All sorts of events tempt a university to make a public statement of support or condemnation: a terrorist attack on New York City and Washington, D.C. A mass shooting at a nearby elementary school. Faculty and student enthusiasm for protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. A social reckoning like #MeToo. Thugs storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the moment, the benefits of making a statement feel as though they outweigh the costs.

But the costs are real and cumulative, as Harvard has learned in the seven months since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. Alumni and students on both sides of the Gaza conflict have called on the school to condemn the atrocities of their enemies, or sympathize with their pain, or affirm their political positions, values, sentiments, or sense of morality. It could not please everyone, and its president, Claudine Gay, had to step down under pressure.

In a report released on Tuesday, Harvard has come to the wise conclusion that the institution should stop issuing “official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.”

[Robert P. George: Universities should not be ideological churches]

It will be interesting to see whether Harvard’s leaders can heed that advice and resist making statements through Election Day. Until then, other institutions would be wise to follow Harvard’s example and adopt their own policy of institutional neutrality. Universities have never possessed moral clarity. Knowledge creation requires rewarding dissent and epistemic modesty, qualities that are incompatible with institutional solidarity or real-time judgments about who is on “the right side of history.”

Institutional neutrality is most closely associated with the University of Chicago, where the Kalven report was adopted in 1967. It notes that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student,” not the head administrator or any entity that purports to express any collective view. “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic,” the report states.

Harvard’s new report follows a similar rationale. It says, “The integrity and credibility of the institution are compromised when the university speaks officially on matters outside its institutional area of expertise.” Its leaders, after all, are hired for “skill in leading an institution,” not “expertise in public affairs.” And when university leaders habitually release statements, they face pressure from competing sides of nearly every issue, distracting “from the university’s essential purpose.”  

It also notes that choosing a side “can undermine the inclusivity of the university community. It may make it more difficult for some members of the community to express their views when they differ from the university’s official position.” The report advises against even statements of empathy pertaining to wars, natural disasters, and persecution, because “the university runs the risk of appearing to care more about some places and events than others” and “runs the risk of alienating some members of the community by expressing implicit solidarity with others.” And “anodyne official statements may cause further distress to the very groups they are meant to comfort.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: The wrong way to fight anti-Semitism on campus]

The report closes by advising that when pressure builds to make an official statement, Harvard should refer to its new policy and clarify the reason for its silence: “the belief that the purpose of the university is best served by speaking only on matters directly relevant to its function and not by issuing declarations on other matters, however important.”

As university leaders pronounce less, faculty and students should feel more free to step up and speak up, not on behalf of any collective, but as individuals who prefer constructive discourse to groupthink. For those who crave pronouncements from the top, there is still religion.

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As we wait for the jury’s verdict in Donald Trump’s hush-money case, let’s slow down a bit and ponder what the former president has told us over the past few days.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The real “deep state” RFK Jr.’s philosophy of contradictions “La Niña really can’t come soon enough.”

A Week of Angry Posts

On Memorial Day, while the nation mourned its honored dead, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to denounce “the Human Scum” who are “working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country.”

In the post, Trump did not mention the fallen soldiers whom, in the past, he has referred to as “suckers” and “losers.” But he did take the occasion to lash out at “the Radical Left, Trump Hating Federal Judge in New York” who had described what he did to E. Jean Carroll as “rape,” and the “N.Y. State Wacko Judge [Arthur Engoron] who fined me almost 500 Million Dollars (UNDER APPEAL) for DOING NOTHING WRONG.”

In a separate post the night before, Trump went after the “Radical, highly Conflicted Judge Juan Merchan,” who is presiding over the hush-money criminal trial in which the jury has begun deliberations. Trump also denounced “the Corrupt, Soros backed D.A., Alvin Bragg,” whom he accused of being “controlled by Crooked Joe Biden’s White House.” As I wrote last month, Trump’s broader strategy is to delegitimize the justice system as a whole—and to spread fear within the institutions tasked with holding him accountable.

