The universities made an easy call amid turmoil over Israel and Gaza. The real tests will come later.

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It’s telling that the official turn toward neutrality is coming amid the ructions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Support for Israel, broadly speaking, is not a topic that divides liberals and conservatives so much as a topic that unites conservatives and divides liberals among themselves. Elite university leaders answer to primarily liberal stakeholders, including activist student organizations and left-leaning faculty, though alumni are probably more politically mixed.

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Institutional statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of the kind university leaders had been offering about other issues — almost always on the progressive side — thus tend to fracture and inflame university politics. Meanwhile, pro-choice statements, or statements in favor of gay or transgender rights, for example, are likely to meet pushback mainly from outside academia. University presidents are inevitably political, and it is in their interest to avoid creating friction within their base (as Israel-Gaza does) and to instead unify it against perceived external threats (as issues like Black Lives Matter do).

The pivot is not all about the Middle East. After all, corporate executives began shedding the overt progressive commitments they had accumulated in the previous years before the Oct. 7 attacks. And Stanford foreshadowed its new policy in March last year. After progressive law students shouted down a conservative federal judge attempting to give a talk, the law school dean (who is now provost) released a statement rebuffing students who expected the administration to condemn the judge’s views: “Our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is not going to take the form of having the school administration announce institutional positions on a wide range of current social and political issues,” she wrote.

Still, it’s clear that the fallout from Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza has made the case for institutional neutrality in higher education seem more urgent. Controversy over the war has contributed to the resignations of two Ivy League presidents, campus protests and new free-speech dilemmas. For universities navigating this political environment, liberal neutrality might seem principled, yes, but also appealing as a matter of self-preservation.

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In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, by contrast, instincts for self-preservation among university leaders cut the........

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