Does a university have to stay neutral on contested issues to remain a home for open inquiry? At a Steamboat Institute Campus Liberty Tour debate co-hosted by Heterodox Academy and held at the University of Wyoming, constitutional law scholar Jonathan Turley (George Washington University) argued the affirmative and Todd Wolfson (Rutgers University; president of the American Association of University Professors) argued the negative. The Steamboat Institute’s Tony Blankley Fellow George Bogden moderated. A transcript of the debate is below.
Jennifer Schubert Aiken: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back. Thank you for joining us. My name is Jennifer Schubert Aiken. I’m the co-founder and CEO of the Steamboat Institute. We are very grateful to the University of Wyoming and to Heterodox Academy for hosting us here in Laramie tonight for our Campus Liberty Tour debate as part of the Mountain West Regional Conference. We would also like to welcome those who are watching the live stream of our debate, coming up here in just a few minutes. We always have live stream viewers from all over the country, and we’re happy to have them joining us.
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Today’s debate addresses a question that has become increasingly important in higher education: Should colleges and universities adopt a position of institutional neutrality, or should they take public stances on controversial social and political issues? We invite all of our audience members, including our live stream viewers, to respond with your view on this question. There are QR codes on the cards on the table. The question is this: Is institutional neutrality necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes? Agree, disagree, or undecided? Do this now. If you’re watching the live stream, you’ll see a link in the chat. For those of you here in the room, like I said, there are cards on the table — use that QR code. Then, when the debate is over, we’re going to ask your opinion again to see if opinions have shifted.
And now it’s my great pleasure to introduce our speakers and moderator for this evening. So let’s welcome them to the stage, and I will then introduce each of them while they remain seated. Welcome, speakers and moderator. It’s okay if you want to applaud. Yeah.
Okay, so I will introduce each of them, they will remain seated, and then I will turn it over to our moderator, and opening statements will begin.
Arguing the affirmative on our resolution is Jonathan Turley, a nationally recognized legal scholar who has written extensively in areas ranging from constitutional law to legal theory to tort law. Professor Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School. Professor Turley is the founder and executive director of the Project for Older Prisoners. He has written more than three dozen academic articles that have appeared in a variety of leading law journals, including those of Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, and Northwestern, among others. Professor Turley has served as counsel in a variety of national security and terrorism cases, and is a frequent witness before the House and Senate on constitutional and statutory issues. He is a nationally recognized legal commentator and is the second most cited law professor in the country. Professor Turley is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, where he frequently publishes opinion pieces on constitutional law and civil liberties. He’s the author of The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, published in 2024, and the just-released Rage in the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution. Please give a warm welcome to Professor Jonathan Turley.
Arguing the negative on our resolution is Todd Wolfson, Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. He also serves as president of the American Association of University Professors and as national vice-president of the American Federation of Teachers. Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, Professor Wolfson’s research focuses on the convergence of new media and social movements. He is the author of Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left, which examines the impact of new media and communication technologies on the spatial, strategic, and organizational fabric of social movements. Professor Wolfson is also a co-founder of the Media Mobilizing Project, which uses media and communications as a core strategy for building a movement of poor and working people in Philadelphia and beyond. The Media Mobilizing Project has been recognized as a national leader both in using media as an organizing tool and in advocating around the intersection of poverty and technology. Please give a warm welcome to Professor Todd Wolfson.
Our moderator for the debate is George Bogden, Senior Counsel for Trade at Continental Strategy, a government relations firm with offices in Washington, D.C., Florida, and Latin America. Dr. Bogden previously served as Executive Director of the Office of Trade Relations at U.S. Customs & Border Protection, where he was the agency’s primary liaison to the international trade community. A writer and commentator, his analysis has appeared in outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others. Dr. Bogden is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a David Rockefeller Fellow of the Trilateral Commission, and a Senior Fellow with the Steamboat Institute. He was recently named to Washingtonian magazine’s 2026 list of the 500 Most Influential People Shaping Policy. And now I’ll turn it over to Dr. Bogden to begin our debate.
George Bogden: Thank you so much, Jennifer. It’s such a pleasure to be here today. I have to say that this is an exciting debate, not just because of our extraordinary speakers, but also, I think, because you all have been ruminating and deliberating on many of the subjects we’re going to address. So I ask, make this an opportunity to kind of crystallize and bring to the fore those points of agreement and disagreement you may have had earlier on.
I also want to say that — this is kind of the third debate that I’ve gotten to moderate in this fashion, and I have to say what really makes this fun is audience participation. And so I’m going to give a little demonstration. These cards are key to the debate. I think it’s great that Steamboat looks at folks using their devices as a feature, not a glitch, of a big public event. And so take the opportunity now to express your views on the topic, but also to start thinking through topics for the questions, because it’s my preference to ask your questions rather than the ones that I’ve prepared, and I’ll certainly stick to that.
Beyond that, I think it’s important to take one moment to read out what is a bit of an elaborate resolution. So if you’ll bear with me: This house believes that institutional neutrality is necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes. There’s a lot there. So without further ado, I think I’ll hand it over to our opening speaker, Professor Turley.
Jonathan Turley: Thank you very much. And please let me first thank Steamboat Institute, and of course Todd Wolfson, in facilitating what I think is a very timely debate.
The term “institutional neutrality” is often associated with the debate that really began significantly in 1900, continued through the 1950s, and then culminated with a report that you’ll hear a great deal about, called the Kalven Report. But it actually can be traced back centuries, to the basis for universities as institutions, as unique forums for free expression and free thought. Indeed, you can trace it back to the very founding of the concept of an academia. And that term, as I mentioned, I talk about in my book The Indispensable Right, can be traced to a small Athenian grove in ancient Greece where Plato would gather with his students, and famously they would form a circle to create a type of protected space, and they would direct their comments and their thoughts to the center of that circle, and it would symbolize the fact that what they would discuss was protected from pressures and influences outside. Higher education is meant to maintain that protected space. Universities and colleges protect the circle itself, and allow students and faculty to speak freely within it.
