Beyond Political Neutrality in Higher Education: An Interview with Brian Rosenberg
President Rosenberg enjoys dinner with students in the Cultural House. Photo by Macalester College.
Since the outbreak of conflict in Israel and Palestine on Oct. 7, universities have been thrust into the fray of international politics. With pro-Palestinian students protesting on campuses and pro-Israel affiliates responding in kind, university administrators have been expected to respond to current affairs while placating both sides. For a number of school administrators, this venture into politics is a sharp departure from how they normally operate as they have only sporadically commented on political affairs in the past. However, Brian Rosenberg—former president of Macalester College and current visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education—regularly voiced his thoughts on political events during his tenure at Macalester. Throughout the Trump administration, he criticized the president’s Muslim ban and other policies which Rosenberg said conflicted with Macalester’s commitment to “internationalism, multiculturalism, and service to society.” For this reason, I decided to sit down with him to discuss why universities should comment on political affairs, what difficulties are inherent in doing so, and how schools should navigate said difficulties.
In 1967, the University of Chicago issued the Kalven Report, which called for universities to “maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.” During your tenure at Macalester, however, you made it a point to frequently comment on current affairs. Why did you find it important to do so when much of higher education was trying to be apolitical?
I tried to follow one of the rules that was established by a mentor of mine, Bill Bowen, who was the longtime president of Princeton, and then the president of the Mellon Foundation. Bill was a big believer in institutional neutrality with a couple of notable exceptions. One of them was when there was an issue that bore directly upon the educational mission of the institution and the ability of the institution to carry it out, and another was when there was something that was so serious, that it was a kind of existential threat. Like almost everybody else, he used the example of Nazi Germany, and whether universities should have spoken out in a context like that. That’s the standard that I tried to apply, and the difference between me and many other college presidents is that my definition of issues that directly affected the ability of the institution to carry out its mission is probably broader.
Macalester’s mission says that it has a commitment to internationalism, multiculturalism and service to society. And so when it came to an issue, for instance, like immigration policy, which is a very hot button political issue, my view was that policies that made it impossible for Macalester to recruit international students or made it very, very difficult for Macalester students to study abroad, or that created an unsafe environment for Macalester students, in fact, did bear directly upon our ability to carry out our mission. So I felt that it was my responsibility to speak to that policy as a way of defending the mission of the institution. The same would be true of affirmative action and the institution’s commitment to diversity.
Those who turn it into a simple binary—never say anything or say things—are oversimplifying. Virtually everyone would agree that there are some instances where you need to say something. The question is, where do you draw the line? That’s where the differences of opinion come in. I think the Kalven report is an oversimplification, and also on some fundamental level, wrong, in the sense that when you look at 1967, when that report was issued by the University of Chicago, the claim that the University was neutral on social issues seems to be specious. If you look at the number of African American students enrolled at the University of Chicago at that time, I think you can count it on the fingers of one hand. Universities engage in political and social issues, not simply by statements, but by their actions, and the University of Chicago was making a statement by not admitting a diverse student body, even though it wasn’t saying anything directly about civil rights. I know for many people the Kalven Report is a sacred document, but for me, it is something of an oversimplification.
When it comes to issues that are uniquely divisive on college campuses, like the ongoing conflict in Israel and Palestine, should university presidents change their approach to making public comments? If so, how?
It’s become extraordinarily complicated, as you know. Part of the problem is not necessarily with college presidents making statements or not making statements, but it is with the fact that we seem to be living in a moment where there is absolutely no space for nuance, where people want to turn every issue into a Manichaean battle between good and evil—where you’re either entirely right or entirely wrong. It should be possible for a college president to make a statement about what’s going on in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that reflects a commitment to human life, that acknowledges suffering on both sides without being pilloried as taking one side or another, or being insufficiently sympathetic to one side or another. That, unfortunately, doesn’t need to be the world that we live in right now.
I still believe—and this is where I may differ from some college presidents—that one of the roles a college or university president has is a kind of pastoral role, and that is something that a lot of people who’ve never been a college president don’t understand. That is, you have students on your campus, you bring them in, you promise them that you’re going to provide them with a safe and supportive environment, and then things happen in the world that make them feel unsafe or threatened. You can choose silence, or you can choose to try to say something that acknowledges to the community that you know some people are in pain or that some people are afraid.
I tended to lean toward the side of acknowledging the pain or trauma on my campus. I was still president of Macalester when George Floyd was murdered. It was very near the end of my presidency. That happened four miles from my campus, so my question to the people who say college presidents should say nothing is: Should I have said nothing when it was a deeply traumatic experience for the country, for the state, for the city, and for the college?
