Universities in Western liberal democracies are often described as polarized, politicized, or bureaucratically overextended. These descriptions capture aspects of contemporary academic life, but they fail to identify the more consequential transformation now underway. What has changed is not only what universities believe, whom they protect, or which values they publicly affirm. What has changed is how they understand the nature of institutional authority itself, and more specifically the role of judgment within it.
In the wake of October 7 and the conflicts that followed on many campuses—protests, counter-protests, confrontations, reports of intimidation—administrative responses in North American and European universities began to converge into a familiar script. Statements condemned “all forms of hate,” reaffirmed commitments to inclusion and open dialogue, and announced reviews of policy and procedure, while often declining to specify what had occurred or how it should be interpreted. The incident was acknowledged, but its meaning was suspended.
What is striking in this script is that it does not only defer judgment; it disciplines affect. Neutrality becomes an affective filter: grief, anger, fear, and moral urgency are treated as institutional liabilities, to be cooled into “balance” and “process.” The implied norm is not simply “do not decide,” but “do not feel too sharply.” In this way, procedural authority stabilizes conflict by emptying it of the very responses through which moral meaning first becomes visible.
What is at issue is not a contingent malfunction of otherwise healthy institutions, but a structural transformation internal to liberal authority itself. Liberal institutions have increasingly organized themselves around the promise that moral conflict can be governed without judgment, resolved without interpretation, administered without authorship, managed without responsibility, and justified without accountability. The contemporary university offers a particularly revealing site for this transformation, not because it is uniquely compromised but because it continues to claim moral and intellectual authority even as it reorganizes itself around the systematic displacement of moral decision.
Over the past decade, universities have reorganized their authority around a governing imperative that increasingly defines their institutional behavior: the avoidance of judgment. Where judgment was once exercised episodically, at moments of conflict requiring interpretation, decision, and justification, it has been displaced by continuous ethical governance. Authority no longer appears as something assumed in response to specific disputes. It has become permanent, anticipatory, and procedural. Governance is no longer activated by exceptional cases. It has become the background condition of institutional life.
Universities today speak incessantly in the vocabulary of ethics. Values are articulated, harms are named, responsibilities are affirmed, and commitments are reiterated across mission statements, policy documents, training regimes, and public communications. Moral concern saturates institutional self-presentation. Yet precisely as ethical language proliferates, the institutional capacity to judge erodes.
The reason is structural rather than attitudinal. Authority is no longer secured through the assumption of responsibility for moral decisions, however contestable or fallible those decisions may be. Instead, legitimacy is increasingly grounded in demonstrable adherence to procedure. Institutions authorize themselves not by deciding rightly, but by showing that they have processed correctly.
This shift matters because judgment is not an optional feature of institutional authority. It is the mechanism through which authority becomes accountable. When institutions lose the capacity to judge, they do not lose power. Universities continue to regulate conduct, allocate resources, discipline members, and shape public discourse. What they lose is authorship. Governance persists, but responsibility for meaning dissolves. What remains is authority that can act without fully acknowledging what it has decided or why.
Judgment and the Structure of Authority
In its classical institutional sense, judgment is neither discretionary whim nor arbitrary power. It names a capacity to interpret situations as morally meaningful in contexts where rule application alone is insufficient. Judgment becomes necessary precisely where categories blur, where harm and offense overlap, where speech becomes action, where historical asymmetries shape present vulnerability, and where consequences cannot be inferred mechanically from intent or precedent.
Judgment binds authority to responsibility because it requires institutions to say not only how a situation will be handled but what it signifies. It converts uncertainty into a publicly accountable determination. To judge is not simply to apply a standard, but to articulate the meaning of a situation and to accept responsibility for that articulation. In this sense, judgment is inseparable from authorship. An institution that judges acknowledges itself as the author of its decisions rather than the mere executor of process.
Authorship matters because it locates responsibility. Institutions that judge accept that their decisions can be questioned, criticized, and held to account. Authorship does not guarantee correctness. Institutions can judge in good faith and still judge wrongly. Without authorship, authority becomes opaque. Decisions occur, but responsibility cannot be meaningfully assigned.
Judgment is therefore intrinsically risky. It exposes institutions to disagreement, backlash, liability, and retrospective condemnation. It binds authority to fallibility. Yet this exposure is not a defect. It is the condition under which authority remains answerable. Authority that cannot risk error cannot meaningfully assume responsibility. Where judgment disappears, authority does not vanish. It becomes insulated, proceduralized, and detached from the moral burden of interpretation.
The contemporary aversion to judgment is not groundless. Institutions have learned, often painfully, that judgment can misfire, exclude, entrench power, and legitimate harm. Historical memory weighs heavily here. Judgment has been used to silence dissent, to naturalize hierarchy, and to justify violence in the language of moral necessity. Liberal institutions did not invent proceduralism arbitrarily; they developed it in response to the dangers of discretionary authority exercised without constraint.