It is equally important to emphasize what institutional neutrality is not. It is not a bar on people who want to take public stances or engage in protests. Rather, as stated in the Kalven Report decades ago, the university is the home and sponsor of critics. It is not itself the critic. It also does not mean that the universities cannot speak to defend institutional interests, such as attacks on academic freedom, as many institutions have done in the last couple of years. Institutional neutrality encourages free expression and academic freedom by assuring students and faculty that the school itself takes no position other than supporting their right to speak, debate, write. Faculty can join en masse in protests and petitions, but when they do so, they do so as individuals, not as representatives of the university.
The call by figures against institutional neutrality is not coming from the students. A recent poll found a majority of students oppose institutions taking these public positions. Notably, another poll showed that roughly 60 percent of students said they fear speaking freely in class. An even larger percentage say that they actively self-censor in classes and on campus. That is a particularly distressing and depressing statistic. Many universities have taken the stand to try to reverse that, and they’ve reaffirmed their commitment to institutional neutrality to try to restore diversity of viewpoints. Schools from the University of Chicago to Yale to this institution, the University of Wyoming, have expressly embraced institutional neutrality as a touchstone. But other universities have abandoned that. University and department heads now regularly denounce ICE, condemn conservative speakers, or make other types of public statements on issues of the day. An institutional statement at the University of California, Santa Cruz declared, as an institution, that Gaza is a feminist issue. In the last election, Wesleyan university president Michael Roth called upon universities to reject institutional neutrality, and even called for them to endorse Vice President Harris, to oppose what he analogized as the rise of the Nazis.
The rejection of institutional neutrality is the final goal of many who have turned our higher education into an academic echo chamber. In the last two decades, conservatives and libertarians have been effectively purged from faculty and departments. There are many departments now that don’t have a single conservative or libertarian on the faculty, in a country that has a majority of conservatives and libertarians. With the complete control of faculties, many of these same figures are now pushing to make the academic institutions themselves into advocates. What is striking for some of us is these voices are not new; they’re all too familiar. At one time universities imposed a variety of religious and political viewpoints, including punishing those that undermined Christian values. It’s common for universities to denounce and cancel — but what we are watching is the final breaking of the circle from the Athenian grove. Higher education is now in an existential battle with itself, and we must join to create a new circle to guarantee that this garden, this grove, will allow many ideas to flourish. Thank you.
Todd Wolfson: Hey, everybody. How you doing? Good to see you. Um, I also want to start by thanking Steamboat. And, you know, this is my first time seeing these campus tours. It’s beautiful — a beautiful and important thing — so I really appreciate it.
Um, so we’re going to run into like some crossroads here, because I think there’s a lot we agree on. So I want to start with a concession: universities do issue too many statements. They do. Many are performative, politically convenient, and they’re intellectually hollow. I’ve spent 30 years in higher education, and I’ve watched institutions rush to signal virtue on questions far removed from the core mission. I’m not here to defend that. If the question tonight were “should universities weigh in on every political controversy,” I might be sitting on my opponent’s side of things.
But that’s not the question in front of us. The proposition before us is whether institutional neutrality is necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry. Necessary is a strong word. It does a lot. That means without neutrality, there is no open inquiry. That is the claim that my opponent — that Jonathan — must prove today, and I’m here to argue that he can’t, because history and experience point to the opposite direction. And so my burden is simple: find one case where non-neutral institutional action preserved open inquiry, and then the proposition fails, because a necessary condition admits no exceptions. So I intend to give you a couple of exceptions tonight, and we can think through from there.
But here is the central point I want to make. Academic freedom is the foundation of open inquiry — academic freedom. Neutrality is merely a strategy that helps us hold open inquiry, but a strategy is not the thing that makes a university free. Tenure, shared governance, faculty speech, independent research — these are the conditions under which genuine inquiry happens. Neutrality is a strategy that sometimes serves those conditions, but it’s not the source of those conditions. Confusing the strategy for the foundation is a central error in the proposition before us. Even the Kalven Report — and Jonathan said as well — even the Kalven Report recognizes that universities must defend the conditions that make inquiry possible.
Think of it this way. If universities were perfectly neutral, but the government abolished tenure, dictated curriculum, and controlled research, would inquiry be free? And that doesn’t matter whether you have a left-wing or right-wing government. In either case, if they dictated a curriculum, would that institution be free? You know, obviously not. In that world, universities would be perfectly neutral; they would also be profoundly unfree, which means neutrality was never the variable that matters most.
And we’re watching this play out in real time. Last October, the federal government sent a document called the Compact for Academic Excellence to nine major universities. The offer was straightforward: accept federal criteria over admissions, your curriculum, and your campus governance, and receive preferential access to federal funding; decline it, and you do not receive access to that federal funding. Seven universities publicly said no — MIT, Brown, Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, Virginia, and Arizona. Each took a public position, a public position: we will not let the government determine what we teach, whom we admit, and how we govern ourselves. Did those non-neutral statements destroy open inquiry at MIT, Brown, and Dartmouth? Did open inquiry suffer, or did they protect open inquiry by making a non-neutral statement?
And this is not a left or right question. One of the most influential defenses of free inquiry in modern higher education is the University of Chicago principles from 2014. Chicago did not remain neutral on free expression. It issued an explicit institutional statement rejecting the suppression of unpopular ideas, and affirming the university must protect the right to express them freely, and also demanding no safe spaces from ideas. More than 100 colleges and universities signed onto those principles. This is not a neutral position. And universities have likewise defended Christian student groups, conservative speakers, and unpopular voices through explicit institutional action.
So even the strongest defenders of institutional neutrality recognize that neutrality has exceptions. Once we admit that universities may speak when the conditions of inquiry are threatened, the debate is no longer about whether universities should ever speak. It becomes a debate about when they should speak — when and how they speak. And that’s a very different proposition.
My opponent will argue that when universities take institutional positions, they chill dissent and compromise their role as forums of open inquiry. Hold that claim against what you just heard. Seven universities publicly refused a government demand to submit their academic programs to political criteria. Some advocates of institutional neutrality would counsel silence, but silence in that moment is not neutrality. Silence is compliance — it’s compliance.
