BY JOAN W. SCOTT

The victory of Donald Trump in the presidential election has caused great concern for many in academia. When, on the campaign trail, J. D. Vance, now the vice-president-elect, commented that “professors are our enemy,” when the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 called for the abolition of the Department of Education, and when Trump recommended ending the accrediting agencies that maintain some level of standards for colleges and universities, a few university presidents—Michael Roth at Wesleyan and Patricia McGuire at Trinity Washington University—argued that a public stance of institutional neutrality was no longer feasible.

When I submitted my comments on institutional neutrality to a forum in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the future of higher education after the election, a friend and legal scholar who is doing research on Felix Frankfurter sent me a copy of a letter that Frankfurter, who was on the board of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at the time, sent on November 21, 1934 to Director Abraham Flexner. The letter is in the Beatrice Stern research files in the IAS Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives (Box 3, Frankfurter-2).

Frankfurter and Flexner were clearly in conversation about how to structure and define the mission of the newly created IAS. It was founded in 1930, and its first appointments included Albert Einstein and other scientists fleeing Nazi Germany. Among several issues Frankfurter addressed was whether to refer to IAS as “a paradise of scholars.” He thought that was a bad idea. “Apparently [Eden] was an excellent place for one person, but it was fatal even for two—or at least for two when the snake entered.” He also thought that an “ample” salary was needed so that faculty could “be relieved of the necessity ‘to do hack work, summer teaching, lecturing and God knows what all, at a terrible cost to their intellect and productivity,’—circumstances which operate perhaps most unfairly against the wives and thereby greatly hamper in achieving a gracious society, which I deem an essential for a society of scholars.” (Happily, the all-male society he imagined has finally given way to a mix of genders and colors.)

But Frankfurter’s most vehement comment, and the first he addressed in his letter, had to do with what I take to be public declarations of institutional neutrality. “For myself,” he wrote, “I don’t want to hear anything more about German Universities for a good long while anyhow.” He thought that they ought not furnish the criteria for the Institute because they treated research as apart from the world. “In successive moral crises not only have the universities of Germany failed to reveal the accumulated wisdom that we call civilization, but to a large extent they have been the centres of decivilization.” Something in their very organization, he added, must have led to their becoming “poisonous centres of anti-Semitism, militarism and Nazism.” “After all,” he reminded Flexner, “a university is something more than a means for contributing to knowledge. Especially in the social sciences, the test of knowledge lies in action.”

It’s not clear that Flexner, whose model for IAS was German institutions of higher learning, followed Frankfurter’s advice, but his words remind us, in our current moment, of the fragility of the academic enterprise. By action, I think Frankfurter meant publicly standing up to those who would interfere with scholarly work on the grounds of politics, race, national fealty or religious belief, ironically precisely what German “reason of state” is now imposing on its own universities as it proscribes any scholarship or teaching critical of Israeli policy in the name of combatting antisemitism. Frankfurter wanted the German professoriat to be held morally accountable for their complicity with the Nazi regime, which discriminated on those grounds. He added, they “had better not serve as a watershed for our enlightenment—except by way of dangers to avoid.” In the light of these comments, I would speculate that Frankfurter would have agreed that, now as then, public declarations of institutional neutrality are not an option when the very mission of higher education’s pursuit of knowledge is at stake.

Joan W. Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.