This paper argues that sufficientarianism is most plausible when its threshold is reconstructed in relational rather than merely material terms. Sufficientarianism is attractive because it gives special moral weight to ensuring that everyone has enough, but it becomes vulnerable if 'enough' is defined only by survival, minimal comfort, or private welfare. Such thresholds may prevent destitution while leaving persons without the conditions required to participate as social and political equals.

The view defended here is that a person has enough when they possess the material and social conditions needed for equal civic standing. By equal civic standing, I mean the status of being able to stand and act as a full member of a shared social and political order. This includes political standing before institutions and in collective decision-making, but also social standing in relations of recognition, respect, and non-subordination.

Drawing on Shields' pluralist account of sufficiency, Casal's critique of the negative thesis, Axelsen and Nielsen's account of freedom from duress, Nussbaum's account of equal citizenship, Rawls' social bases of self-respect, and relational egalitarian work by Young, Anderson, Nath, and Neuhäuser, the paper develops sufficiency as a threshold of equal civic membership. On this account, inequalities above the threshold do not matter merely because they are inequalities, but they remain relevant when they undermine equal standing, entrench hierarchy, produce exclusion, or weaken the social bases of self-respect.

The result is a relational sufficientarian account that preserves the urgency of securing enough while avoiding a thin subsistence threshold. Justice requires more than keeping people alive or privately secure; it requires securing the conditions under which persons can participate in social and political life without subordination, stigma, or degrading dependence, and can be recognised as equal members of the community.

Neutrality remains attractive in university governance because it promises to prevent the institution from becoming a corporate critic on contested political questions. Yet neutrality, when treated as a general slogan, cannot resolve the conflicts that most often arise around academic freedom, campus expression, and institutional action. Those conflicts turn less on whether the university should be 'neutral' than on which part of the university is acting, under what authority, and by what standards. A department's decision to invite a speaker, a student group's use of campus space, a protest that disrupts classes, and an institutional statement on a public crisis do not belong to one undifferentiated expressive domain. They require different forms of judgment.

This paper argues that the better governance ideal is political independence. Political independence preserves the value behind neutrality while replacing its indeterminacy with a jurisdictional design. Inside the academic core, universities must permit content-sensitive selection governed by disciplinary competence, pedagogical purpose, and collegial reasons. In that context, selection is not a failure of free expression but part of scholarship itself. Outside the academic core, universities should protect robust campus expression through viewpoint-neutral time, place, and manner rules, while also preserving counter-speech, protest, and ordinary forum access. Between these domains, institutional voice must be restrained by default, though not absolutely silent when the university's own mission, legal obligations, or conditions of inquiry are directly threatened.

The paper develops this account against Robert Mark Simpson's challenge to the standard two-zone view, according to which academic freedom governs the academic core while free speech governs the rest of campus. Simpson is right that the line between those domains cannot be treated as a simple conceptual boundary. However, extending an academic communicative ethos across the whole university would collapse the university's plural roles into a single managerial regime. Political independence instead treats universities as communities of inquiry, employers, property owners, public forums, and corporate actors, each requiring distinct decision rules. The result is not neutrality as institutional passivity, but independence as institutional design: exacting scholarly standards where academic judgment belongs, generous expressive latitude where civic disagreement belongs, and clear governance rules that prevent governments, donors, administrators, or public pressure from bypassing collegial academic authority.