So it’s academic freedom. I’ll just say this one more time, and have us like center this: academic freedom is the central foundation upon which we have open inquiry. Institutional neutrality is a strategy, which sometimes works and sometimes is not necessary to hold and maintain open inquiry in our universities. Thank you.
George Bogden: Thank you so much for those stirring public — or opening — statements. And now we have a really exciting moment in the debate where I get to ask questions, you get to ask questions, and we’ll kind of see where things head. I want to start off by kind of going to the canonical example that Professor Turley opened us with, which really has to do with Athens and its validity as a model for the university. Do you think that that concept of the free and open space creates potential for harms and abuses? I’m thinking of, you know, putting to death of Socrates, or the ascendance of his acolyte Alcibiades. I didn’t mean for much alliteration. But, I mean, what I’m getting at is, is that a formula for people to take advantage and to do negative things and to persuade publics in awful ways?
Jonathan Turley: No, I don’t think it is. In The Indispensable Right, I talk about this growing chorus of academics who are saying that free speech is harmful or dangerous or triggering. And I don’t accept that. I don’t believe that free speech is harmful in the sense that you should be able to regulate it and curtail it to a large extent. But the question is what the baseline is.
This sort of goes to what Todd had said. I do not believe that the standard of whether institutional neutrality should exist is whether there’s a single academic somewhere who is showing academic freedom. That’ll be a hell of a test. The Chinese could say, “Yeah, you don’t need free speech; I can name an academic in Beijing who seems to be doing just fine.” The question is what the baseline is. And some of the universities that Todd referenced as opposing the Trump administration policies — and I oppose some of those policies — are signatories on institutional neutrality. The Kalven Report specifically says that universities are allowed to speak publicly about their institutional interests. Now, does that mean that the exception swallows the rule? No. But to come back to your question in terms of Athens: no one is actually being forced to take hemlock. In reality, they don’t need it. Most of the dissenting voices have been eliminated in many departments. And, quite frankly, I’ve always thought it was amazing that this group really wants to get rid of institutional neutrality — they have control of virtually every department in the country. They can sign petitions with overwhelming numbers because there are very few conservatives, Republicans, contrarians, libertarians. They’re largely gone. I’ve been teaching for over 30 years; I’ve watched it happen. So no one’s afraid of hemlock, because they got rid of Socrates years ago. They actually got rid of Plato years ago.
George Bogden: Right, right. And what do you think? Any response to that, or?
Todd Wolfson: Well, I do agree with Jonathan on this. I don’t think that open inquiry — and free, the circle — is the problem. So we do need a university. We might not agree on issues, but there’s no disagreement that we need a robust university that has diverse thought, where we are fighting over ideas, where we are teaching our students how to think. We are training them in multiple different disciplines that help them think. I mean, if that’s the proposition — that like there’s a side that doesn’t believe that’s true — I don’t think there’s actually that side in this world. I don’t see it. And I’m the one that’s the interlocutor on the left that supposedly is walking amongst the folks that are trying to shut everyone down. That is not what I am seeing. That is not the reality of the university I see today. That doesn’t mean there aren’t excesses — and Jonathan, you brought up some good ones about statements that were humorous, like “Gaza being a feminist issue” being one. But I think that there’s a typecast about what’s going on in the university that is not my experience.
Jonathan Turley: Can I follow up on that? Because Todd and I actually do share a lot of values — not surprisingly, we’ve both been teaching so long. And I don’t doubt Todd’s love for academia, but we obviously have some fundamental differences. What Todd just referred to — originally, much of our academic freedom policies came out of the German school, and this idea of sort of the Wissenschaft type of principle of higher education as teaching a way of learning. And the reason that’s important is because you’re not being taught that there is an orthodox set of answers. The idea is that we would teach a way of learning. That requires a very specific environment, that protected environment, and in my view essential to that is for the institution not to take a stand.
And, you know, there was a famous statement by a physicist who said that all great advances in science follow funerals. And what he was saying was that you have to wait for a lot of the orthodox advocates to pass before you can challenge it. And so what I would say to Todd is that when you go to sort of ways of learning, it’s very dangerous when institutions take positions, and it’s not necessary. In the Kalven Report they refer to universities becoming second-rate political organizations. No one really cares that much outside the university what they say, but people in the university — because if you want to go for tenure, if you want to get rehired, and you have a university saying X is the truth, then, if you were even thinking of writing that it’s not the truth, it presents a real barrier. And what I would put forward as examples of that is that during the pandemic we had many academics who were fired and attacked for taking opposing views of COVID. And that includes the Great Barrington letter that was signed. I spoke at the University of Chicago, and many of the signatories were in the front row. And I asked them — most of them were vindicated. They were vindicated on saying those blue masks did not prevent the transmission of the virus. They were vindicated on saying that the six-foot rule did not have a scientific basis. They were vindicated that you didn’t have to shut down schools — our European allies didn’t, and they flourished, while we are still suffering from that. All those voices were silenced because universities adopted positions that said that they were wrong and even racist. So that’s the problem.
George Bogden: Jump in with another kind of historical example here, because I think that oftentimes when we think about universities, and we talk about things like lawfare, we think the present is all there is. But just to give you one very vivid example: during the height of Watergate, one of the president’s men, Mr. Magruder, described then the special prosecutor Archibald Cox as, quote, “high priest of the Kennedy White House in waiting in Cambridge,” end quote. And it’s my understanding that that characterization was used to try to discredit this sort of constitutional process to investigate this question. And I’m using that example to try to put a fine point on: if institutional neutrality is impossible, what separates it from becoming any other political actor in our system? And I think you have the important first point to make on that.