It is also worth asking whether the procedural university is best understood as one local expression of a broader modern trajectory: the rationalization of authority. In Weber’s terms, legitimacy migrates from substantive judgment to formally defensible procedure—an evolution amplified by a litigious environment in which institutions learn to treat “due process” as safer than “good judgment.”
The problem is not that this fear is unwarranted, but that it has hardened into an institutional reflex that treats all judgment as suspect and all interpretation as exposure. In seeking to protect themselves from the historical risks of judgment, institutions have displaced the responsibility of judgment altogether. The avoidance of error has come to stand in for the assumption of responsibility. Recovering judgment does not mean restoring older forms of discretionary authority but reclaiming authorship under conditions where institutional power can no longer pretend to be neutral.
Procedures are indispensable to institutional life. They constrain arbitrariness, enable coordination, and protect against bias. But procedures govern how decisions are made. Judgment concerns whether institutions recognize those decisions as moral acts for which justification must be borne, defended, and, if necessary, revised. When procedures cease to support judgment and instead replace it, authority persists without accountability, and responsibility becomes diffuse.
Risk Avoidance and the Reorganization of Governance
What has changed in contemporary universities is not that decisions are no longer made. Sanctions are imposed, norms are enforced, resources are allocated, affiliations are regulated, and lives are materially shaped. What has changed is that institutions increasingly refuse to recognize these actions as judgments. This refusal reflects a structural recalibration of how institutional risk is understood and managed. Judgment is costly because it produces visible authorship. It ties an institution to determinations that can be contested and condemned. Procedure disperses responsibility. Decisions can be attributed to frameworks, compliance obligations, or regulatory necessity rather than to institutional interpretation. Under conditions of heightened scrutiny, reputational vulnerability, and legal exposure, this dispersion becomes attractive.
By the mid-2010s, universities were already undergoing a quiet reconfiguration. Governance increasingly took juridical form. Long-standing orientations toward compliance and risk management intensified, particularly in the United States after the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter expanded Title IX enforcement. Though framed as procedural guidance, its effects only became visible over time, as authority migrated from faculty judgment to administrative process. Comparable dynamics appeared elsewhere through liability regimes, audits, insurance requirements, and regulatory harmonization. Across these domains, episodic faculty judgment was gradually displaced by standing administrative oversight.
At the same time, institutional life became explicitly moralized. Universities increasingly presented themselves not simply as sites of debate but as ethical actors with standing commitments. The expansion of DEI infrastructures, conduct codes governing speech and identity, and proliferating value statements produced a condition of moral saturation.
These developments unfolded amid sustained political polarization and growing legitimacy anxiety. Universities came to function as symbolic battlegrounds in broader cultural conflicts, where decisions once resolved internally now carried reputational, legal, and geopolitical consequences. Judgment became costly not because of the risk of error, but because it entailed visible authorship. Platformization intensified this pressure by collapsing the boundary between internal deliberation and public exposure. Under such conditions, procedural neutrality appeared safer than decision: frameworks could be cited, processes invoked, and responsibility deferred.
The COVID years accelerated and consolidated this transformation in ways that permanently altered institutional habits of authority. Under conditions of declared emergency, universities normalized rule by exception, displaced deliberation with protocol, and reorganized decision-making around technical guidance rather than interpretive judgment. Decisions of extraordinary consequence were framed as matters of compliance with external expertise, public health mandates, or evolving models, thereby further distancing authority from authorship.
What appeared at the time as an extraordinary suspension of ordinary governance trained institutions in a mode of action oriented toward insulation rather than responsibility. When the immediate emergency receded, the governing reflexes it produced remained. Universities emerged from the pandemic more comfortable exercising extensive control without assuming interpretive responsibility, more practiced in deferring justification to procedure, and more habituated to continuous governance that no longer pauses at the moment when judgment would once have been expected.
This transformation also altered the internal distribution of authority. Judgment migrated away from disciplinary communities toward compliance offices, legal counsel, and risk managers. Decisions were increasingly shaped by anticipatory calculations of defensibility rather than by engagement with contested meaning. The university’s capacity for internal moral deliberation gave way to a managerial orientation focused on insulation.
Moral Saturation and the Performance of Legitimacy
As judgment receded, ethical language proliferated, and values statements produced a condition of moral saturation. Ethics ceased to be something institutions confronted selectively and became something they performed continuously. Moral vocabulary standardized and routinized. Rather than sharpening moral evaluation, ethical discourse increasingly functioned as a signaling mechanism. It demonstrated alignment with recognized frameworks while avoiding the burden of interpretation. Ethical language remained omnipresent even as moral judgment became elusive.
To judge is to be seen judging. To decide is to be seen deciding. Procedural neutrality appears safer not because it resolves conflict, but because it diffuses responsibility. Institutions learn to survive controversy not by persuading but by demonstrating compliance. Ethical language shifts from deliberation to performance. Values are affirmed but rarely interpreted. Harms are named but seldom weighed. Responsibility is invoked but rarely assumed.
