At Yale University, things are getting Orwellian

On Tuesday, Sept. 30, the Yale University Film Society, via email, announced a screening the following day of “Orwell: 2+2=5,” the latest documentary from Academy Award-nominated director Raoul Peck. The film, which focuses on British author George Orwell and features archival footage from the writer’s estate, with excerpts from his essays and diaries narrated by the actor Damian Lewis, arrived “at a moment of urgent resonance,” according to the announcement. It promised to offer “a stirring depiction of the dangers of unchecked power and the fragility of so-called civilized society, told through the eyes of a man from the past who may hold the key to the world’s future.”

For a campus screening, the email’s copy was unusually compelling. It was itself cinematic. Peck’s film, too, isn’t like the film society’s usual offerings; it’s not a dazzling Hollywood blockbuster. The screening brought something different: A confrontation with Orwell’s words and their lasting resonance, rather than a typical celebration of a premiering film. 

Given Yale’s silence on matters worthy of speech, the event was timely. Orwell’s warnings about the corruption of language felt suddenly relevant.

As a sophomore at Yale, I’m concerned, as so many are, about the Trump administration’s efforts to seize autonomy from universities across the country. On Friday, Cornell University announced it would pay a $30 million fine to the federal government and devote another $30 million to fund agriculture and farming programs on its campus after the administration accused the institution of antisemitism and discrimination in admissions. In return, the government will restore hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and research grants, which had been frozen since April. 

Cornell’s announcement follows similar agreements between the administration and at least five other institutions. In September, Harvard University agreed to pay $500 million to settle the federal government’s barrage of attacks against it, according to President Donald Trump. Columbia University had hundreds of millions in grants frozen, which were released only after the university agreed in July to federal policy changes. Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia have also reached agreements with the administration, and according to the New York Times, the University of California has entered negotiations with the government.

So far, Yale’s federal funding has not been explicitly targeted by the Trump administration, making it the only Ivy League university to evade being singled out.

But the evasion of direct funding cuts and the ominous threats of administration directives comes at a different expense, one that is perhaps costlier than any financial sum. Like other universities, Yale has adopted a policy of “institutional neutrality” in all but name. 

The screening of “Orwell: 2+2=5” presented me with the chance to ask Peck, an Orwell scholar, what a term like “institutional neutrality” might mean in the context of the late writer’s words.

I decided to attend.

The origins of institutional neutrality

When Hamas attacked concertgoers in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, institutional neutrality was already around. Anthropologist Peter W. Wood wrote about the origin of the term in the aftermath of those events, underscoring why a century-old concept had reentered the lexicon at that particular moment. The concept, he explained, was first framed by Arthur O. Lovejoy in 1915, as a “principle aimed at curtailing the readiness of academic administrations to take sides in disputes in which some of their faculty members were on the other side” and was “intended to protect academic freedom.”

In 1967, institutional neutrality reemerged when the University of Chicago issued its “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action,” subsequently dubbed the Kalven Report after a professor at the law school. The document contains passages that remain pertinent, including one that I recalled as I watched the film: “There is no mechanism by which [the university] can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives.”

The report’s principal idea — that universities should not comment on political issues unless they threaten “the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry” — read as honorable restraint in 1967. Now it sounds more like paralysis.

“The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity,” the report reads, in a passage that was written nearly two years before President Richard Nixon took office in 1969 — and more than a half century before the days of President Donald Trump’s unprecedented, sustained assault on universities and intellectual life.

While reflecting the time in which it was written, the Kalven Report has been misinterpreted — its important contingency about threats to a university’s existence has been largely discarded and gone unheeded. But if institutions of higher learning are to preserve the freedom of dissent among its students and community — let alone ensure that such dissent continues to thrive — then they must respond when these very values are under attack.

Doublespeak

After the screening I wasn’t sure how to pose my question to Peck, but I was curious how he might view the policy that Yale adopted one year ago: “Institutional voice,” which many of us here know to be institutional neutrality. 