Todd Wolfson: Yeah, and I think that’s the key point that we’re really at right now, is what constitutes a political statement, right? And so let’s go to the Kalven Report, and let’s just understand the moment it was written in. It was written in the ‘60s, during the civil rights movement, during the anti-war movement. And I think that students — not just students, faculty — were militating to get universities to make statements about the Vietnam War, or to make statements, or to divest from the war machine in one way or the other, right? And so in order to insulate the institutions from that, University of Chicago adopted this commission that then developed the Chicago Kalven Report. And they say in the report that we have to give leave for institutions to defend themselves historically, looking back, maybe at McCarthyism, maybe at Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s. But they don’t go into detail about what that means there. There are some statements about it, but there is not an express discussion about exactly what that means. And I think that’s where we are today, and that’s where maybe the disagreement lies, right?
So I think that if you fast forward to 2026, what the problems that the university faces — though some of them are from within, many of them are from without. And they’re demanding that universities sign demand letters from the Trump administration, or sign on to the compact, or do any number of things that limit curriculum, that limit who we hire, who we admit. And so I think the thing about the Kalven Report is that it was meant for the university of the 1960s, and we need to augment it by understanding that we’re in a different moment in 2026, and that it demands a different understanding of what institutional neutrality is, and what political or administrative speech is. And I would argue again that speaking against a president who makes a demand of X, Y, and Z is political speech. You cannot tell me that standing up to the Trump administration, as Dartmouth University or MIT, was a non-political act. It was a political act. And so, again, the choice and decision point we have now is not whether institutional neutrality is necessary, because it’s not. The question we have is what kind of speech, and when that speech is necessary, and we need to come to a place where we’re comfortable setting new boundaries about what speech makes sense.
Jonathan Turley: Yeah, I’d like to respond to that. First of all, when we get to like the death of Socrates — whether we’re having more Socrates and Platos, but the death — it was Socrates that took the hemlock. But I don’t know if Plato would do any better. But I want to go to this idea that this all began with the Kalven Report. That’s simply not true. It’s not what Todd is saying — Todd is saying that really the emphasis is on the Kalven Report, and he’s right about that. But actually, I went to University of Chicago, and I was very proud of this connection. President Harper, who was the first president of Chicago, articulated the first institutional neutrality principle. The first paper was in 1899; his famous speech was in 1900. Then you had a further work from Yale that came out before the Kalven Report. And so there was a great deal of American scholarship identifying institutional neutrality as essential to creating that really unique environment, that almost fleeting environment that produces what is extraordinary, which is intellectual life. You know, it’s probably the most vulnerable and delicate life form there is, is intellectual life. It dies with the smallest temperature changes. It has to exist within that type of circle.
And when Todd refers to standing up to the Trump administration — I criticized the Trump administration for its position with universities, even though I agree with the Trump administration on the lack of diversity and some of these other issues. But when Dartmouth and other schools did that, that’s exactly what Kalven anticipated. He said that you can speak as an institution for the things that are threatening you as an institution. So if there’s a threat to academic freedom, of course the university can speak. But that’s a very bright line, and I don’t think you can go from then say, well, you can protect academic freedom, therefore it’s a bonanza — you know, we can just start to hold forth on these issues. There’s a value to bright lines, and that’s what this gives. If you read the University of Wyoming statement on institutional neutrality, like some of these others — these are not statements when you read them you think, “My god, how limiting!” You would say, “Well, this is pretty common sense.” University saying, you know what, we’re going to protect all of you to talk, all of you to speak, all of your research, and we’re not going to weigh in. We’re leaving it to you. Our job is to make sure you can do that job and fulfill that function.
George Bogden: Those are both very helpful answers. Um, I want to give you a kind of extreme example, right, so really, I think, bring to the fore, you know, kind of examples that we may have seen in everyday life at universities. You know, say I’m a student, very upset with, you know, the position taken by faculty on, you know, a conflict that I have a heritage connection to. And I come to the administration, and I say, you know, I demand that the administration discuss and make a statement on the injustice of one side or another in this conflict that’s taking place. Can you explain for us why or why not the university should take a position on that, and how they would respond to the argument of the student that “I don’t feel safe at the university because these statements are being made in public on the university’s campus, and it’s chilling my ability to be a student or to engage in the speech that I would like to engage too, because I feel threatened”? Is that to me first, or to Todd?
Todd Wolfson: Look, you know, I mean, we all face these situations, right? We’re facing them now on our campus, certainly when it comes to the war in the Middle East, where we have students coming to us from both sides, feeling completely distressed about the — not just the academic life, the social, cultural life of the university — because they feel threatened, because a word they hear, a word that’s spoken, they hear differently than it’s meant to be as a spoken word, etcetera. I, again, I am not here to defend that universities should speak on these issues. I do not think universities should take a stand, for instance, on Israel and Palestine. I do not think, as a faculty member at a university that’s probably got — Rutgers University, it’s probably got one of the largest Jewish faculty and largest Muslim faculty communities in the country — it is not healthy to create an environment where the university itself takes a position on that, even if many members have strongly felt beliefs. So I am not arguing — now, I would not argue that.
Again, what I’m arguing is that the argument for institutional neutrality runs up headlong against the moment we live in now, when universities are forced to take political positions in defense of themselves. And that may be spoken about in the Kalven Report, but in and of itself it forces universities into a different position than they’ve been in, and therefore institutional neutrality cannot be fully, fully protected. Because in the moment that you make that decision, that is a judgment decision by the president or the board of governors of that institution to stand up and defend the institution. And I’ll note that two universities, while they didn’t accept the compact from the Trump administration, they did not speak publicly, right? And they did not publicly reject it. So they made a different decision about what was right for their community. So again, that’s the ground I want us to be on. I am not going to make an argument here today to you that we should be speaking out as institutions about all told number of horrors in the world. I think we, as individuals, should; I don’t think our institution should.
George Bogden: Just to push you a little bit on that point, before we get to you.
Todd Wolfson: Please, go ahead.
George Bogden: I mean, let’s say we have a Jewish university, and a university that identifies with the Jewish tradition and so on. And would you say, under the Kalven criteria, they have a basis to make a statement about the conflict which you’ve raised as an example?
