Jonathan Turley, AAUP president debate university neutrality at UW June 23

Jonathan Turley and Todd Wolfson will bring a national campus fight to Laramie when they debate whether universities should maintain institutional neutrality at 4:15 p.m. June 23 at the University of Wyoming. The Steamboat Institute event will be livestreamed, making the question of what UW says, and does not say, visible well beyond Albany County.

Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University Law School, will argue the affirmative. Wolfson, a Rutgers University professor and president of the American Association of University Professors, will argue the negative. Wolfson was elected AAUP president in October 2024 for a four-year term that runs through 2028, and Rutgers describes him as an anthropologist whose work focuses on new media and contemporary social movements.

At UW, the argument is not abstract. The university adopted a Statement of Principles in December 2023 that commits it to political neutrality and says it will foster free expression and constructive dialogue. University leaders said the statement drew on the 1967 Kalven Report, the University of Chicago’s 2014 free-expression principles, Wyoming’s Constitution and the state’s Code of the West, and UW said it was developed after consultation with campus and outside stakeholders. The practical questions now are whether that stance changes how the university issues public statements, how hiring decisions are perceived, and whether students and faculty in Laramie feel the classroom is insulated from political pressure.

The AAUP has pushed back hard on that model. Its 2025 institutional neutrality statement says neutrality is neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor incompatible with it, and the organization says the new language was shaped by protests surrounding the war in Gaza. That puts two competing views in direct tension at UW: one side says neutrality keeps institutions from taking sides in political disputes and protects open inquiry, while the other says silence can mask real choices and leave academic freedom less secure.

The debate also lands in a place that has lived through campus free-speech controversy before. In 2012, UW removed the Carbon Sink art installation after political and financial pressure, a reminder that questions about speech and institutional power in Laramie can quickly move from theory to consequence. The timing adds another layer: Heterodox Academy’s Mountain West Regional Conference is scheduled at UW June 22-24, 2026, putting the university at the center of back-to-back discussions about openness, neutrality and the limits of institutional voice.