The policy emerged from a committee appointed by Yale President Maurie McInnis during her first few months at the university as president. Its co-chairs, in a Yale Daily News op-ed, wrote that the committee “did not recommend that University leaders adopt a position of neutrality.” But their report did state that Yale, and particularly university leaders such as deans and department heads, should not make statements on matters of public importance.

In her first year, McInnis has faced broad threats to federal research funding, such as research cost reimbursements from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and growing skepticism about higher education. She formed committees on “institutional voice” and “trust,” increased lobbying in Washington and signed a joint statement condemning federal interference — but she declined to comment on Harvard’s defiance of the Trump administration. McInnis has said she prefers “behind-the-scenes work” to public pronouncements and believes it “respectful” to refrain from commenting on peer institutions.

But not everyone at Yale agrees with McInnis’ silence. 

In a blog post titled “The Institutional Neutrality Trap,” Amy Kapczynski, who serves as the John Thomas Smith Professor of Law at Yale Law School, wrote that the committee’s report had been wrongly interpreted as establishing “institutional neutrality.” But Kapczynski conceded that the report “does too much to encourage silence” and “too broadly casts forms of collective speech as problematic.”

For its part, the committee has insisted its recommendation that the faculty and administrators of the university refrain from making public statements is not institutional neutrality. But the distinction feels like a retreat into semantics — or what Orwell might refer to as “doublespeak.” The writer of “Politics and the English Language” recognized such convoluted reasoning and the dangers associated with it:

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.

I thought about those words, and the committee’s actions, as the closing credits of Peck’s film crawled up the screen. Whether acknowledged overtly or not, Yale has, in fact, adopted a policy of institutional neutrality — and the committee’s deliberate efforts to evade being accused of doing so are dangerous. 

The report seems to want to have it both ways: Deciding that institutional neutrality should be effectively instated at Yale, while allowing the university, at the same time and with deceptive accuracy, to dismiss accusations of institutional neutrality.

Orwell had something to say in his famous essay about such verbal gymnastics. “Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way,” he wrote. “That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”

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At the screening, I stood up to speak. “This year,” I told Peck and the audience, “Yale decided to become institutionally neutral, which means it now says nothing of importance about anything of importance. Would you consider a term like ‘institutional neutrality’ to be ‘Newspeak’?” (Orwell explains newspeak as a language that uses English grammar but with a shrinking vocabulary that reduces complex thoughts to simplistic terms.)

Peck smiled and joked, “Can you assure my getaway?”

He answered my question, telling the largely student and faculty audience, “To be neutral is to have a political position. There is no such thing as ‘neutral’ in a society. Neutrality is not an option. How can you be satisfied with the state of the world? It’s a position of fear — especially in a place of education. That is the only place where you can have real discussion. If that space becomes ‘neutral,’ I don’t know what it is.”

In April, Variety reported that Peck spoke before a sold-out masterclass at Visions du Réel, a Swiss film festival. Before ever being asked about institutional neutrality, Peck said, “Words don’t mean anything anymore. Science doesn’t mean anything. There’s no truth — there are ‘alternative facts.’ We’re living in a world that’s upside down, where no one says anything.”

“Terror,” he said, “comes slowly.”

Boots on New Haven Green?

Yale has a proud legacy of addressing events of the day and defending the principles of civility in a free society. University presidents such as Kingman Brewster Jr. and A. Bartlett Giamatti, for example, spoke out about the Vietnam War, the Black Panthers and May Day protests.

But with its silence this past year, Yale has abandoned its local and national responsibility.

Last fall, “YaleNews,” the university’s press arm, published an article about Yale’s relationship with the town of New Haven, Connecticut. The story celebrated the number of my classmates who had graduated from local high schools, called one of its own programs an “outrageously awesome concept” and insisted that Yale and New Haven share an “interwoven interdependency.”

But this summer, when a Wilbur Cross High School student was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, the university said nothing. Three weeks ago, when ICE abducted eight people at a car wash two miles from campus, Yale said nothing.

