Neutrality Is a Fiction—But an Indispensable One

Few people are neutral about neutrality these days. Sophisticated thought, certainly, has turned against it. The very ideal, we’re told, is misconceived, at best a ruse for prettifying partisanship. Following the recent contretemps at Stanford Law—where an administrator, trying to quiet protesters who were heckling a conservative judge, spoke in a way that appeared to side with the protesters—the law-school dean cited the 1967 Kalven Report, from the University of Chicago, stressing the importance of institutional neutrality. Almost as soon as she invoked that august defense (half a century old, please note), eyes rolled. One scholar declared that it was “extraordinarily difficult” to call out the judge’s slick doublespeak “while claiming to do so from a position of political neutrality.” Whatever roles we play in public life, after all, we’re hardly free from political and ideological leanings. If our personal values are truly important to us, shouldn’t they inform everything we do? Why shouldn’t we all just put our cards on the table and be open about what’s in our hearts?

All sorts of people—judges, journalists, physicians, administrators of public institutions, you name it—maintain, in their professional capacity, some pose of neutrality. U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts famously a judge’s role to that of an umpire. (“It’s my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”) Len Downie Jr., who ran from 1991 to 2008, was so determined to avoid the appearance of bias that he . (“So that I never make up my mind which party, candidate or ideology should