On October 12, 2023, Williams College was ahead of the curve. On that day, by the reckoning of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), just four institutions of higher learning had adopted “official position of institutional neutrality substantially similar to the principles set forth in the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report.”

Williams, however, has limited its policy to the office of college president. In an e-mail to the campus on that October 12th, President Maud S. Mandel explained her decision to refrain from sending out “campus-wide messages about domestic or international events or even natural disasters, no matter how tragic or painful, is based on several considerations:”

First and foremost, terrible tragedies and injustices occur too frequently in life. Our awareness of specific events may vary depending on our communities, personal connections and the media’s focus. But such events are constantly affecting people from Williams, their families and innocent victims around the world—sometimes on a very large scale. I put out no statement after the many—too many—incidents of recent times: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the displacement of Armenian Christians from Nagorno-Karabakh, the earthquakes in Turkey and Afghanistan, and terrible events in Sudan, Burkina Faso and Ethiopia, to name just some examples. We think with grief, too, of the many shootings at schools and places of worship. Each of you will have injustices that you could add to this list. We should each have the chance to decide which of these affect us and how we want to contend with them.

A sound rationale.

We are wondering why she has been hesitant to extend this policy from her office to the entire college. In the nearly two years and six months since Maud’s statement, an additional 37 colleges and universities have adopted institutional neutrality, among them, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Virginia. The University of Wisconsin system, Dartmouth, Brown, and most recently Tufts.

Williams is now behind the curve.

It is long past time that the college follow the lead of our sister institutions and adopt the same policy Maud adopted for her office as the official position of the college.

Otherwise, given the liberal tilt of the faculty and college programming, students at the college and alumni of the college as well as observers of the academic scene might wonder if Williams is not a place where free inquiry is valued, but where only certain ideologies are promoted.