[Disclaimer: Students expressing opinions on the College’s policy were granted anonymity.]
The Vassar College administration is prohibited from supporting or opposing political candidates or positions, President of the College Elizabeth Bradley told The Miscellany News. Bradley wrote in an email that because the College is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) prohibits this kind of political advocacy. “Vassar cannot use funds, facilities, or resources to, directly or indirectly, support candidates or political parties and violating this rule can threaten a university’s tax-exempt status,” she wrote. “As a result, administrators do not use their roles or Vassar resources to advocate in support of or against political candidates or positions.”
This comes as Bradley recently declined to oppose or support a proposal by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to construct a detention facility in Chester, New York, near Vassar. She told the Miscellany in February, “As a nonprofit organization, Vassar cannot take a political position on this project.” Bradley has written multiple statements about ICE’s surge in seizures, detentions and deportations, especially following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. On January 26, she wrote, “As the legality of actions by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is being debated, lethal violence against peaceful protest—the heart of our democracy—has occurred.” She then reiterated the College’s policy on protecting Vassar community members from ICE.
In a second statement to the Miscellany, Bradley wrote, “We are all constantly contemplating and contending with a range of challenging—and often deeply concerning—issues affecting our society. Our primary responsibility as a college is to foster an environment for open, respectful, and constructive dialogue on these issues, rather than asserting a single institutional position or perspective.” She concluded: “The most important areas of exception are issues that we believe directly impact our students’ day-to-day lives—especially their safety and wellbeing—or the ability of the College to function and fulfill its mission.” Bradley’s previous comments include condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, denouncing mass shootings and violent extremism and raising concerns about the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on university affirmative action programs—a case in which Vassar filed an amicus brief.
In recent years, many universities have passed policies of “institutional neutrality” that say their administrations will not comment on public issues that do not directly affect the university. According to Higher Ed Dive, over two dozen higher education institutions have adopted such policies as of 2024. Many universities did so following large student protests and encampments in Spring 2024, against Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip—which remains ongoing. Vassar does not appear to have released an official institutional neutrality policy. The College’s policy has not been previously reported.
Assistant Professor of History Daniel Mendiola, who studies Latin America and immigration, said, “Professor Bradley has written about things like ICE, but specifically within the context of if there’s gonna be ICE agents on campus. And so since that is something that’s clearly an issue that’s affecting university campuses and also happens to be a political issue, in that case, she weighed in.”
The second Trump administration has targeted higher education institutions on numerous fronts for alleged discrimination and liberal bias, including withholding billions of funding dollars and filing investigations. Columbia University agreed to pay the federal government over $200 million to settle alleged antisemitic discrimination. Harvard University has chosen to fight in court. Among those targeted were Vassar peer institutions like Swarthmore and Middlebury Colleges. Vassar has not been investigated and has continued operating its Engaged Pluralism (EP) program as before. EP works similarly to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs that the government has opposed.
In February, EP hosted an event featuring Steven Cash ’84, which a group of students protested due to Cash’s role in domestic and international surveillance and law enforcement. In response to the protest, Bradley wrote a community message affirming the College’s commitment to the exchange of ideas, which she said was crucial to liberal arts education and a “sustained democracy.”
Both a Vassar Student Association (VSA) official and a student who spoke to the Miscellany said that they understood Vassar’s reluctance to make political statements in light of the Trump administration’s attacks. Both also said they were grateful that Vassar has so far largely escaped those attacks.
As recently as last semester, the Vassar administration has worked to ensure compliance with the IRC. According to Democracy Matters Co-President Noah Daube-Valois [Disclaimer: Daube-Valois is an Assistant Humor Editor for The Miscellany News], his organization planned a phone banking event for New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in October 2025. The day of the event, Director of Student Activities Will Rush emailed Democracy Matters’ leadership to inform them that the event had to be canceled. “This event cannot occur and must be cancelled as a College sponsored event, as political activity is expressly forbidden as the college is a non-profit organization with a 501c3 status,” Rush wrote. “Phone banking for one candidate in any election is an expressly partisan activity. Especially for Democracy Matters, which is a non-partisan organization, this is an even larger issue.” Rush also noted that the organization had not properly registered the event. Daube-Valois told the Miscellany that he understood the cancellation, as Democracy Matters was in violation of both of these College policies.
But whether the prohibition on such political activity extends to political positions is less clear. On its website, the Internal Revenue Service, which implements the IRC, states, “An organization may take positions on public policy issues, including issues that divide candidates in an election for public office as long as the message does not in any way favor or oppose a candidate.” Vassar’s Political Participation Policy makes no mention of administrators commenting on public policy issues.
“Vassar’s webpage says the College is committed to ‘a more just, diverse, equitable, and inclusive college community.’ Isn’t that a political statement? Efforts at inclusion are opposed by a good portion of the American public,” Professor of History Joshua Schreier wrote in an email to the Miscellany. “It sounds like Vassar doesn’t want to make SOME statements.”
The student interviewed for this piece commented, “I think it’s interesting that that is the framework through which it’s being described, because that seems very clearly not to be the real intention. I feel like it’s through the nonprofit angle that you can less controversially say you’re not going to have political opinions, but it seems like a very self-protective stance, which I understand, given the current political climate.”
“A lot of times we use politics interchangeably with elections,” said Mendiola. “I don’t think universities should just turn into political slush funds or PACs [political action committees] or whatever, so I understand why there’s limitations on what universities can say relative to elections.”
He continued, “The problem is people have started to conflate that to say that universities can’t talk about political issues, which is massively problematic, in my opinion… At a fundamental level, some of the most important things in our lives—policies that affect everyone—that’s what politics is… Universities are literally the places where our core value is to try to produce accurate information. If we can’t talk about politics, then how is anyone ever gonna have solid information to make decisions that are massively important that affect all of our lives?”
“I obviously hate it,” the VSA official said of the policy. “I think that everything’s political, especially being in a place like Vassar where we talk about wanting to change the world and make the world a better place. And it’s kind of silly to expect to be able to do that and have some kind of impact on the world if you can’t talk about the different systems and structures that are in play to create the world that we have.”
When asked if he felt a responsibility to speak publicly more on political issues in light of institutional neutrality, Mendiola responded, “One hundred percent… Maybe we should have been doing that all along anyway, but especially if these more powerful voices of the official university representatives are not going to be doing this, then we need to, because academia needs to be represented in these conversations.” Mendiola and Schreier have both published opinion pieces in The Guardian; Schreier is also a contributor to Academics for Peace, which works to improve public opinion on Palestinians’ struggle for self-determination.
“Part of something that I’ve, throughout my Vassar experience, had to really grapple with and sit with is the fact that Vassar is not going to do shit,” the VSA official said. “And as much as we pretend to think that Vassar is this beacon of social change and is going to push the envelope, it’s not, as an institution.”
Schreier wrote, “I think faculty and students should not wait for the upper administration to make public statements. Of course we’d like it for the administration to make certain statements, but at some point we need to accept that they don’t agree with us.”
“The point of going to a place like Vassar is to then be able to redistribute what you’ve been able to take [from] this place to other people, and bring it back to your community,” the VSA official argued. “At the end of the day, [Bradley] taking a stance, the College taking a stance, it’s not going to change anything for these people… It’s going to be the people on the ground, the communities that are most impacted, who are going to be doing that.”