Todd Wolfson: No, because there are also many Jewish people who are not comfortable with the war in the Middle East. So no — there are Jewish people who are not comfortable with... I’m a Jewish faculty member who is not comfortable with the war in the Middle East at this moment. So no, that would not be acceptable.
George Bogden: They would have to accept the premise that that conflict has no threat to their core values. I’m just trying to push you on this one.
Todd Wolfson: No, they would have to accept that there are — all right, so you’re saying, do they have to accept that? You would have to make a case for me, which hasn’t been made, that speaking out about the war in the Middle East, or the war in the Middle East itself, in some way undermines a yeshiva or a Jewish institution in a way that stripping a university of its right to control its own curriculum does to Vanderbilt. I do not see those as apples to apples.
Jonathan Turley: I’d like to respond to your original question, and then come back to Todd’s answer. First of all, at University of Chicago, the answer was clearly stated in the Zimmer letter, which I thought was absolutely brilliant. So some of the students that had been accepted at the University of Chicago received a letter of acceptance, and it congratulated them on being selected. It said that the University of Chicago is excited about their coming. It said, some of you might be concerned that you’re going to face these triggering types of ideas — there’s no, that you’re not going to have a safe space at the University of Chicago, and I’m just writing to make sure you know there are no safe spaces at the University of Chicago. And he said, we will not protect you from ideas, and if that’s really important to you, then this is not the place to go. The Chicago letter has been adopted by many universities. So the answer to your question is no.
I’m sympathetic with people that feel like certain speakers are triggering. They can protest. What they can’t do — and what we can regulate, which is not speech — is conduct. So if you shout down a speaker, that’s conduct. If you’re at Stanford and you’re shouting down a federal judge who wants to talk about his philosophy, that’s conduct, okay? That’s not — you’re preventing free speech. You’re protected to be outside and to state all of those reasons.
But I want to push my friend Todd a little further on this, because I feel the same way about academic institutions as I do about the AAUP. And the AAUP has signed a letter taking a position on the Gaza war. And as an academic who believes strongly in the history of the AAUP and how it has fought for academic freedom, I was very critical of that. I was critical of your pledge, as a president, to make it more of an advocacy organization. You know, I’m not too sure why the same doesn’t apply to an AAUP. I believe that academic institutions, which include the AAUP, should be fighting for the right for people to speak freely, and not take a position on what they are doing, their research, or the issues that are being debated.
Todd Wolfson: I’ll respond to that. And it’s true — AAUP and I have taken many controversial political positions, and I feel very comfortable with that. And I think that it’s a very different beast than a university. And so what I would say to that simply is that, first and foremost, AAUP is a member organization. We have 60,000 members, and we’re a democratic member organization. And so we reflect the thoughts and will of our overall membership. And democratically — which means if 60 or 70 percent feel a certain way, that are engaged in a process of democratic deliberation, then we will take a position on that. And I feel strongly that that’s what organizations that are member-led democratic organizations should do. That, again, is different, because we have a different role than a university, which is meant to, you know, do research, teaching, and service, and of course protect open inquiry. That is not the role of AAUP. AAUP, as a member organization, reflects the will of its members. And, you know, like, we might not all agree on this, but my feeling — it’s important to understand the history of AAUP, which is, it was founded well over a hundred years ago by John Dewey. And for the first 50 years of its lifetime, it was a professional association representing the profession. In that moment, I think Jonathan is right. It would be better off being neutral. The last 50 years, it has pivoted to being mostly a union. The people who pay the dues have collective bargaining rights, and it’s become a union, and unions are political organizations. So we have shifted the organization to reflect that reality. I agree, though: if it was more of a professional association, it would be less appropriate for us to take these sort of political positions.
George Bogden: You can push this a little further. Go for it.
Jonathan Turley: First of all, I don’t agree on the AAUP. I actually think unions should — I have a problem with unions taking a lot of political positions when members are paying dues from different political standpoints. But that’s — I can see Todd’s point, and that’s a legitimate point of disagreement. But the AAUP, through its Committee A, produced a position on institutional neutrality very recently, and you have a very able head of that committee, who is a University of California professor. And, you know, it was a very strong argument against institutional neutrality, but it’s notable that his position includes, for example, saying that universities should issue a statement condemning Charlie Kirk if he spoke on campus — this was before he was assassinated. And it gave an insight into at least what that author thinks about institutional statements, that he thinks that one of those things institutions could legitimately say is to attack a conservative. Not someone like Angela Davis, or someone from the West who are more frequently speakers on campuses, but that Charlie Kirk should have been condemned. And I’m just wondering whether you believe that that’s true — that your view of institutional neutrality means that universities should condemn people like Charlie Kirk.
Todd Wolfson: Well, I think you’re referring to Brian, who is not the chair of Committee A, Rana Jaleel is — she’s also from University of California. There’s a bunch of University of California folks on Committee A. I won’t — it’s not my job to defend Brian’s book.
Jonathan Turley: No, I’m just interested in this — in the point, not his book, but this idea that…
Todd Wolfson: I mean, I think I’ve made my point clear, which is, look, I think that what we really want to — what I really think needs to be explored here is how institutions are responding to a — what I believe is an existential threat from a very aggressive federal government. Again, it could be a leftist federal government. In this case, it’s not. And how it is forced to take political positions, and what that means for the concept of institutional neutrality — because I think it undermines it, even if the Kalven Report made an exception for it. I don’t feel it’s necessary for me to respond to an argument that Brian Soucek made about Charlie Kirk, which actually I’m not even, frankly, you know —
Jonathan Turley: Yeah, I agree, it was sort of an unfair thing, quite frankly. I regret I asked it. But I’m more interested in trying to figure out, sort of grope around, where your line is drawn here. Because for those of us who are big advocates of institutional neutrality, we want a bright line rule. And you make us feel really uncomfortable, because we’re not sure where that line is.
