After a months-long internal review, UChicago’s Laboratory Schools concluded in November that some of its educational practices had strayed from the University’s enduring dedication to open inquiry, Lab’s interim director, professor Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, told the Maroon.

Lab and University administrators finally announced their solution to the problem last month: a policy calling for viewpoint-neutral educational practices.

“The purpose of viewpoint-neutral education is not to limit inquiry or discourage engagement with difficult, important, or contested topics,” the policy states. “Rather, the goal is to ensure that Lab classrooms and school spaces remain… places where students can encounter, explore, and evaluate important questions without being steered toward or away from particular conclusions by the authority of adults.”

The policy has set off a schoolwide debate about the role of politics in the classroom amid ongoing scrutiny of UChicago’s commitment to institutional neutrality.

Some community members welcome the change. They say it helps restore ideological diversity to the school, which they felt had been diminished by an emphasis on political advocacy in the classroom.

“If you care about diversity, you should be delighted that there’s an emphasis now on diversity of viewpoints,” a parent who requested to remain anonymous told the Maroon.

But critics say the new policy won’t fix the school’s problems and will instead limit learning and teachers’ academic freedom. Others fear the new policy will discourage political advocacy at the school, which they see as crucial to students’ educational experiences and overall well-being.

“Where some parents are overly scared about the kids being exposed to too much, I’m much more concerned about my kids being exposed to too little,” Lab parent and former Lab board member Matthew Shapiro (LAB ’84), told the Maroon.

Lab, a division of the University that sits just blocks from the main quad, was founded in 1896 by the progressive educational reformer John Dewey to create a small community where students would learn to be productive citizens. More than half of Lab’s families have some affiliation with UChicago, and it has sent roughly 11 percent of its total graduates over the past four years to the University—more than to any other school.

Of the more than 25 Lab faculty members, parents, and students interviewed by the Maroon, some said opposition to the policy had come from an outspoken minority of left-leaning teachers, while others said proponents of the policy came from an outspoken minority of conservative parents.

Many people—irrespective of their opinions—declined to speak on the record with the Maroon, fearing they or their families would face social repercussions and judgement for sharing their perspectives.

Bueno de Mesquita echoed these concerns to parents and teachers at an April meeting about the policy. “I’m also alarmed by how many people on both sides of this issue clearly feel a social sanction if they express disagreement with a point of view that they, in fact, disagree with,” he said in a video recording obtained by the Maroon.

The policy has prompted community backlash, including the creation of a support group for families in favor of the policy, as well as a support group for families protesting it. This spring, students staged a walkout and the faculty association filed a grievance to the administration in protest. The policy has even factored into some parents’ decision-making about continuing to enroll their children at Lab or to donate money to the school.

Debates among students, parents, faculty, and administrators at Lab reflect broader pedagogical disagreements about political engagement in the classroom. Lab is grappling with competing visions about the purpose of education: whether political neutrality cultivates independent, empathetic thinkers, or whether neutrality is itself political, making advocacy a crucial learning tool.

Concerns over politics in the classroom

In February 2025, University President Paul Alivisatos launched a review to “explore how the [Lab] Schools provide an environment for robust academics and integrate University values across all levels,” he wrote in an email to parents and Lab faculty at the time.

Mesquita chaired the review committee alongside former Dean of the College and Lab parent John Boyer (Ph.D. ’75), Head of School at Trinity Preparatory School of Florida Byron Lawson, Jr. (A.B. ’91), and former University Provost and Lab parent Ka Yee Lee. After chairing the review, Mesquita assumed the role of Lab’s interim director in early November 2025, just weeks before the committee released its findings.

A month before Alivisatos initially launched the review, UChicago economics professor and Lab parent Jens Ludwig wrote a Chicago Tribune op-ed criticizing the school for “mission drift.” Lab, as with many top private and public schools across the country, had lost much of its pluralistic, academic focus, ceding to politics and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, he argued.

Over the past few years, “there’s been a concerted effort to make everything political,” said a parent who requested to remain anonymous. Multiple parents requesting anonymity said they felt teachers were overly politicizing academics by emphasizing, for example, Black Lives Matter as a political movement in the classroom or by hanging political flags on classroom doors.

Another parent requesting anonymity recalled one teacher hanging a Palestinian flag on a classroom door while a different teacher hung an Israeli flag on their door. The parent called both gestures “irrelevant, especially for kids aged three and four. I don’t know what it has to do with anything.”

