The Dangerous Myth of Neutrality Brian Soucek on Why Universities Should Take Sides

[00:00:00] Andrew Keen: Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States. Hello everyone, my guest today is Brian Soucek, the author of an intriguing new book, The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education. So I began our conversation with Brian by asking him why, at least in his view, is the promise of neutrality in higher education so mythical?

[00:01:10] Brian Soucek: Well, if by "objective" you mean something like neutral, which is what most universities are increasingly claiming they are or want to be, there's a few problems. One, when they do that, they’re talking about making statements—or rather not making statements. They're pledging—one university after another in the last few years has been pledging—that their presidents are going to stop talking about contested political or social issues. But even if they did, even if they stay quiet, they would still be wading into the exact same issues in their policies, in their actions. And even on the statements themselves, every single pledge universities have signed in these last few years has had a carve-out that they'll still talk when their mission is at stake. They'll talk about issues, however controversial they are, if they threaten, as the University of Chicago puts it, "the very mission of the university." And that’s a carve-out that is not neutral at all, given the variety of missions that we see across universities—which is a good thing.

[00:02:18] Andrew Keen: Is your book as much a challenge to the Right as the Left? Obviously, the Trump administration has been very hostile and aggressive towards many universities. But is it also a challenge to the Left?

[00:02:35] Brian Soucek: Oh, certainly. I mean, one thing that I see from both sides is this attempt to flatten out or homogenize universities, to make them more like each other. And that comes from all sorts of directions. It comes from the compact for higher education that the Trump administration tried to impose by threatening funding. It comes from things like U.S. News rankings. It comes from the idea of neutrality, which organizations on all political sides have been endorsing or pushing universities to endorse. It’s a way of keeping them quiet and not expressing their own particular values.

[00:03:15] Andrew Keen: How much of a crisis, Brian, is there in the university when it comes to free speech? We’ve done many shows on free speech—sometimes with Fire, with other critics of one kind of intolerance or another. You teach at UC Davis; you went to Yale Law School. Is this an unusual crisis, or is it something that's been brewing for a while?

[00:03:40] Brian Soucek: Well, the external threats are absolutely a crisis and fairly unprecedented ones—the threats I mean coming from the federal government, coming from hostile state legislatures. The internal threats are, I'd say, more or less what they've always been. They are threats of people who don't tolerate dissent, administrators that don't like protest, peers often—much of the pressure I think comes from students not wanting to stand out from their peers. They're young people we're educating for the most part, and they don't like to seem different or go against the grain sometimes. And often they're just learning about these topics in their classes, so they're just afraid to speak up on something that they don't—or don't yet—know much about. I see that problem, which gets reflected in surveys like Fire—people will say, "Oh yes, I self-censor." Well, sure, we all self-censor. But the real question I think is, if you dig into those studies and find that students are hopefully more comfortable speaking in their classes than they are in other contexts, like their dorm or the dining table at home.

[00:04:47] Andrew Keen: How central is this, Brian, in what many perceive as the crisis of American democracy? If we don't get this right, does it mean that American democracy is in severe jeopardy? If we don't get the free speech crisis at university [right]?

[00:05:04] Brian Soucek: Well again, I'm not sure that I would call it a crisis, unless we're talking about the external threats, and that is absolutely existential for universities. I mean, there's no question about it. The threats to funding that we've seen at the University of California, that schools have seen across the country—they will not survive in anything like their current form if those cuts go into effect and are allowed by the courts to stay in place.

[00:05:33] Andrew Keen: So who's against the idea of an opinionated university? That's the title of your book. Would anyone actually argue with that? Does anyone believe in the promise of an objective university? Does it come from social science? Does it come from traditional science?

[00:05:49] Brian Soucek: It comes from some well-funded efforts to get universities to sign on to this conception of neutrality that really dates back, in its current form, to the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report of 1967. Which was just a faculty report like so many others and, like most faculty reports, it didn't get much attention at the time. But it's really been raised to prominence through the Goldwater Institute and other organizations that have spent a lot of money to get boards of trustees to adopt neutrality policies—or in some cases state legislatures to require their state universities to adopt these kinds of policies. Heterodox Academy, which is a campus speech advocacy organization, has estimated that 150 universities have adopted a policy like this just since October 7th. So, I would say I’m on the losing end of this trend for sure.

[00:06:48] Andrew Keen: Is it though coming mostly from the Right? You mentioned the University of Chicago has a tradition as a bastion of conservative thought.

[00:06:58] Brian Soucek: I think people on both sides of the aisle are tempted to endorse something like this. I think what happens is people's intuitions are shaped largely by what they associate—what kinds of statements they think of—when they think of a university as being opinionated. So, many people on all sides of the issue were uncomfortable by or alienated by things their universities said after October 7th and after the attacks in Gaza. Universities bungled their responses to events like that. And so, if that's the kind of example you have of university speech, if that's what you have in mind, then I think people on all sides of an issue like that are going to think, "Maybe the university should just shut up." But that's just not the only kinds of things that universities do speak about, or really the things they should primarily be speaking about.