Todd Wolfson: Well, let me give you an example, which I do think is important for us to think about, um, that is outside of the argument I’m making about, um, response to the federal government in this moment. So when I was at Rutgers, Rutgers University wanted to expand its cancer center, and they made a decision, using the power and networks that they have and a very large endowment, to close down the best-performing middle school in New Brunswick and move that middle school — their offered site was a brownfield site. And it’s important to note that the majority of the students were people of color. And so, that they could expand the Cancer Institute, right? Now, that is not something that is dealt with appropriately, I think, in our discussion of institutional neutrality. We talk about statements, but that act by Rutgers University to kick out students who had the best-performing middle school and move them somewhere far away — it took years for them to rebuild that school — I believe is also a political act, and an act that we haven’t appropriately dealt with when we think about our universities and institutions and we talk about institutional neutrality. How do we reckon with that? How do we reckon with that? It’s an honest question. I think institutional neutrality does not effectively reckon with that.
George Bogden: I love this organic exchange, but it is my favorite part of the debate where I get to ask your questions. Before we do, though, I just want to tell the audience my favorite quote from Jimmy Hoffa, given all this talk about unions, which is, you know, “I may have my faults, but being wrong ain’t one of them.” Beyond that, though, there’s a lot of, I think, really interesting kind of ideas coming from the audience, basically around the converse of what I asked you earlier on. So we now have had a discussion about what separates a non-neutral university from any other political actor. So now, Professor Turley, I want to ask you, from our audience: does institutional neutrality require what we might call apathy from all external forces? Or where do you draw the line beyond the Kalven discussion?
Jonathan Turley: Well, it’s a very good question. And the fact is, I am a believer in robust institutional neutrality. The times of where academic freedom is challenged are, thankfully, few, although we’ve seen some with this administration where universities took a position, and, whether you agree with them or not, I think that absolutely that was within their right to do so. But it’s a very slippery slope. And you end up — for example, my university took a position on D.C. statehood. And I understand that they viewed that as the sort of disenfranchisement of a city with a majority of African American voters, and they felt very strongly about that. But that’s a very good example of where this slippery slope can take you. I testified on D.C. statehood repeatedly in Congress and raised, I believe, that the bills that were being put forward were facially unconstitutional — that the Congress could not do what they were thinking of doing, for constitutional reasons. So there’s a myriad of reasons why you would support voting for D.C. residents. In fact, I suggested a way of doing that, but be opposed to D.C. statehood. But the university stepped in and said, no, here’s the answer.
And the question is, how does that make, for example, an assistant professor who just started in the political science department — how does she deal with this subject if it’s within her wheelhouse, and she thinks that no, it’s a bad idea, when the university president is saying this is the position of our university? So the problem with abandoning this bright line rule is that it quickly takes you on there, and we’ve seen institutions lose those bearings. And it gets back to that sort of baseline I mentioned with Todd, of where the baseline should be. And a lot of you — dozens of universities — have said the baseline has to be with institutional neutrality. Now, are there going to be outliers off that baseline? Of course, there always are. I mean, you can’t have a principle where there’s not going to be these tough questions. But the baseline itself has a certain gravitational pull for the institution. It tells professors and students, we’re not here to tell you the right answer; we’re here to help you find a way of learning, and to reach the answers on yourself.
When I went to University of Chicago, there was still a very robust free speech community, and I talk about it in Indispensable Right, that it was like walking into the bar scene in the Star Wars movie. And, you know, we had — I lived in a cooperative, a vegetarian cooperative, and downstairs Trotskyites would meet, and upstairs, like, we had militant vegans, and next door we had crazy libertarians. And I loved every single minute of it. I love meeting people who could see what I was saying and see something so different. That twilight environment, that fragile intellectual environment, requires institutional neutrality, in my view.
Todd Wolfson: Can I — can I, because you pushed me? I’m gonna ask you — you know, turnabout’s fair play. So, all right, so let’s go to Texas, and I think it’s Senate Bill 37. So Senate Bill 37 puts real constraints on how we teach around race and gender. It also abolishes shared governance, but then it asks the different Texas systems to put it into practice, and the different universities put it into practice differently. Texas A&M had review of all syllabi, right? And I think the number is between 200 or 300 classes were found to be teaching race or gender incorrectly, and they were either canceled or moved out of the core curriculum. One of the famous examples, I think we all heard of, is the teacher who was teaching on Plato. And so Texas A&M and the Texas Tech system didn’t abolish shared governance, but they turned faculty senates into faculty councils, something like that. The University of Texas at Austin, the flagship, took a different position: they abolished the university, or faculty senate — I’m not sure which it was; I think it was a faculty senate — but then also, and I was just saying this as we were walking in, they are closing four departments: African and African Diasporic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Mexican Latino Studies, and American Studies. They’re consolidating them into one mega cultural studies department, and many of the faculty will not be returning, right? And so I guess the question for you: none of the Texas universities spoke out about this or challenged this state law. And so my question for you is, should they be speaking? Should the universities be speaking out about the Texas universities, about SB 37?
Jonathan Turley: Well, I can’t speak to that actual legislation, but I get the gist of it from your description. It sounds like some of that I’ve criticized. I don’t believe that legislators should be telling academics what they can teach in class, like barring anyone from teaching, for example, critical legal studies. I teach a theory class as part of my torts class, and I teach various schools of thought from feminism to economics to critical legal studies, because I want my students to understand all these different perspectives and to come up with their own view of what the law should do. And so I was critical of some of this legislation that dictated you cannot teach these. Now, having said that, I also want to note that the state legislators are in a position now that I believe is a difficult one, and we’ve created it.
The fact is that universities are overwhelmingly hostile today to certain views. That’s what a lot of conservative Republican students report, they have a much higher rate of self-censorship. And, you know, I had this debate at Harvard with a Harvard professor, and I mentioned the majority of judges in this country are Republican appointees or conservatives. Half this country is Republican, and you’ve got like five on your faculty. And Randall — who was a guy I liked a great deal, Randall Kennedy — said, “We’re an elite institution; we don’t have to look like America.” And I said, “Randy, you don’t even look like Massachusetts. I mean, Massachusetts is 35 percent Republican.”