Trump also took the time in his Memorial Day Truth Social post to resume his attacks on Carroll herself—the woman he has been found liable for sexually abusing, and then defaming, and then defaming again. He already owes her $91 million, but he felt the need, apparently, to once again accuse her of lying about his assault of her.

Amid all of the angry and unhinged rants, Trump’s attack on Carroll was particularly notable because it could prove even more expensive for the former president. Caroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, has previously suggested that Carroll could file a third defamation suit against Trump for his continued comments about her. “We have said several times since the last jury verdict in January that all options were on the table,” Kaplan said in response to Monday’s post. “And that remains true today—all options are on the table.”

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that Trump is promising donors that he would deport pro-Palestinian protesters. As The Atlantic’s David Graham notes, protest is “an essential element of American freedom and is not itself against the law.” The threat, David writes, “is classic Trump: vindictive, nonsensical, disproportionate, and based on the assumption that deportation is the answer to America’s problems.” I could list other dangerous and nonsensical recent statements, but I’ll end with this one: Trump’s Memorial Day rant came just a little over 24 hours after he shared a video of a man furiously raving at MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough—and liberals in general. The man declares that Trump will “get rid of all you fucking liberals. You liberals are gone when he fucking wins. You fucking blow-job liberals are done. Uncle Donnie’s gonna take this election—landslide.”

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent noted that this apparent endorsement of the idea that “liberals” will be “done” if Trump wins “should be placed alongside Trump’s other recent threats, such as his vow that news organizations will be ‘thoroughly scrutinized’ if he wins, his promise to persecute his ‘vermin’-like political foes, and his threat to prosecute a range of enemies without cause.” Taken together, as Sargent points out, these threats paint a clear picture of how Trump intends to treat ideological adversaries once in office.

The gravity and volume of Trump’s concerning statements, and the ways that they interconnect, are not always reflected back by major media coverage. A November study by Media Matters for America found that major news outlets gave “dramatically less coverage” to Trump’s description of his enemies as “vermin” earlier that month than they devoted to Hillary Clinton’s remark about a “basket of deplorables” in 2016. Among other findings, the Media Matters review notes that the Big Three broadcast-TV networks “provided 18 times more coverage” of Clinton’s comment than of Trump’s.

I offer the above list as a reminder of what the man the Republican Party is set to coronate for the presidency this summer is telling us outside the courtroom. For the moment, Trump’s fate is in the hands of a New York jury. But ultimately, his fate will be up to the voters, won’t it? Millions of voters seem disengaged from this year’s campaign. A New York Times analysis of recent polling found that Trump’s current lead rests with voters “who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news and who don’t regularly vote.” Young voters seem especially dismayed about the election and cynical about the stakes.

But Trump continues to tell us who he is and what he intends to do. We’ve been warned, and nobody—including that jury—is coming to save us before November.

Related:

Trump has a new plan to deal with campus protesters. The Trumpian vertigo of American politics

Today’s News

Jurors in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial began deliberations. They asked to rehear parts of the testimony from Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, and David Pecker, the ex-publisher of the National Enquirer. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said in a letter to lawmakers that he would not recuse himself from two upcoming cases about the 2020 presidential election and the U.S. Capitol riot after recent news stories reported that two controversial flags flew at his homes. Israel’s national security adviser said that the war in Gaza would last at least until the end of the year.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Clouds are one of the greatest climate mysteries left, Zoë Schlanger writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

H. Armstrong Roberts / Getty

The Child-Nutrition Myth That Just Won’t Die

By Lauren Silverman

The fact that stealth cooking has remained so popular is amazing when you consider how much work it is. You might spend an extra hour cooking, say, chicken nuggets from scratch with pureed beets tucked inside—versus buying a bag of regular chicken nuggets from the supermarket. But if it helps your toddler get their recommended cup or cup and a half of vegetables each day, it’s worth it, right?

The nutrition experts I spoke with say it’s not.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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