When the College announced its policy of institutional restraint in December 2024, it entered uncharted territory. There was no precedent for such a policy in Dartmouth’s history, which left room for much debate over its implications. Now, however, the policy has found its analogue in a surprising place — not at another university, but at the CBS headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. And yet, rather than reassuring us about Dartmouth’s policy, the case at CBS News is quickly becoming an omen about what exactly could go wrong with institutional neutrality at Dartmouth, and how a policy designed to promote free speech could be co-opted just as quickly to restrict it.
In October, Bari Weiss entered as CBS News’ editor-in-chief singing a familiar tune. Having left The New York Times over what she believed to be an “illiberal environment,” Weiss had then founded The Free Press, a news organization focused on combatting a perceived cancel culture pervading higher education and mainstream media. Her organization platformed various critiques of mainstream media coverage and perceived attacks on free speech. Weiss, along with David Ellison, the CEO of CBS’ new parent company, brought this theme to CBS, promising “balanced and fact-based” coverage. The parent company wanted to ensure that its coverage “embodies a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum.”
The parallels with the College’s policy are clear: the vision Weiss and Ellison initially presented is in effect a form of institutional neutrality. In this ideal, CBS as an institution does not promote a certain view, instead allowing a full range of facts to be presented regardless of whose positions they challenge. In a similar way, the College wants to take a step back from taking stances on most political issues with the goal of letting students debate those issues themselves. In both cases, the ultimate goal is promoting free speech and discourse, and both cases appear similarly laudable on their surfaces.
Yet as time has gone on, the vision Weiss initially laid out is becoming more and more exposed as a fraudulent one. In December, Weiss made a last-minute decision to pull a segment from the network’s flagship “60 Minutes” that would have investigated the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants to an El Salvadoran detention center, where they have allegedly faced “brutal” conditions. The decision was met with backlash among the network’s correspondents. One correspondent called Weiss’ decision “political,” noting that the segment had gone through extensive checks to ensure that it was factual. All the while, Weiss wanted to include “missing voices,” suggesting an interview with Stephen Miller, the mind behind the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. She also questioned using the term “migrants” to refer to the deportees.
Weiss’ desire to include “missing voices” is on theme with her initial vision for balanced coverage. The problem is in which voices she wants to include, and how she has gone about including them. Do we really need to include the voice of the man responsible for unwarranted arrests and mass violations of civil rights, especially in a segment highlighting those very abuses? Equally concerning is the fact that Weiss thought the best approach to this situation was to completely do away with the coverage that investigated truths that didn’t favor the Trump administration.
It seems that Weiss is leveraging the concept of viewpoint diversity to legitimize positions that don’t merit a platform in the first place, rather than to promote a discourse that includes viewpoints based in scholarly verification and good faith. Once these positions are legitimized, she then protects them from critique and gives them disproportionate representation in coverage. As Professors Bethany Moreton, Pamela Voekel and Molly Geidel have written, this is a trend in the history of viewpoint diversity campaigns, which have often been used by those who depend on viewpoint relativism to support illegitimate claims.
CBS News has continued to move further in this illiberal direction, revealing last week a set of “simple values” guiding their coverage. Among them, “we love America.” Far from promoting viewpoint diversity, this statement sets a clear standard for which positions CBS can platform. Weiss felt that her position on patriotism was under attack, so she deployed viewpoint diversity to give her view a platform, then took the next step towards silencing any critique of it. The vagueness of this statement at the least invites the suppression of a wide range of legitimate critiques of the American government, and at worst could lead to the outright promotion of dangerous nationalist ideas.
So what does all this tell us about institutional restraint at Dartmouth? Surely President Beilock does not envision for Dartmouth the kind of viewpoint suppression that is slowly taking over CBS. Still, the CBS case ought to be a warning for the College. Weiss’ policy at CBS started with the same ideas that make up Dartmouth’s institutional restraint policy, which is at risk of being taken advantage of the same way.
It is crucial that the Dartmouth administration, in its desire to protect minority views, does not promote or at the very least refuse to denounce illegitimate viewpoints. It is crucial that the administration does not deplatform certain legitimate, fact-based viewpoints simply because they challenge a minority viewpoint. And it is crucial that the administration does not allow someone with the desire to platform illegitimate viewpoints to enter a position of power where they can take advantage of Dartmouth’s viewpoint diversity policy. Our intellectual freedom depends on it.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
