https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fossil-fuel-divestment-versus-institutional-neutrality-a-north-carolina-test-case/
An important test of “institutional neutrality” — a pillar of campus free speech — is now playing out in North Carolina, where the University of North Carolina Asheville (UNCA) recently chose to divest a portion of its endowment from companies selling “fossil fuels” (coal, oil, and natural gas).
Institutional neutrality means that universities should avoid taking official political stands at the institutional level, such as divestment from fossil fuels, since such actions tend to pressure faculty and students holding contrary views into silence. This is particularly true for public universities such as UNCA, for they belong to every citizen of the state.
What makes the UNCA test case especially important is that two years ago North Carolina passed HB 527, one of the first comprehensive campus free-speech laws in the country. HB 527 not only affirms institutional neutrality as a foundational principle of campus free speech at UNC schools, it mandates that an annual report by a committee of the UNC Board of Governors (which oversees the entire state university system) weigh in on any “difficulties, controversies, or successes in maintaining a posture of administrative and institutional neutrality with regard to political or social issues.”
The question now is how the annual report, due in September, will handle this decision by a public university to throw in its lot with the fossil-fuel-divestment movement. More broadly, the question is whether the UNC Board of Governors will act to halt and reverse this clear violation of institutional neutrality by UNC Asheville. Students and administrators at UNCA intend their move to pressure the entire UNC system to divest. That means the UNC Board of Governors’ response to UNCA’s divestment bandwagon will have an enormous impact on the survival of institutional neutrality at every public campus in the state.
Students and faculty at public universities have every right to take whatever stand they like on issues like fossil-fuel divestment, climate change, and the Green New Deal. It is precisely the neutrality of public universities at the official institutional level that supports and guarantees the ability of individual faculty and students to freely speak their minds on these issues. Public universities shouldn’t have an official political line. We wouldn’t tolerate a public university endorsing Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, or Donald Trump for president. Nor should a public university throw its official institutional weight behind a thoroughly political movement whose aims are the subject of active, widespread, and unresolved public debate, particularly when state law cites the principle of institutional neutrality as an essential component of campus free speech.