The review committee shared its findings in a late November 2025 report and a draft of their “viewpoint-neutral education” policy in January 2026, sparking immediate backlash, as well as approval.

According to community members in favor, the policy brings political expression at Lab into compliance with the University’s stance of institutional neutrality on social and political issues.

“If people send their kids to school at the University of Chicago Lab School and they think that [Lab] should be promoting a particular opinion about the world, they’re in the wrong place,” one parent said.

This spring, a group launched “Parents for Open Inquiry at Lab” in support of the new policy, while a separate group of families created a group opposing the policies, “You Belong Here,” in the winter.

The editorial board of the U-High Midway, Lab’s student paper, first argued against the proposed policy in December 2025. This May Day, nearly 30 Lab students staged a walkout in protest.

Some parents told the Maroon they would feel more reassured about continuing to send their children to Lab with the new policy in place. Other parents, like Lab alumnus Rahul Sekhar, said they plan on unenrolling their children for next year.

Starting this fall, Sekhar’s first-grade son will attend the private, independent Francis W. Parker School in Lincoln Park. The new policy and Sekhar’s experience with the school over the past year “indicates a push to a very different value set from what I experienced at Lab over the almost 50 years of my affiliation, and that’s not what we want for our son,” he wrote to the Maroon.

After the final draft of the policy had been issued, UChicago’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors called it an “unprecedented intrusion into the classroom” in an open letter that has garnered more than 250 signatures since April.

On April 29, Lab’s Faculty Association filed a grievance over the standards. The Association considers the policy to be a violation of the academic freedom clause of their collective bargaining agreement, Lab teacher and Association president James Catlett told the Maroon. Lab is one of the only top private schools in the Chicagoland area where faculty are represented by a local union chapter of the American Federation of Teachers.

Differing expectations of a “progressive” school

Some community members are opposed to the new standards’ emphasis on neutrality, saying that it erodes values they see as integral to education and to Lab’s academic culture.

“I just don’t think that the right way to go about including everyone’s voice is through being neutral,” Lab sophomore Mila Bhatoey-Bertrand said. Openness to ideological differences helps students and teachers gain a better understanding of their own and others’ opinions, according to Bhatoey-Bertrand, who runs the Coalition for Free Speech at Lab’s high school.

A parent requesting anonymity said they were initially attracted to Lab because of its commitment to DEI, which they saw demonstrated through public displays of support for social causes like the Black Lives Matter movement or pro-LGBTQ+ signs around the school. “Most people come to [Lab] because they expected—and the school advertised—a certain set of… politically progressive, liberal values,” they said.

According to Mesquita, Lab is educationally, but not politically, progressive. “That kind of progressive education centers students as active thinkers rather than passive recipients of information,” he wrote to the Maroon. Although Lab does not adhere to a specific political ideology, the school is committed to non-partisan values such as “the dignity of all people, care for others, belonging, inclusion, honesty, non-harassment, listening, and respectful disagreement,” he wrote.

Some teachers and students say the new policy misunderstands the role Lab teachers play in educating students.

The policy “really makes it seem as though children are unable to come up with these ideas of change and to be change-makers. It really paints this picture that teachers are the ones really forcing this idea onto children,” said Lab teacher Orlando Torres. According to him, it is students who frequently bring up political or activist topics, which he says he then feels obligated to address.

Light Dohrn, a Lab senior and the editor-in-chief of the U-High Midway, felt she has benefitted academically from teachers expressing their perspectives in class. Dohrn said listening to her teacher reflect on the brutality of war during a lecture on an ancient Roman battle was “such an integral part of what that lecture meant to me.”

The new policies frustrated her because they “ignored the extent to which a teacher’s opinion humanizes them and in turn, humanizes their students,” Dohrn said.

Practical implementation remains complex

The policy has raised concern among community members who say it ignores students’ lived experiences with contested issues, making those issues challenging to confront in an ideologically neutral way.

The new policy includes six standards for promoting “student-centered open inquiry.” They instruct teachers not to raise contested issues unless pedagogically justified and developmentally appropriate, to encourage students’ free speech, and not to use their authority to frame contested moral issues with fixed conclusions.

As a practical example of these standards, “some view questioning policies related to gender identity in athletics as a legitimate part of public debate about fairness to biological female athletes, while others view such questioning as dehumanizing and harmful to transgender athletes,” stated a January 2026 document with guidance for teachers about approaching contested moral issues under the new standards.