[00:07:54] Andrew Keen: You’ve mentioned October 7th a couple of times already, Brian. It's obviously the third rail, it would seem, in the American university these days. What in your view should and shouldn't be allowed to be said about the current situation in Gaza? It obviously is enormously divisive.

[00:08:14] Brian Soucek: Allowed to be said? Oh, nearly anything should be allowed to be said. I mean, on campus, the idea that—it's one thing, I'm talking of course about what campuses themselves say, what universities themselves—how they weigh in on an issue like that, which in many cases they probably should not. But whether they should be allowing people to—students or faculty or others to—be protesting on campus and expressing their views on those issues, and whether they should be funding research and symposia and things like that on both sides of that issue? Of course they should be. And there are very few limits to what should be said in that context.

[00:08:55] Andrew Keen: Where's all the intolerance coming from, Brian? It seems to be coming, as you’ve suggested in your book, both from Left and Right. Is this something in the air? Can we blame the universities perhaps in the first place? A lot of conservative critics of the university have suggested that it's left-wing ideology, left-wing faculty that's created this broad cultural intolerance. Is that fair?

[00:09:22] Brian Soucek: Well, my problem with that is when I did research for this book, I read books from the Vietnam War era, in the late 90s, early 2000s, in which people are just making those exact same claims about the university. You know, "political correctness" 30 years ago is "wokeness" now. The same things being said about protest during the Vietnam era and a tolerance for dissent and that kind of thing. So, it's a perennial problem. I don't think that it's some kind of crisis that's new in the current moment.

[00:10:00] Andrew Keen: You talk about the myth of institutional neutrality. You’re a law scholar. Aren't the courts supposed to be institutionally neutral? Are you suggesting that all institutions are one way or the other biased?

[00:10:14] Brian Soucek: No, no. The claim isn't that neutrality doesn't exist or anything like that. There are any number of constrained—the—you could have a constrained scope in which neutrality is of course entirely possible. So, think for example of: my university doesn't make endorsements in political elections. We don't side with one candidate rather than another. We can't do so. There's a state law here in California against it; the IRS regulations for our nonprofit status would ban that kind of intervention. So nobody should think when the University of California stays silent about who should win the next election that they're thereby, you know, endorsing the status quo, that silence is meaningful in that context. Of course, in something like that where the criterion of when not to speak is clear—say, electoral politics—nobody's contesting what that means. So there, neutrality is entirely possible. Whereas that's not what schools are pledging to. They're saying, "If this issue is part of our mission, we are going to speak; otherwise we aren't." And the mission of a particular university is something that I think is and should be deeply contested.

[00:11:24] Andrew Keen: We’ve done some shows—and actually we’ve got an upcoming show—on diversity. How does this play into your narrative in your argument? Are you pro or against DEI, and how does that play into your philosophy of the opinionated university?

[00:11:42] Brian Soucek: Well personally, yes. My school is of the opinion, yes. [UC Davis?] UC more broadly. The University of California has a policy from the Regents that dates back to 2004 or 5 that says diversity is integral to our achievement of excellence. So that is a very clear view that's been expressed. And then more importantly, it's not just said in policy, but it's embodied in policy of: how do we judge academic merit when we're hiring faculty, when we're giving tenure? And there, after years of shared governance, we started to say that yes, contributions to diversity, to that aspect of the university's mission, is something that we see as part of academic merit. And if that's the case, then we should be rewarding it. And that led ultimately to the much-maligned diversity statements where faculty members are reporting what they've done to contribute to diversity. Now the claim is not that all universities need to see that as part of their mission. I'm a pluralist—I really mean that—about universities having different missions. But at mine, we've chosen to go that path.

[00:12:56] Andrew Keen: What about the role, Brian, of bureaucracy? There are more and more layers, particularly in large state universities like the UC system. Do the bureaucrats get it? Is your book in a way a broadside against these university bureaucrats who perhaps hide behind the myth of objectivity?

[00:13:17] Brian Soucek: I definitely don't want to identify a university with its administration. So, in so far as we're talking about whether the university should speak or otherwise act in expressive ways, that doesn't just mean its administration. A necessary predicate of all of this is that the university allows for, and hopefully encourages, shared governance—which means the faculty is working with the administrators, with the trustees, with each leading in whatever their particular area of competence is in order to set the mission and figure out how best to advance it, whether that's through speech or action. And so no, I don't want to just give all of this over to, as you put it, bureaucrats.

[00:14:04] Andrew Keen: You’re in favor of universities being opinionated. I'm guessing that most university administrators and faculty are very hostile to the current American presidential administration. Should they be more outspoken in your view, given your arguments in the book?

