Institutional Neutrality is Good, Actually

Another Letter to the Editor of the Michigan Daily

Mar 26, 2025

You can read the letter here. The rest of the post is just a bit of backstory…

Edit 2025-03-26T11:46: Apparently, my byline in the Daily reads “incoming LSA freshman.” A friend texted me, after reading it, asking “You committed to Michigan? When?!”

So, to be clear: I have been admitted and am considering attending U of M. That’s all! I’ve now emailed the editor asking for the byline to be changed to reflect this…

For the last week or so, I’ve been trading edits back and forth with the editorial staff of the Michigan Daily—the University of Michigan’s student paper—over a piece I hoped to publish with them.

See, on March 12, the Daily published an op-ed by a Comparative Literature professor condemning institutional neutrality in the snottiest way imaginable. Here’s a typical paragraph from the piece:

It is certainly true that University faculty skew heavily liberal, probably because Republicans and conservatives oppose so many well-supported theories about the world and human societies: that climate change is real and threatens our survival, that racism has significantly impeded the economic success and well-being of those it targets and continues to do so, that it is wrong to force women to stay pregnant against their will, that vaccines save lives, that neither sex nor gender are binary and so on. Most of us believe these things not because we are liberals — rather, we are liberals because the best data, the most cogent arguments and the best historical evidence tell us they are true.

I found the piece offensive and annoying, so I sent a letter to the editor. After some hand-wringing (and teeth-gnashing, no doubt), they finally published it last night.

In the letter, I ask Michigan faculty and students to embrace epistemic humility and compassion; to understand what it might feel like to hold a minority view on a campus that punishes dissenters:

Imagine a world where the University’s community protested relentlessly against abortion. And where, eventually, the president’s office published a dictate condemning Planned Parenthood and decrying any pro-choice stragglers as complicit in the genocide of millions of unborn children. Would you feel comfortable speaking out, knowing it jeopardized your career and livelihood? Would you be glad the administration abandoned its neutrality?

The letter was published under an extremely lame title: “In response to ‘The University of Severance’.” However, I believe, and will always believe, that it should’ve been called “Sever Me Harder, Daddy.”

Enjoy!