At a June 23 debate on institutional neutrality hosted by the Steamboat Institute at the University of Wyoming, Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), made a series of unexpected concessions.

Although he argued against institutional neutrality, he acknowledged many of the very criticisms that have led its advocates to support it, including the reality that colleges and universities too often issue politically expedient statements far removed from their educational mission.

“Universities do issue too many statements. They do,” Wolfson said. “Many are performative, politically convenient, and they’re intellectually hollow.” Drawing on three decades in higher education, Wolfson said he had watched institutions “rush to signal virtue on questions far removed from the core mission.”

Wolfson was also candid about the academy’s declining standing with the public. Public trust in universities, he acknowledged, has fallen: “Arguably, maybe it’s because the faculty don’t reflect America. I think that there’s some reality to that argument.”

Yet when the Chronicle of Higher Education asked him why so few conservatives serve on university faculties back in 2025, Wolfson pulled back from the question. Rather than engage with one of the most extensively documented findings in the literature on higher education, he replied that he would “love to see the data.”

Wolfson also said that colleges and universities should take no position on Israel and Palestine, applying the principle to his own Rutgers University, which he described as home to the nation’s largest community of Jewish and Muslim faculty.

His own record complicates that position.

In December 2024, for example, while serving as president of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT, the union adopted a divestment resolution on Gaza and announced it in a letter bearing his signature. The AAUP, under Wolfson’s presidency, has likewise issued statements on the conflict, and he said during that June 23 debate that he is comfortable with his previous political positions. (Start the recording of the debate at 38 minutes and keep watching).

Asked about the obvious contradiction, Wolfson argued that the AAUP is different from a college or university because the AAUP is a union—a “democratic membership organization”—whose positions are determined by member votes rather than institutional neutrality.

I, for one, do not support the AAUP’s recent positions. As I wrote for the American Enterprise Institute:

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP)—one of the nation’s largest advocacy groups of college professors and instructors—has shamelessly become a deeply anti-Semitic organization. Not only did the AAUP reverse its long-standing policy against any form of academic boycotts in the wake of the October 7^th terrorist attacks, but the AAUP is now whitewashing history and promoting the views of known anti-Semites. The AAUP has become a political agent and seemingly only speaks to progressive proclivities with the new president, Todd Wolfson, recently calling Senator JD Vance a ‘fascist.’ While Wolfson is welcome to believe whatever he likes, such a public statement is simply not appropriate given his public role representing such an apolitical group.

Whatever one thinks of Wolfson’s position on institutional neutrality, his admissions regarding the emptiness of institutional political statements and the need to address faculty ideological imbalance matter because they came not from a typical professor but from the president of the AAUP. Under Wolfson, the organization has styled itself a “fighting organization” and has often responded to critics with ridicule rather than argument—just look at his X feed.

My own view is that institutional neutrality is a sound default. Colleges and universities best serve open inquiry by hosting debate rather than adjudicating political controversies. Others disagree. Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, contends that institutional neutrality too often serves as camouflage, allowing universities to appear impartial while selectively advancing favored political causes. (Read The Illusion of Institutional Neutrality by Peter W. Wood.)

This article, however, is not intended to adjudicate the debate over institutional neutrality. Rather, this is to simply say that Wolfson’s remarks underscore a broader point: universities have earned much of the public distrust that has made institutional neutrality an increasingly attractive principle.

Although Wolfson continues to oppose institutional neutrality, he nevertheless accepted many of the empirical premises underlying the case for it—namely, that universities issue too many political statements, faculty ideological diversity is lacking, and institutions should avoid taking positions on divisive political controversies.

Those admissions deserve more attention than they have received, especially given that they came from one of higher education’s most influential leaders.