Orwell warned us about the power of abbreviations like ICE, words that sound neutral but that conceal violence. In his novel “1984,” political contractions such as Ingsoc, Minitrue and Miniplenty echo the clipped speech of Nazi and Soviet regimes, like “Gestapo” and “Comintern.” Each was designed to mask ideology in plain sight. Today, “ICE” bears the same chill: An acronym that flattens cruelty into three clean letters. 

The university hasn’t spoken about Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s assault on more than a century of medical progress either — even the advances that Yale itself helped to shape. Its researchers produced the first medical X-ray images, introduced penicillin and chemotherapy to the United States in the 1940s, developed the first artificial heart pump, discovered melatonin, identified Lyme disease, built the first insulin pump and were the first to use DNA sequencing to diagnose a disease. As the Trump administration cuts funding for scientific research, Yale’s scientists continue their groundbreaking work despite the tightening budgetary constraints.

The university has said nothing about Trump’s recommendation that military generals use U.S. cities as training grounds for war. Will Yale wait until there are boots stomping across the New Haven Green? As Orwell wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

The results of silence and cowardice

Each time Yale absents itself from public discourse, it makes a political decision. Perhaps the university fears that, just like Harvard and Columbia, it could become a target for the Trump administration.

In recent weeks, after the administration offered a compact for preferential federal funding to nine universities in exchange for policy changes, Brown University — after settling with the government in July — and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the first institutions to reject the demands outright. (Five of the other universities have since rejected it, but the University of Texas and Vanderbilt University have remained open to signing it.) The compact offer, which requires colleges to agree that “academic freedom is not absolute,” was later expanded by Trump himself via Truth Social to include any university. Yale’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) urged the university not to comply, according to the Yale Daily News. 

The AAUP’s own history illustrates how far interpretations of institutional neutrality have strayed from the phrase’s origins. Formed in 1915, the same year that Lovejoy coined the term, the AAUP now finds itself a vital voice speaking into the void left by the universities it represents.

Only a month ago, President McInnis and Dean Pericles Lewis speculated, half-jokingly during parents weekend, that Yale has been spared only because “Y” came at the end of the alphabet. It’s never that simple, of course. Believing so — or poking fun at threats to academic freedom — causes concerned students to wonder whether university leaders are, in fact, prepared to meet this moment. After all, our four years of college overlaps with Donald Trump’s second four years in office.

We already know the results of silence and cowardice in the face of totalitarianism. There are far too many examples.

When Peck was growing up he “had a very physical relationship with fear from growing up in Haiti,” under François Duvalier’s dictatorship, he told writer Cian Traynor. “My father was arrested under the dictatorship of Duvalier, so I know the fear of disappearing; I know the fear of roadblocks where you feel there are people in uniforms, armed in the dark, who can do whatever they want to you. That prudence in front of uniforms has never left me.” His father was later arrested a second time, and Peck said authoritarianism always starts the same way: One by one, journalists, judges, academics are picked off and isolated. 

Once you are alone, they have you.

It’s Orwellian how the Trump administration bends storied institutions that are older than the country to its will. The government announces it is “cautiously encouraged” by certain conduct and promises to “keep an eye on the situation and aftermath” — when the “situation” happens at a private university and the “encouraging conduct” is capitulation to the government’s overreach. In “1984,” Big Brother survives by wielding absolute power; freedom is flattened by the thudding steps of a goose-stepping soldier and by language that makes those steps seem necessary.

Trump says “it doesn’t matter” when he jokes about fixing elections. He spews contradictions that leave words meaningless. “I’m saying you don’t have to vote — it doesn’t mean we’re not gonna have elections!” He reverses a post-World War II decision that renamed the War Department the Department of Defense, returning its meaning to “war.”

Some institutions, including Yale, say nothing. That’s their policy.

Solidarity

After the screening, Peck joked about his getaway. ICE has already targeted or taken students and professors from Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard and Georgetown. Institutional neutrality, I thought, might be why they haven’t yet come for Yale.

But it’s hard to believe that it will be silence that saves us. So I said to Peck, “I’ll walk out with you.”