Lalami^[25][26]