Harvard adopts a policy of silence on public matters that don’t ‘affect the university’s core function’

After months of controversy over the Israel-Hamas war, Harvard University said Tuesday that its administration will no longer issue official statements about public matters unless they directly affect “the university’s core function.”

The school made the announcement more than a month after an Institutional Voice Working Group was established to consider whether Harvard should stop taking positions on weighty social and political matters. It comes as institutions around the country debate whether to adopt such policies, and at the end of an academic year in which many campus communities have been torn apart by division over the war.

“The integrity and credibility of the institution are compromised when the university speaks officially on matters outside its institutional area of expertise,” the working group said in its report, which was accepted by Harvard’s administration.