[00:14:22] Brian Soucek: Oh, absolutely. I mean, even my opponents in this, even the Chicago types, again say when the issue is an attack on your very mission, you're—the Chicago folks say—you're obliged to speak out. And so this is a moment where the widespread silence in many cases is just baffling. And I mean baffling—we know why they're doing it. We know—the New York Times reported that my university's president once said, "We don't want to be the tallest nail." You know, we don't want to attract the attention of the administration and be singled out for extra attacks or anything like that. So I get it. But we've also seen how effective it's been when either a university like Harvard, or before Harvard did their faculty through the AAUP, spoke out against the Trump administration's attacks on it. And that changed the whole conversation.

[00:15:19] Andrew Keen: I'm not entirely sure, Brian, of your politics—and I'm not sure it's necessarily particularly important—but it seems to me, from being inside and outside universities all my life, that universities do tend to be very much biased, certainly liberal arts faculty, on the progressive side. Do you agree with that? And if it is, then how does that play into your argument about an opinionated university, given that by definition these universities tend to tilt towards the Left?

[00:15:53] Brian Soucek: Well let me be clear, I only think a university should be saying things, just as it only should be taking certain actions, if it advances that university's particular mission. I'm not calling for a university that's just going to weigh in on any debate that comes along. Now, it does mean when there's an attack from the federal government, as we've seen right now—if you have an executive order defining trans people out of existence, and you see as part of your mission the need to educate people no matter their gender identity—I see that as an attack on your mission. Now, is that going to be coded as left-leaning? Well, of course. It's entering into a political debate in which there are very strong sides, very heated divisions. And yet, the university has no choice but to act in some way on a topic like that. You know, are trans students and faculty going to go to this bathroom or that, or not have one at all? Trans people are going to be able to play in this sports team or not. So decisions there are unavoidable, and none of them are going to count as neutral.

[00:17:03] Andrew Keen: You’re the MLK professor—or you hold the MLK chair at UC Davis—so you're all too familiar with the philosophy, the life of Martin Luther King. He of course spent a lot of his life wondering about whether one should or shouldn't have the moral right to break the law, especially if that law was unjust. If, as the Trump people seem to have done, if they make DEI illegal, does the university or individual university administrators in your mind—do they have the moral right to break the law?

[00:17:39] Brian Soucek: Well, what they're doing isn't making DEI illegal, it's declaring DEI illegal. And so I think what the obligation is on universities is to look at what the law actually says and then stand up for what they've chosen to do if that is on the right side of the law. And so the things I'm writing about, things like diversity statements for faculty, those have not been struck down or even questioned by even our very conservative Supreme Court. The end of the affirmative action opinion said students when they apply can of course talk about their race if it's tied to some story about how they've overcome obstacles or developed some kind of virtue because of their experience as a member of that race. And similarly with diversity statements, faculty can report even identity characteristics if those are relevant to the work they're doing to advance diversity. None of that is illegal. And so when we just abandon efforts like that because the Trump administration has called it illegal, I think we seed ground that wasn't earned on their side.

[00:18:55] Andrew Keen: Identity politics has critics both on the Left and the Right, not just conservatives who are opposed to the dominance of identity politics and identitarian philosophies. How does your thesis in this new book, The Opinionated University, fit into that debate?

[00:19:15] Brian Soucek: Well, when I'm talking about diversity statements again, you get—or should get—zero points solely because of your identity. The fact that I'm gay doesn't give me some diversity points that I could just say, "Well, I'm gay so there's my diversity statement." That's not how it works. The question is—and what we've really changed policy at UC to make sure this happens—is to say, "What have you done to advance this part of the mission? Not who are you or what do you even—what do you believe?" It's "What have you done?" And that's the same thing we report in every other area of our applications for faculty to join the faculty or to advance through the faculty. So, we are not crediting identity itself; we really are looking to see what are the gaps, the DEI-type gaps in your given field, and have you done anything to address those gaps you’ve identified.

[00:20:13] Andrew Keen: Thinking more broadly about what you call the myth of neutrality, Brian, there are some people who would argue, "Well, it doesn't really matter what the color of my skin is, or my sexual organs, or my sexuality. I'm just human, and I'm in that sense neutral." What do you make of those arguments? Are we all shaped then by the color of our skin, by our sexuality, our lack of sexuality, our gender?

[00:20:41] Brian Soucek: Personally, I think we are, but that's no part of the argument I'm making here. Because for one thing, the pluralism I'm endorsing says that a university's mission—which will include the extent to which they see their mission as advancing diversity and, if so, how they define diversity, what types of diversity they care about—that's something that's going to vary from place to place. So what I actually am fighting against is a world in which those kinds of questions are decided once and for all for all universities across the board, again imposing that kind of sameness on all of them.

