For people outside the US, what's the context?
People like the sister commentor (now flagged/dead) that think anyone with a view different than their own is a Nazi want to insert themselves into what should be free inquiry, and have devised all sorts of mental gymnastics to explain why constraining thought is actually a good thing. University administrators who only care about preserving their power and want to take the most risk adverse path get onboard, and faculty get held hostage by an entitled minority that thinks their agenda is more important than anything else. (When the agenda is really just power anyway, not the causes they use as wedge issues)
And so the faculty has symbolically signed a statement that shouldn't need to exist, saying their business is their business and they should be left unmolested to free enquiry. And a few culture warriors call it culture war bullshit to try and give it the usual smug dismissal treatment that's the only form of rhetoric they know because they don't actually have a point
It's ideology being put above all else. It can be religious or non-religious. You don't need to look much further than Stalin's Russia. Lysenkoism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism?wprov=sfla1 ) was the nonsense hoops that academics had to jump in order to align with the Ideology of the Russian state. Those who aligned their work efforts to the ideology were rewarded, promoted and those who didn't ended up much worse.
We don't have this extreme level here in Western countries, but we are starting to see the seeds of it. It's nice to see MIT standing up against this. Stanford seems to be all for ideology.