Yale will stop making statements on political issues its about time

Yale has decided to kill its “institutional voice” and quit issuing statements on controversial issues.After years of making statements on hot-button topics from abortion to Black Lives Matter, the Ivy League school will adopt a standard of “institutional neutrality,” in a bid to stay out of the culture wars.University president Maurie McInnis announced Wednesday the school would keep its mouth shut and “refrain from issuing statements concerning matters of public, social, or political significance, except in rare cases.”It’s about time.Who cares what a college as a collective thinks about the latest election results or faddish protest cause? And since when is it up to a college president to speak for everyone in the community, assuming they’re all on the same page? What ever happened to diversity of opinion?Yale made the right move — and it’s time for other colleges to follow suit.McInnis appointed a Committee on Institutional Voice to determine what — if any — stances the school should take on current events and, after seven weeks of meetings, the committee concluded: just about none.What schools should and shouldn’t opine about came into sharp focus in the wake of Hamas’ October 7th terror attack on Israel.Many colleges and universities remained uncharacteristically silent, hesitating to condemn the atrocities that took place for fear of agitating campus activists.This selective silence, understandably, left many Jewish students feeling abandoned. “When leaders speak on one issue but not others, some members of the community may feel marginalized on the ground that their concerns have been overlooked while others’ have not,” Yale’s committee noted in their report.At Yale, former president Peter Salovey did ultimately release a carefully worded statement entitled “War in the Middle East” on October 10, 2023.But the committee is absolutely right that universities around the country fumbled the ball when it came to releasing...