UChicago’s Laboratory Schools are facing backlash from community members after news that it will no longer raise a Pride flag on a flagpole in the school’s courtyard during Pride Month, a decision that Lab Schools Interim Director Ethan Bueno de Mesquita said was made to better align the school with the University’s position on institutional neutrality.
The U-High Midway, the Lab Schools’ student paper, first reported the change on May 28.
The Lab Schools first raised a Pride flag in its courtyard in June 2022 following a petition by two fifth grade students, and the school has flown the flag alongside the American flag every year since. According to Lower School counselor Keren Faling, the flag raising had been widely attended by students in the past, and there was no formal announcement from administrators that the tradition would not continue this year.
The Pride flag was first mentioned to Bueno de Mesquita by Lab administrators during conversations about institutional neutrality and whether the flag would fall under the University’s guidelines for institutional expression, he told the U-High Midway in an interview. Bueno de Mesquita then contacted University administrators, who determined that raising the flag—or any banner other than the American flag—did not follow University guidelines for institutional neutrality as outlined in the Kalven Report, a 1967 policy document created by a faculty committee in response to Vietnam War protests that outlines the “University’s role in social and political action.”
Following news that the Pride flag would not be raised, multiple groups of Lower School students decorated the flagpole and the surrounding area of the courtyard with miniature Pride flags. A group of high school students, upset with the decision, raised a Pride flag in the courtyard on Wednesday morning, which was removed by administration later that morning. The smaller Pride flags were not removed.
Faling said that the event of raising the Pride flag had become a tradition for Lower School students and noted that younger students would not be able to remember a time without it.
“It’s hard, in my opinion, to recreate the feeling of joy, belonging, and tradition that had developed around the flag raising without having had more time to come together across constituencies to plan,” Faling told the Maroon.
The change was also met with backlash from several parent and teacher groups, which held Pride celebrations outside Earl Shapiro Hall and Blaine Hall on Monday.
Bueno de Mesquita sent an email to Lab students, parents, and faculty members on June 1 in response to community pushback, stating that the decision applied only to the flagpole and did not extend to other methods of expression.
“To be clear, the full membership of LGBTQ+ people in the Lab community is not a contested issue,” he wrote. “It is a core value.”
He cited a “longstanding University practice” of only raising American flags on University flagpoles, following the Kalven Report’s position on institutional neutrality, and emphasized that the decision was not related to the viewpoint-neutrality standards. The Maroon was unable to find documentation of a University policy limiting which flags may be raised.
In response to a request for comment, a University spokesperson reaffirmed Bueno de Mesquita’s statement that “this does not indicate a change in Lab’s recognition of Pride Month,” and that “the full membership of LBGTQ+ people in the Lab community is a core value.”
Debra Stulberg, a member of the parent affinity group Gender Affirming Families, helped organize both Pride celebrations on Monday in response to the news.
“We wanted there to be extra support from the parent community so that LGBTQ kids know that they are loved and supported, and that we’re really proud of them,” she said in an interview with the Maroon.
According to Stulberg, the announcement came at the end of a year of changes regarding administrative support for the LGBTQ+ community at Lab.
“This has been a rough year for LGBTQ families at Lab,” Stulberg said. “We’ve tried to express some things to [the] administration that have frustrated us, and we don’t feel like there’s been much movement on those.”
She cited changes to admissions documents that required parents to report their child’s sex assigned at birth as well as the assigned sleeping arrangements of trans students during overnight trips as issues that had been brought to Lab administration by Gender Affirming Families, but said that the group’s efforts had not swayed administrators.
The change comes amid a year of tensions surrounding institutional neutrality at Lab. Following a months-long review of educational practices at the school, Lab administrators released a policy in April calling for “viewpoint-neutral” educational practices at both an institutional and classroom level, including avoiding all signs, symbols, and slogans that could be interpreted as holding a political stance. The policy has divided community members; some have praised it for bringing the Lab Schools into alignment with the University’s position on institutional neutrality, while others have said that it limits what teachers are allowed to discuss in the classroom.