So what these legislators are facing are these universities that have become these hardened silos, and they don’t want to keep on supporting them with public dollars unless they see real reforms. And they have spent decades telling these university presidents and faculty members, you’ve got to have greater diversity, and the faculties will not do it. They have continued down the same path. So I guess my answer is, I agree with Todd on some of this stuff, and I am very critical of some of these laws. But I’m also very sympathetic as to what some of these legislators are trying to do, because the number of applications are dropping. Universities are closing at an unprecedented rate, and we’re like a ship of fools. We’re not even remotely interested in why many people look at higher education now, which is the highest — sorry, the lowest — level of public trust and respect in modern history. And yet we’re fighting about this as we alienate half of this country.
George Bogden: Well, you know, I think Foucault would agree with you about that ship of fools. I don’t know if it’d be negative for him. Nonetheless, you know, I have to get to, before we go to closing statements, what I think is the overwhelming point of the questions that have been submitted, which is the critique that you’ve heard from many different places — I think from folks like Desmond Tutu: if you’re silent in the face of injustice, you’re essentially siding with the unjust party. And I want to push that a little bit further, very quickly. How do you see the difference between silence and neutrality? Or is there one?
Todd Wolfson: I do want to say one quick thing, which is, there’s many reasons why public trust in universities has dropped. Arguably, maybe it’s because the faculty don’t reflect America. I think that there’s some reality to that argument, but there are other things we have to be honest about and look at. And so I am not happy with the Yale report, for instance, because that’s what they focus on, but they miss the fact that for the last 60 years, the federal and state governments have divested away from our institutions, our public institutions. And in divesting, they’ve put the burden of college onto the backs of our students and their families, and created $2 trillion in student debt. And then secondarily, the people who have had the biggest microphones talking about higher ed for the last five to 10 years are people who are using it for political platforms, right? And so while I am sympathetic that there are not enough conservative voices or libertarian voices in higher ed — I think there’s something to be said about that — I think that that’s only a part of the story, and it’s an overused part of the story, because we are not looking at long-term divestment, and we are not looking at who is talking about our universities and how are they talking about them and for what purpose.
But to return to — just really briefly, and I know we’re running out of time — I am very sympathetic to the concept, the Desmond Tutu’s famous quote, that if you do not — if you are silent in the face of oppression, then you are complicit in that oppression. I am. That does not mean, I think, that universities are the way that we respond, necessarily, to that oppression. And I think I heard Jonathan say this as well: there are all sorts of ways to organize. I organized by building a union. And the union — and maybe we disagree about the role of unions, but the union is then meant to respond to those injustices if the members agree with those injustices. So I agree with the quote, but I don’t think that the university making statements is going to be the solution to those problems.
Jonathan Turley: You know, I think the quote is misplaced. I remember one time I had a colleague that was in a fight over his shirts being lost by a laundromat, and this owner said, “I’m going to call my lawyer.” And Eric spun around and said, “I make lawyers.” Putting the bravado aside, what we do as academics is we create thinking — or we perfect thinking — people, where we shouldn’t be trying to get them to understand what they should think. And that means that sometimes, in terms of an institution being silent, it’s because it’s not our role. What we need to do is, if you really want to fight injustice, create a generation of educated and thinking people. That’s how you end injustice, that’s how you end ignorance, and the institution itself can make that happen by protecting that way of learning.
George Bogden: Very excited for us to begin our closing statements. I do want to remind you, after those closing statements, to vote. I want to reiterate that — that it’s really crucial to the integrity of the debate that it’s after you all have heard those final remarks that you vote. But with that, I’ll hand it over.
Todd Wolfson: Hey, y’all. When we began tonight, I made a concession: universities issue too many statements. Some are performative, and some are foolish. Some undoubtedly create pressure to conform rather than encouraging debate. After this discussion, I’m even more convinced that concern needs to be taken seriously. But again, that’s not the proposition before us. The proposition is not whether institutional neutrality is often wise. It is. The proposition is not whether universities should comment on every controversy. They shouldn’t. The proposition is whether institutional neutrality is necessary to preserve the university as a forum of open inquiry. Before you decide how to vote, I think it’s important to be clear about what must be true for that proposition to prevail.
My opponent can’t just show that institutional neutrality is often wise. He can’t show that some statements are misguided. He can’t show that sometimes those statements chill dissent. All of that’s clearly true. To win, he must answer the core argument we’ve discussed tonight. He must show that institutional neutrality is not merely a strategy, but a necessary condition of open inquiry. He must show that academic freedom is not the true foundation of a free university, and he must explain why universities that spoke to defend their own independence and the conditions of inquiry do not count as legitimate exceptions. I do not believe he has, because if even one legitimate exception exists, the proposition fails. And that’s not the legitimate exception of an individual; that’s a legitimate exception of any institution that speaks politically in order to protect open inquiry. A necessary condition admits no exceptions. And after an hour of debate, I do not believe the burden has been met.
I’ve spent 30 years in higher ed. I’ve watched universities face pressure from governments, from donors — a lot, recently — from political movements of every stripe. And what I’ve seen consistently is that institutions that survived those pressures with their integrity intact were not the ones that stayed silent. They were the ones that knew what they stood for, and they defended it.
Throughout this discussion, I’ve asked us to distinguish between the strategy and foundation. Academic freedom is the foundation of open inquiry. Tenure is a foundation. I think shared governance is a foundation. I think the independence of teaching and research from political control is a foundation of open inquiry. I do not think institutional neutrality is a foundation. I think it’s important at times, but not a foundation.
My opponent argued, following the tradition of Kalven Report, that institutional statements can chill dissent, create pressure to conform, and draw universities into political disputes. They’re right to worry about that, and I worry about that too. But even the strongest defenders of institutional neutrality recognize that universities must defend the conditions that make inquiry possible. And once we admit that principle, we already acknowledge that academic freedom is prior to neutrality, because when the two come into conflict, neutrality must yield to academic freedom.
