BY HANK REICHMAN

Yesterday (February 5), while some 200 people protested outside the campus, two recruiters for the US Border Patrol staffed a booth at a Brigham Young University career fair in Provo, Utah.  Inside the event, The Salt Lake Tribune reports, “students flocked to the ballroom for the chance to talk with recruiters from more than 70 potential employers — even as faculty, staff and students had signed a Google Form petition against the inclusion of U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the event.”  Among those at the job fair were a BYU faculty member and her husband, an alum, wearing t-shirts with printed messages.  His: “Immigrants make America great.”  Hers: “I stand with immigrants.”  They chatted with students while they stood near the CBP booth, but did not engage with or speak to the recruiters.  Nonetheless, after a half-hour

security personnel asked the couple to leave — along with another faculty member, whose shirt said “The kingdom of God has no borders.”

“The two people I was with were faculty, so they mentioned they were faculty and because of that, I think we got to stay a little longer as the security person looked for an administrator,” Jordan [the faculty spouse] said.  “Then some sort of administrator came in and told us that BYU is politically neutral, and so even though we’re just wearing shirts, we’d have to leave.”  . . .

“I’m glad we were there.  I’m glad there was some voice at the fair to be able to stand with people who are feeling unsafe and uncomfortable today on campus,” Jordan said.  “I’m disappointed that BYU considers our church politically neutral, while they consider CBP being there a politically neutral or OK thing, because it’s certainly not in this current climate.”

That notion of “neutrality” extended as well to BYU’s treatment of the demonstrators outside campus because BYU — owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — requires advance written permission for on-campus protests, hence the demonstrators had to voice their opinions outside the institution’s gates.

This incident is a perfect example of what’s wrong with the growing calls for policies guaranteeing “institutional neutrality.”  Of course, CBP is an agency of the federal government and it would be risky, to say the least, for any university, public or private, to bar its representatives from campus.  But nothing requires the institution to silence the agency’s critics.  Moreover, the LDS church has reaffirmed its commitment to principles on immigration policy that CBP’s activities clearly violate.  In short, BYU’s professions of “neutrality” were not only objectively supportive of CBP and by implication the Trump regime’s criminal immigration policies, they also can be seen to violate the LDS church’s own values, which are supposed to guide the institution.

“It was bad enough [that CBP appeared at a Utah Valley University career fair the day before] but at BYU?” one former BYU professor who attended the protest told the Tribune.  “It’s just really disturbing to me and has really made me feel so desolate, that my church is not taking a firmer stand against all of these horrors that are happening, to American citizens, but to every child of God.  No one deserves to be treated the way people are being treated.”

In his recently published book The Opinionated University (which, by the way, everyone should read), UC Davis law professor and Committee A member Brian Soucek addresses precisely this dilemma.  He acknowledges that sometimes a university’s commitment to academic freedom and free speech will conflict with other fundamental values, compelling a choice.  “When institutions have sacrificed one of their closely held values, they need to make up for it,” he says, “even if the sacrifice might not have been avoidable or if avoiding it might not have been wise, all things considered.” (104)

On these grounds BYU would have been fully justified had it issued a statement acknowledging, as one protester put it, that the presence of CBP on campus “really discourages immigrants from actually coming to this campus, and it promotes violence.”  Such a statement might have comforted immigrant students and reaffirmed institutional values.  Indeed, that would have been the right thing to do.  But it was surely not the right thing to remove three individuals from a public event for the sole crime of wearing t-shirts with words on them.  Indeed, this was a brazen violation of the very free speech principles that we’ve been told the “neutrality” principle allegedly protects.

In an essay published last week in a memorial volume dedicated to the late Chandler Davis, I concluded,

The trumpeters of institutional neutrality get one big thing right: as institutions colleges and universities must remain neutral in the scholarly disputes with which their faculty and students inevitably engage.  However, such neutrality cannot be used as an excuse to avoid the responsibility of university administrators to defend the right and ability of faculty members and students to freely engage in discourse and debate. . . . [At times], neutrality itself can only be maintained through the responsibility to choose to speak out . . .

Silence is not neutrality.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition came out in March 2025.