But when transgender students are in the classroom, UChicago Law School professor and Lab parent Nicole Hallett said the conversations should “implicate kindness and fairness to those students in the Lab community. How can Lab teachers do that while remaining silent if other students express that they don’t believe trans students have the right to exist?”

Hallett, speaking to the Maroon as a Lab parent and not as a University employee, said that “there’s this sense that we can separate the political from the personal. And that’s just not possible to do. And they’re sort of pretending it is.”

Some teachers’ opposition to the policy has resulted in disagreements with administrators over the past academic year about educational programming.

This fall, during Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort in the Chicagoland area, Lab administrators shut down a project where Torres’ kindergarten class was partnering with high schoolers to create whistle kits as part of a unit on butterfly and human migration patterns. The kits became popular in Chicago this fall as a way to alert neighbors to the presence of immigration enforcement.

According to Mesquita, the kits “included a zine with instructions for countering federal immigration enforcement and a whistle for use in those efforts.” Although the broader migration unit proceeded, “the whistle-kit portion of the project was stopped because it constituted teacher-initiated political activism in the kindergarten classroom,” Mesquita wrote to the Maroon.

When another group of teachers wanted to start a coat drive for immigrants and refugees amid the immigration crackdown, “we were told that we could not put the word ‘refugees’ into any of the information that goes home because it’s contested. So we couldn’t do a coat drive for Hyde Park refugees and say that it was for the Hyde Park refugee community. We could do a coat drive, but we couldn’t explain the context,” said a parent and teacher who requested anonymity.

Mesquita said the coat-drive predated his interim director position. However, “a coat drive framed as helping people in need—including one framed around helping immigrants or refugees in need—is entirely consistent with Lab’s commitments to compassion, care, and community responsibility,” he wrote to the Maroon. “The key distinction is between service and political advocacy.”

Concerns over academic freedom for teachers

Many teachers say they are modifying their behavior based on the new policy in ways that they fear will inhibit student learning. “I think we’re going to see teachers perhaps complying with [the standards], perhaps out of fear. And that may impact their instruction,” Catlett said.

Lab high school English teacher Mark Krewatch has, in the past, considered whether or not to teach certain books for fear of judgement by students or colleagues on the left. He wrote to the Maroon that his department navigated this issue by “being more thoughtful and grounded in our choices, considering both why some people might not want particular books in the curriculum and what value those books might bring to class.”

With the new policy, however, “it feels like we’re getting pressure from the other side of the spectrum—but it’s founded in an actual policy, which implies punishment, which is beyond what we previously faced,” he said.

The policy reflects the definition of academic freedom outlined in the Faculty Association’s collective bargaining agreement, Mesquita told parents and faculty at a meeting this April. He also explained how academic freedom required what he called “different guardrails” at Lab than at the University because of UChicago’s research mission and because students at Lab are minors.

“Institutional neutrality at the University is designed to protect faculty and students equally from the authority of the institution and its leadership. Viewpoint-neutral educational practices are designed to protect students’ inquiry from the authority of educators,” he said, according to a video obtained by the Maroon.

Krewatch said the new policy risks diluting the innovative teaching Lab prides itself on providing for its students. Teachers will revert to more traditional texts and assignments to avoid teaching any potentially controversial materials, he said.

Students have also begun to notice these effects in the classroom. “I think institution[al] neutrality should not mean that teachers, on a [daily] basis, cannot express their political beliefs,” Lab junior Isaac Sutherland said. “And at least from how I’ve seen it implemented, that’s how it’s appearing.”

Lab says outside pressures don’t motivate policy, but speculation persists

Mesquita has stressed that the new “viewpoint-neutral education” policy is not a response to outside pressures, including the national political context. Instead, “the University of Chicago has a deep institutional commitment to open inquiry and to avoiding the establishment of orthodoxies that long predates the present moment,” he wrote to the Maroon.

But amid federal political pressures on UChicago and a broader crackdown on free expression at educational institutions, many community members have begun to speculate about the timing.

“I think that this move by the [University] administration is an attempt to respond to outside political pressures, and I think it’s ironic that they are pushing a policy because of political pressures that attempts or pretends to be politically neutral,” Hallett said.

Community members also pointed to other recent events they say have contributed to a more politically charged environment at Lab, including the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel.

For some people, however, the urgency of the policies has outweighed the concerns about potential outside pressures shaping them. “I do think the timing does have to do with the [Trump] administration; I’m not going to deny that,” said a teacher and Lab parent who requested anonymity. “But I do also think something had to be done at some point.”