University leaders should think carefully before making political comments that could be taken to speak for their institutions, according to Professor Arif Ahmed, the Office for Students’ director for freedom of speech and academic freedom.
Speaking at a Westminster Education Forum conference, Ahmed drew a distinction between the rights of individual academics and the position of senior leaders or institutions themselves. Academics, he said, “absolutely have the right to express political views”, which are “essential for a university to function”. But different considerations apply where senior management teams, or universities in their institutional capacity, make public interventions on politically contested matters.
As first reported by Times Higher Education, Ahmed warned that political statements issued by university management may be perceived as expressing the institution’s own view, with consequences for freedom of expression within the university. Such interventions, he said, “may be something that has a chilling effect on academics and students within their institutions, particularly those who are in more vulnerable positions, such as academics on short-term contracts”. For that reason, he said, there is “a lot of value in universities adopting an approach of institutional neutrality”.
For senior administrators, there is therefore a “balance to be struck”, as the more authority one holds within an institution – including over the allocation of resources and priorities – the more difficult it becomes to express views on contested issues without those views being taken as those of the institution itself.
The idea of “institutional neutrality” has become a matter of controversy in recent months, not least because the language has appeared in more coercive forms elsewhere, particularly in the United States – most notably in Section 4 of the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence. But in its classic sense, associated with the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, the principle is a narrower and more protective one. On that view, when a university takes sides, as an institution, on contested political or moral questions, it necessarily sets itself against those within the academic community who hold the opposing view.
Understood in this way, institutional neutrality, as Ahmed appears to be suggesting, becomes a form of discipline imposed on the university as a corporate body to protect the freedom of individual members of the academic community to dissent, argue and criticise. It requires the institution itself to refrain from adopting political, social or ideological positions except where this is legally required or directly implicated by its core functions. As the Kalven Report put it, “the university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic”. In other words, the neutrality principle is meant to restrain the institution’s corporate voice precisely so that academic freedom can expand.
Ahmed also raised concerns about the use of ideological tests in university recruitment. Job descriptions that impose requirements relating to beliefs, he said, are generally a “source of concern” for the regulator.
While it is legitimate for universities to require compliance with obligations under the Equality Act 2010 – including the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), which requires them to have due regard to eliminating discrimination, advancing equality and fostering good relations – that is very different from requiring staff to subscribe to particular beliefs or values. Referring to examples such as lectureships that require successful applicants to sign up to an institution’s equality values, or postdoctoral roles that effectively mandate belief “in our sort of values on equality, diversity and inclusion”, Ahmed suggested that such requirements were inappropriate at the level of institutional employment.
“These may be very fine things to believe,” he said, “but it’s not the job of universities and colleges to make windows into men’s souls.”
CAF has seen the kind of issue Ahmed was describing arise in practice across multiple institutions. In a recent investigation into academic job descriptions at the University of Greenwich, we found a standard clause requiring post-holders to “adhere to and promote the university’s policies on equality, diversity and inclusion”.
Greenwich’s Equality and Diversity Policy Statement commits the university to developing policies that advance its EDI “ambitions”, and makes clear that these will apply across its wider policy framework. What staff may therefore be expected to “adhere to and promote” is not limited to legal duties, but extends into a broader institutional programme. Under that umbrella, the university’s Race Action Plan says Greenwich “aspires to be anti-racist” from recruitment onwards, sets out an “ongoing commitment to eliminate structural, institutional and systemic racism”, and promises measures including a staff and student “Anti-Racist pledge”, anti-racist EDI training for all staff and students, and “all-faculty decolonisation of curriculum”. Its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Annual Report 2024/25 also refers to “allyship workshops”, discussion of “appropriate language” and “ways of addressing microaggressions”, and the adoption of inclusive practice and language training across faculties and schools.
While CAF takes no view on the merits of this approach, it is clearly not confined to the requirements of equality law. Rather, it reflects a particular and contested set of theoretical assumptions associated with critical race theory that will not be shared by all academics. Alternatives range from colour-blind approaches to race and inequality, defended by scholars such as Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter and Nigel Biggar, to class-based analyses from critics including Vivek Chibber, Walter Benn Michaels, Adolph Reed Jr and Aijaz Ahmad, who argue that a dominant focus on racialised or decolonial discourse can obscure underlying dynamics of inequality.
Treating any one of these traditions as fixed and beyond question, and requiring its endorsement as a condition of employment, progression or continued good standing, risks suppressing precisely the kind of legitimate scholarly disagreement that universities are supposed to protect. This, in turn, is precisely the sort of danger Ahmed was warning about.
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s monitoring of developments in UK higher education. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, click the link and subscribe to our newsletter.