I’m a strong supporter of institutional neutrality at universities. We shouldn’t issue statements about contested political questions, because any “official” position threatens to squash dialogue and dissent.
That’s what University of Chicago law professor Harry Kalven argued in 1967, in his now-famous report on the subject. Kalven said universities should refrain from political statements, with one important exception: when the institution itself was in danger.
“From time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry,” Kalven wrote. “In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and values.”
The university has reached such a time, right now. And the threat to our interests and values has a name: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
It is our institutional obligation to speak out against Donald Trump’s nomination of Kennedy as secretary of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy has tied vaccines to autism, mass shootings to antidepressants, and changed gender identities to chemicals in the water supply. He called the COVID-19 vaccine — which Trump helped produce, via Operation Warp Speed — the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”
He said fewer people would have died of the coronavirus if they had taken ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine instead of the vaccine. And he said COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
Oh, and I almost forgot: he questioned whether the HIV virus causes AIDS.
All of these claims have been thoroughly debunked by medical science. And all of them threaten the essential mission of the university, which is to discover and disseminate knowledge.
As a private citizen, Kennedy can spout whatever conspiracy theories he chooses. But if he is confirmed to lead HHS, he’ll have the power to influence public policy in accord with them.
Kennedy has called the Centers for Disease Control a “fascist” enterprise, claiming it injures children like “Nazi death camps” and covers up its crimes like the Catholic Church hid pedophiles in its priesthood. He would likely try to divert money from the agency, which funds university research about vaccine effectiveness and public health.
So Kennedy isn’t just a threat to universities’ scientific principles. He’s a danger to our bottom line.
Why aren’t we speaking out against him?
To be sure, many individual scientists and medical researchers have condemned Kennedy’s nomination. Thus far, however, no major college or university leader has done so in an official capacity.
That’s probably because of last fall’s campus controversies, following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent war in Gaza. Many universities found themselves in hot water for issuing statements about the conflict, which inevitably angered one side or the other.
Did a statement fail to call the Hamas attack “terrorism”? The university got labeled pro-Palestinian, or even antisemitic. But if a statement said Hamas was a terrorist group — or if it didn’t condemn civilian deaths in Gaza — then the school was supposedly biased towards Israel.
I get it. It was unwise for universities to take official positions about the Israel-Palestine situation, for exactly the reasons that Kalven spelled out a half-century ago. When there are reasonable arguments on both sides of an issue, we shouldn’t give our imprimatur to one or the other.
That’s why an estimated two dozen universities issued Kalven-like policies in 2024, pledging institutional neutrality on complex public issues. And good on them.
But Kennedy’s medical claims aren’t controversies about which informed people disagree; they are lies. And they directly imperil our institutions, which rest in large part on scientific research and instruction.
Over the past year, four of the eight Ivy League universities — including my own — have replaced their presidents. In each case, the new appointee came out of the medical sciences.
Perhaps the schools imagined that leaders with medical backgrounds would appear less “political” than, say, someone from the humanities or social sciences. But politics has arrived at their doorstep anyway, in the form of RFK Jr.
It’s time for them to step up. Universities shouldn’t issue statements about everything under the sun, that’s for sure. But, just as surely, they need to defend their institutions when they’re under fire.
I suspect that they’re afraid to get in the new Trump administration’s crosshairs, so they’re keeping quiet. But silence in the face of existential danger isn’t wisdom or prudence. It’s cowardice.
Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools” and eight other books.
