Institutional neutrality protects the university’s fundamental mission of pursuing, preserving, and transmitting knowledge. This mission requires not only academic freedom and viewpoint diversity, but also principles and policies that enable us to avoid contests among people of competing ideological stripes for control of the university and its individual units. The university must belong to everyone in our community, not simply those who are on the allegedly “right” side of contested issues.

As I noted, Princeton was once a sectarian college: Until almost a century ago, it was affiliated with Presbyterian Christianity. Today, as a nonsectarian university, its mission no longer includes the propagation of sectarian doctrines. It is, in this crucial respect, unlike Notre Dame, Brigham Young, Baylor, Yeshiva, and Zaytuna. I have nothing against such institutions. In fact, I think they do great work. I’ve lectured at all of them. And I’m glad they are available to students and families for whom religiously based education is important.

But I believe that it is valuable for there also to be great nonsectarian universities such as Princeton, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and the rest, in which people are united not by shared commitments to religious or secular ideological dogmas but by, and only by, a commitment to the pursuit, preservation, and transmission of knowledge—and an understanding that the cause of knowledge-seeking can be mightily advanced only by encouraging the critical engagement of ideas among people who have fundamental disagreements on normative and other important matters.