According to Ruthie Williams, a parent and teacher at Lab, teachers have not yet been given formal instruction on what constitutes viewpoint-neutral education, resulting in some instructors preemptively limiting the topics they discuss in class.
“I have talked to a lot of teachers who’ve asked, ‘Is it allowed for me to wear a Pride shirt? Is it allowed for me to go to a protest on my own time?’ A lot of teachers are nervous about what’s allowed or what’s not allowed, and they’re not sure, and they are worried about getting in trouble,” Williams said.
“I’ve heard our director say over and over, [the viewpoint-neutrality standards] are not meant to have a chilling effect on speech, but I think in practice, it has had a chilling effect,” Williams said. “Which is why a lot of teachers that I know and parents to our students and kids are trying to double down on our efforts, not just around pride, but also… all of the issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We want to do more.”
Uncle Milton / Jun 9, 2026 at 12:56 pm
The decision to stop flying the Pride flag is absolutely defensible, CORRECT, and the strongest case for it is built from the protesters’ own premises.
Institutional neutrality is a principle, not a pretext. The Kalven Report isn’t a recent invention designed to target LGBTQ+ people. It’s a 1967 document that emerged from debates over the Vietnam War, and its core logic is that an institution devoted to free inquiry should not itself take collective political positions, precisely so that individuals within it remain free to hold and express their own. A flagpole flying an institutional banner is the institution speaking. The decision rests on a consistent application of a long-standing framework, not a sudden hostility.
Consistency is the whole point. Once an institution uses its official flagpole to endorse one cause, it has no principled way to decline others. Which causes get the flagpole, and who decides? Neutrality avoids that problem by drawing a clean line: the official institutional space stays neutral, while everyone remains free to express themselves through other means. The proliferation of student-placed mini-flags, which administrators left in place, illustrates exactly the distinction being drawn between official institutional speech and individual expression.
And the decision was narrow and explicitly affirming. Bueno de Mesquita stated directly that LGBTQ+ membership in the community “is not a contested issue” but “a core value,” and that the change applied only to the flagpole, not to other forms of expression. If the goal were to marginalize LGBTQ+ students, leaving up the student-decorated flags and reaffirming Pride Month would be a strange way to do it.
Now take the protesters’ own argument: that neutrality is a fiction, because a room with a teacher in it is never a level playing field. Students defer to the authority who holds their grade and shapes their future. Grant it completely, then follow the logic down one age bracket. If that pressure chills a 21-year-old who chose the course, paid for it, and can drop it tomorrow, what does politically loaded messaging do to an eleven-year-old who is legally required to be in that room, cannot leave, and can’t yet tell a teacher’s conviction from established fact? Every factor that protects the adult, choice, exit, maturity, the standing to push back, is stripped from the child. The power-dynamics point doesn’t argue against restraint in a children’s classroom. Properly extended, it’s the single strongest argument for it.
And here is the question the rallies never reach: what is a child supposed to do the moment they understand that the adult grading their work, running their classroom, and shaping a year of their life holds a conviction their own family rejects? The adult can disagree and walk out. The eleven-year-old cannot. They sit there and do the math no child should have to do, whether honesty about what they believe at home will cost them warmth, standing, or a grade from the one authority in the room. That is not a free exchange of ideas. It is a captive audience being asked to choose between their family and their teacher’s approval. Neutrality is what spares them that choice.
Which is why the next question follows: who is defending the other families? A school serves households across the full range of conviction, religiously observant, politically conservative, simply dissenting, whose children sit in those same compulsory classrooms. No one is holding a celebration for them. That is precisely what neutrality exists to handle. A sympathetic, well-organized group can look after itself through ordinary advocacy; the family out of step with the prevailing culture has nowhere to appeal once the institution itself takes the contested position, because the referee has joined a side. Neutrality keeps the school’s official authority off the scale so that every family can send a child into a mandatory setting without the question pre-decided for them—and so that no child has to weigh their own household against the person holding the grade book.