After more than a year of exhausting controversies over free expression at colleges and universities, America’s business leaders would do well to take a simple lesson from embattled leaders in higher education:

Keep your mouth shut.

The lesson has become even more important with the recent gravitation of some corporate leaders toward President Trump. Such public fawning, which would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, demonstrates how unprincipled and fickle corporate political positions have always been.

Increasingly, universities have adopted neutrality policies to recommit to their core mission. So can corporations. The key is committing to institutional neutrality, which requires leaders to stay silent on social and political issues that do not directly affect their operations. This means reining in corporate political statements — progressive and conservative — as well as the political activity of chief executives like Elon Musk and political flip-flops by companies like Meta. Our own university, the University of Chicago, committed to this ideal in 1899 and restated that commitment in the seminal Kalven Report of 1967. This has freed individuals in our community to express their own opinions and ideas in lively debate.

For decades, few other universities have made this commitment. But its value for them — and for business corporations — has become clearer over the past year. The Gaza war created a no-win situation for university leaders accustomed to speaking out on political issues. On the one hand, bland institutional statements on current events have no impact, satisfy no one and relegate the institution to a role as a second-rate political actor. On the other, statements with real substance threaten to alienate and silence those who disagree. As a result, more than two dozen schools, including Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania — whose presidents resigned, in part, after stumbling at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism — have now adopted neutrality policies akin to Chicago’s. More are in the works.

Corporate leaders in the private sector can benefit from these hard lessons.

Along with students and faculty members,fef777 some employees, shareholders and customers take the view that “silence is violence.” They demand that management take positions on issues outside the remit of the company, even if there are other stakeholders — older employees, customers of a different political affiliation — who would disagree. Corporate boards and chief executives have increasingly given in to the demands, creating a virtue cascade. As more companies speak out, it creates competitive pressure on others to join in. They have taken to issuing vanilla statements conveying no real information about their culture or purpose. And predictably, the few times when statements veered away from the mainstream, the corporations were pressured to backtrack.

Notoriously, Disney’s now former chief executive Bob Chapek drew criticism from employees and a furious response from Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida with his reaction to the state’s Parental Rights in Education legislation, also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Waffling from silence to explaining that silence to a firm statement of opposition, Mr. Chapek’s approach was a fiasco that alienated almost everyone, including Mr. DeSantis and the Disney employees who opposed the bill.

While some other corporate leaders may be enjoying the favor they have found in taking sides, they would be wise to heed the lesson of Ivy League schools that discovered the benefits of institutional neutrality a little too late. These corporations would benefit from adopting a formal policy that guides their leaders on when, if ever, they may speak out.

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