Currently, we are seeing this dynamic play out as donors withdraw funding from schools they think do not adequately address instances of antisemitism and anti-Israel speech. In circumstances such as these, how should university administrators reconcile the unique interests of students, faculty, and donors when making a public statement?
When it comes to figuring out how to balance the priorities of donors, students, etc., it comes down to doing what you think is right. You can’t take actions because you’re afraid of losing a large gift if you think those actions are wrong. You also can’t take action because you’re afraid that students are going to protest and occupy your office. At the end of the day, you have to be guided by your judgment and your sense of what is ethically and morally appropriate. Sometimes you’re gonna pay a price for that, and sometimes the price could even be losing your job. But the job of a college president is not to keep the job of being a college president. The job of a college president is to try to do the right thing for the institution even if that means giving up a large gift or alienating a portion of your alumni base because you think you’re doing the right thing.
When you have communities that are as diverse and varied in their views as college and university communities are, you’re never going to make everybody happy, so you just have to be guided by your sense of what is right. You can’t do things that are going to, obviously, harm the institution, but I find some of these decisions now where donors are pulling out large gifts, because they disagree with the actions of a president—that is not the way we want universities to be run. That takes us down a very problematic road where people buy influence, rather than earn influence in the appropriate ways.
What does earning influence in the appropriate ways look like on college campuses?
College campuses should be places where there’s a robust exchange of views. The way your view should prevail is that it is the one that is the most rooted in evidence and the most compelling. There are going to be times where there is simply going to be disagreement.
The people who have the greatest right to have some influence are the people who are actually living and working on the campus at a particular moment, so the students, the staff, the faculty, who [are part of the] community. Much as I love alumni, and much as I worked with donors, the reality is that alumni graduated in the past, and they are connected to the college, but they can’t be making decisions for the college. Very often, the institution as it exists at the present moment is quite different from the institution from which they graduated. So everybody can have a voice, but it’s not appropriate for those with the biggest pocket books to have the loudest voice.
On top of reconciling the interests of these university stakeholders, college presidents also have to be conscious of how their schools are perceived by the wider public. How should this perception influence—if at all—college administrators as they weigh making a political statement?
Underlying a lot of the problems right now in higher education is the fact that it has declined dramatically in public regard. There was a Gallup poll that was released in July, and in that poll, just over one third of people said they had trust and confidence in higher education—which is a sharp decline from five years earlier, and an even sharper decline from 10 or 20 years ago, when higher education used to be among the most respected industries in the country. So the fundamental problem is that higher education has lost a tremendous amount of public trust.
Some of that is the result of things that it can’t control. We’re living in an incredibly fractured and dysfunctional political moment, and higher education is not immune from that. But some of it higher education should be able to control. People are really questioning the cost and value [of higher education], and a lot of people are questioning the extent to which it’s equitable. For places like where you and I are right now, Columbia and Harvard, there’s lots of evidence that if you’re a wealthy person, you have a much better chance of getting in. And in general, higher education has not been very open to change.
All of these underlying factors have begun to erode a lot of confidence in higher education, which then allows for moments like this, where Israel-Palestine blows up and everyone piles on. If you look at the politicians that have piled on, they come from both parties. I tend to work under the assumption that politicians do what’s best for their electoral prospects, and the fact that higher education has become a punching bag should tell us about the extent to which politicians think beating up higher education is going to be a good thing because most people don’t like it. I think the most important thing that college presidents could try to do is work to restore that fundamental public trust in higher education by addressing some of its problems in cost, equity, and fairness and in adapting to a very different world that existed 100 years ago.
To other college presidents, how would you recommend navigating between commenting on political affairs and ensuring that affiliates feel as if they can freely express themselves?
First of all, it’s fundamentally rooted in the culture that exists on a campus—none of these things exist in a vacuum. You have to create a culture of trust, and a culture in which people believe that disagreeing with the President is not going to carry negative consequences. It takes some time to establish that trust and build up that culture, so you can’t wait for moments of crisis to try to build trust. You have to build trust every day when there’s not a crisis. And you do that by being honest, open, human, authentic, confessing when you make a mistake, confessing when you don’t know an answer, and responding temperately and civilly when people attack you.
It’s really important when you issue those statements for them to have an authentic human voice. If they sound like they were produced by an institutional machine. Nobody trusts them, and they can’t. They have to sound like they are coming from a human being with thoughts, feelings, and opinions, and naturally invite other human beings with thoughts, feelings, and opinions to respond.
*This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Wyatt King (CC ’26) is a staff writer for CPR studying political science and statistics. He is interested in Eastern Europe, international political economy, and applying quantitative methods to political science research. In his spare time, you can find him reading a good book in either the Met or MoMA.