Procedure as Moral Technology
Procedure under these conditions is not neutral. It functions as a moral technology that stabilizes conflict while shielding institutions from exposure to responsibility. Instead of asking what a situation demands, institutions increasingly ask which framework governs it. Once conflict is routed through that apparatus, harm becomes a fileable object, urgency is moderated into proportionality, responsibility is redistributed across context, agency is diffused across process, intention is bracketed as extraneous, and consequence becomes only retrospectively legible. Institutions act continuously and speak fluently in ethical grammar, yet they become less able to secure recognition for what they do. Decisions still occur, but their meaning remains unresolved. Action proceeds without interpretation, and enforcement without justification.
Governance without judgment does not produce restraint; it produces severity. When institutions no longer recognize themselves as judging agents, they no longer experience enforcement as something that must be justified, defended, or owned. Sanctions become procedural outcomes rather than moral acts, and their force increases precisely because their meaning is no longer at issue. Power exercised without authorship tends to harden rather than soften, since it is no longer tempered by the need for recognition.
Classical social and political theory anticipated this development with striking clarity, though from very different horizons. Weber traced how formal rationality expands technical control while draining institutions of substantive meaning. Arendt showed that when judgment is displaced by rule-following, the result is not moral security but moral vacancy. Later critiques, from MacIntyre’s account of managerial morality to Foucault’s analysis of governmentality, made visible how ethical life itself could be reorganized into an apparatus of administration. What we are witnessing in contemporary universities is not the erosion of ethical concern but its institutional capture: ethics transformed from a faculty of judgment into an infrastructure of governance.
Time, Deferral, and the Evasion of Decision
Judgment is not only a moral capacity; it is a temporal one. To judge is to act at the moment when decision can no longer be deferred. It binds an institution to a time, fixing responsibility rather than dispersing it. Governance, by contrast, is temporally elastic. Processes can be extended, reviews reopened, frameworks revised. Institutions act continuously, but rarely conclusively.
This reorganization of time has profound consequences. Ethical failure does not disappear. It becomes structurally illegible. When responsibility is endlessly deferred, accountability dissolves. Institutions survive controversy by staying in motion, avoiding the moments where judgment would require them to stop and commit.
Antisemitism as a Diagnostic Case
Certain forms of harm expose these dynamics with particular clarity. Antisemitism occupies this position in the contemporary university not because it is morally exceptional, but because it resists the classificatory logics of proceduralized ethics. Antisemitic harm does not map cleanly onto symmetrical frameworks of power and vulnerability. Jews appear as neither unequivocally powerless nor securely powerful. Antisemitism operates through historical sedimentation, symbolic inversion, and moral projection.
Recognizing antisemitism in concrete situations requires distinctions that cannot be generated by balance without distortion or by procedure without erasure. It requires judgment. Universities routinely affirm opposition to antisemitism in abstract terms. The difficulty arises at the point of application, where asymmetry demands interpretation rather than symmetry.
The post–October 7 campus crisis exposed this dynamic with unusual clarity. Institutional responses were extensive and continuous, yet marked by procedural deferral. Condemnation was issued while responsibility was redistributed. Fear was acknowledged while relativized. Dialogue substituted for decision. The result was not inaction, but action that never quite reached the status of judgment.
Severity without Recognition
One consequence of governance without judgment is not leniency, but severity. When institutions no longer understand themselves as judging agents, enforcement becomes detached from recognition. Sanctions are imposed without persuasion. Decisions are executed without explanation. Authority no longer seeks acknowledgment because it no longer understands itself as interpreting meaning.
Detached from responsibility, enforcement becomes opaque and selective. Severity emerges not from conviction, but from insulation. Institutions act decisively where alignment with dominant narratives or minimal reputational exposure makes action safe, while withholding judgment precisely where asymmetry would require it. Judgment does not disappear. It degenerates into enforcement that no longer seeks recognition.
The Hollowing of Authority
When institutions lose the capacity to judge, they do not lose power. Universities remain powerful organizations. What they lose is authority in the classical sense: the capacity to command recognition as a meaningful arbiter of norms and limits. Conflict is managed rather than resolved. Ethical language persists but refers increasingly to procedures followed rather than determinations made. Responsibility becomes difficult to locate. Decisions proliferate while authorship evaporates.
What has emerged is not a temporary distortion of institutional authority, but a form of governance that can no longer recognize its own decisions as moral acts. Liberal institutions were built on the premise that authority could be exercised without domination because it remained accountable through judgment. When judgment is displaced by procedure, that premise collapses from within. What remains is not neutrality and pluralism, but power without authorship and administration without responsibility. An order that governs moral conflict while refusing moral decision does not only fail in particular cases. It forfeits the very grounds on which its authority once claimed legitimacy.
Topics: Israel Initiative • Reflections & Dialogues
Eliyahu V. Sapir is a political scientist at Maastricht University. His recent work focuses on antisemitism in higher education, documenting the experiences of Jewish and Israeli students and faculty and analyzing institutional responses to antisemitic harm. He co-authored the 2024 report Unsafe Spaces: The Rise of Anti-Semitism in the Dutch Academic World and the 2025 book Het 7 oktober-effect, and regularly contributes to public debate on these issues through op-eds in Dutch media.