The most important example tonight, from my vantage, are the major universities that said no to the Trump administration. Seven refused publicly, without equivocation, because they understood what the proposition tonight misses: silence in that moment was not neutrality. Silence was compliance, and compliance would have ended the independence that makes inquiry possible. Were they wrong? Did open inquiry become less secure at Dartmouth, Brown, and MIT because the leaders defended institutional independence? Of course not. Those statements did not undermine open inquiry; they protected it, and they were not neutral. The University of Chicago reached the same conclusion when it publicly committed to protecting unpopular speech, including speech this audience might find uncomfortable, or I might find uncomfortable. Non-neutral, but obviously right.
The moment we can identify even one circumstance of a university speaking to defend the conditions of inquiry, the proposition can’t stand. Why? Because necessary is a strong word, and legitimate exceptions defeat it. Now, again, imagine a university that’s perfectly neutral. It never issues a statement. It never takes a public position. It never enters a political controversy. That circle is kept closed. But politicians decide what can be taught. Researchers are told what they may study. Faculty can be punished for unpopular views. Shared governance disappears. The university would be perfectly neutral. It would also be profoundly unfree. What makes a university a forum for open inquiry is not neutrality. Academic freedom is the foundation; neutrality is a strategy. And when that foundation is threatened, the willingness to defend it is not optional — that is a mark of a free university. Thank you.
Jonathan Turley: Thank you very much, Todd. Again, and I want to emphasize a couple of things, but I first like to read you something. I may even have glasses where I can do that.
“While university leaders will make decisions about matters that further UW’s educational mission” — you’ve guessed it, this is the University of Wyoming statement — “they do not, on principle, commit the university in ways that are outside of its core academic purpose. This adherence to impartiality reaffirms the intellectual freedom of all at UW to seek and receive information without restriction, and enjoy unfettered access to all expression of ideas through which any side of a question, cause, or movement may be explored.”
You know something interesting about that statement of this institution? It did not create the dichotomy of my friend Todd. It did not say, well, you pick institutional neutrality, or you pick academic freedom, or you play them against each other. If you take a look at some of the early writings — from the 1899 study, the 1900 statement by Harper, the Yale statement that occurred two decades later — they all talked about pillars, plural, of higher education. One of the most important is in fact academic freedom, as Todd correctly notes, but another one was institutional neutrality.
There’s a lot of factors that go into this hothouse, this extraordinary place that produces the geniuses that this country has brought forth for the whole world. It’s a really fragile hothouse. It requires all the right soil, the temperature, the moisture — all of those are the dynamics of growth, intellectual growth. And that in turn is the growth plate for a nation. We need higher education, not to tell us the answers, but to prepare us as a people. We are going to be facing some terrible challenges. I talk about that in Rage in the Republic. We’ll be facing some of the biggest challenges we’ve ever faced as a democratic system. We need an educated population. We need people who can think for themselves.
And the reason I don’t accept the framing of my colleague, um, as clever as it is, is that I don’t view these as competing principles. I view them as part of a wonderful recipe that produces what we have today in higher education. But you cannot achieve those other things without institutional neutrality, because it’s institutional neutrality that helps guarantee academic freedom. It gives the buffer for free expression and for discussion. And it’s one of the things — I’ve had debates before where they say, well, point to someone who’s not really saying what they want to say. That’s rather an old saw. You know, we have to look at the environment that you’ve created.
Now, I’m going to be very blunt, and maybe a tad too harsh, but I believe this generation of academics is killing higher education. I believe the evidence of that is all around us. They have turned it into an academic echo chamber. I’ve seen it happen. I never thought, when I went into teaching over 30 years ago, we would ever be where we are now. The level of intolerance of viewpoints, the lack of diversity of faculty — I never thought it would happen. But part of that equation is institutional neutrality. It feeds the rest of it.
And I would simply tell my colleagues this — you know, this is a revolution in education. Some of my colleagues have called it that. You know, Rage in the Republic, I start with a statement by probably what’s properly known as the Thomas Paine of his generation. He was one of the great thinkers of the French Revolution, a Jacobin, and he observed after the French Revolution that revolutions, like Saturn, devour their children. I would warn my colleagues this: we are already seeing a lot of the people that said nothing as universities were effectively getting rid of all conservatives and canceling speakers — all of the people that said nothing, and now they are being turned upon, and they are being attacked as well. Revolution swallows its children. And what we could lose here is something that is just absolutely irreplaceable for a nation like ours. We’ll never need higher education more. So we need institutions to be neutral, so we don’t have another COVID situation where we’ve got academics who are fired and marginalized for things that they were later supported on. They’re not back. When I asked all those people in Chicago how many of you were rehired, put back on your associations — it was zero. Some of these people were vindicated, where federal agencies now support what they said. That’s the price when institutions start to abandon neutrality. Thank you very much.
George Bogden: Well, just one more reminder to take that moment to vote on how you think the debate went and where you come out — affirmative, negative, or undecided on the resolution — and, we’ll look at the results in just a moment.
Looks like we have some interesting results coming in — still filtering in. Oh, okay. So before the debate, we had 63 — or, excuse me, 66 percent in agreement, 14 in disagreement, and 21 undecided. Afterwards, we had about 63 in agreement, 13 in disagreement, and 24 undecided. And it still continues to fluctuate. I’m kind of concerned, but, you know, clearly we had some change. But as they say in France, plus ça change. I’m gonna hand it over to our host, and thank you all for participating.
Jennifer Schubert Aiken: Just very briefly, to wrap up: thank you to Professor Turley, Professor Wolfson, and moderator George Bogden. One more round of applause. What a fantastic debate.
If you’re wondering about the poll, it will be posted on our website, and you’ll be able to see this on our YouTube channel too later, so you’ll be able to get the final-final as it continues to shift as all of you vote.
I would also like to thank the University of Wyoming and Heterodox Academy for allowing Steamboat Institute to bring our Campus Liberty Tour debate to you here at the Mountain West Regional Conference. Thanks also, once again, to the Adolph Coors Foundation, and Bruce and Marcy Benson, and all of our wonderful supporters shown on the screen tonight, for making the Campus Liberty Tour possible.
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