[00:21:24] Andrew Keen: Why does the book and the argument matter for students? I mean, you teach law students at UC Davis. Why should they care? Or a student care, or for that matter a parent of students? I have two kids who went to university. Why should they care about what you’re arguing?

[00:21:42] Brian Soucek: There's a few reasons. I mean, I spend a whole chapter in the book talking about campus speech issues, both regulation of faculty speech in the classroom but then, importantly, the regulation of mostly student speech out on the quad—protest, etc. And this is an example where I just don't see universities as being able to find some kind of neutral space. They are always balancing values in that context. They've got expressive values on the one hand, having robust dissent and allowing for vocal protest, but they're always—they're always weighing that against things like inclusion and non-discrimination, or expertise—cultivating that—or even just orderly operations and efficiency and not tearing up the grass. These are all being weighed. So there's no sense in which there's just some kind of neutral answer to what our limits on student or faculty or any other speech on campus should be. And that's important, especially in this current time where our students have been more vocal than they have been through at least most of my lifetime.

[00:22:50] Andrew Keen: In terms of your lifetime, you were an undergraduate or you went to Yale Law School. You've been teaching at UC Davis now for 10 or 15 years. Do you see a change in the students when it comes to the thickness or thinness of their skins, of their sensitivity to opinions that they may not like?

[00:23:13] Brian Soucek: One thing I see in my students that I try to push back against is a prefacing of their opinion when they're sharing—when I'm getting them to explore the opinions that they disagree with. There's a tendency there to always make clear, "Well, I don't agree with this, but..." And I keep trying to push them, saying, "You can leave off that first part. Because we're not actually talking here about what you believe. I'm trying to get you to tell me what Justice Scalia believed in Obergefell or something like that when we're talking through a case in equal protection law." And that is something that I have seen increase. There's a worry because they live under a type of surveillance through social media and other factors that just wasn't present when I was in school. And so they're more aware that something they say might be misconstrued, that they might be exploring an opinion of somebody else but have that attributed falsely to them. And I see that as causing a lot of, I suppose, self-censorship.

[00:24:19] Andrew Keen: Speaking of technology, Brian, you mentioned social media. You and I are talking in San Francisco, up the hill from the AI revolution, from the offices of Anthropic and OpenAI, the two leading AI startups. There are AI evangelists of one kind or another who argue that AI is capable of complete objectivity. With technologies like AI, we can get away from not just the opinionated university, but the opinionated newspaper, the opinionated school, the opinionated hospital or government. How do you analyze AI and its potential or dangers in terms of the arguments you make in The Opinionated University?

[00:25:05] Brian Soucek: Oh, that sounds completely dystopian to me. I just can't imagine that kind of sameness—that, "Oh, we have found this position that is objective," as you—I don't frankly know what that means. And any of the options I can think of of what that would possibly look like, and then assume—presumably being imposed on people to adopt that position—just seems like a nightmare to me. I'm—I'm here for the variety of different schools. I'm glad that I was able to go—I went to Boston College as an undergraduate. It's a Jesuit Catholic school—a totally different place than Yale Law School, utterly different mission. And I benefited from having both. I—that's a good thing. That's something that we should want.

[00:25:56] Andrew Keen: Did you get taught by Charles Derber? He was on the show a few days ago. He’s a long-time sociologist there.

[00:26:01] Brian Soucek: I didn't.

[00:26:02] Andrew Keen: I take your point that you may not like the idea of it, but I'm sure you've used ChatGPT, you've used Claude. And when you talk to these bots, they claim objectivity. They would never acknowledge, "Well, I'm on the Left," "I'm on the Right," "I'm against gay identity," "I'm against the market," "I'm a critic of neoliberalism." They claim objectivity. So, I know that you’re a lawyer and this is a book about the university, but what advice would you give people who deal with the Claudes and the OpenAIs of the world who claim this objectivity?

[00:26:41] Brian Soucek: Well, at the end of the day, universities are having to make decisions. They are actually having to do things, not just spit out outputs like some kind of chatbot. And so, I don't know what it means to say, "Oh, I'm not on the Right, I'm not on the Left, I don't have any bias, I don't have any opinion," when it comes to: are we going to have initiatives that advance diversity or not? Are we going to allow this protest on the quad or not? Are we going to allow professors to misgender their students in class or not? What name are we going to give to our buildings, our professorships? Something is expressed when they do that. You know, what was the neutral answer to whether Berkeley should have changed the name of its law school and no longer been known as Boalt Hall? Or Hastings down the hill here—no longer Hastings because of his ties to the massacre of Native Americans. Now it’s UC Law SF. I mean, that sounds kind of neutral, right? "UC Law SF" is about as dry as you can get. But the choice to get rid of Hastings certainly isn't neutral; it's expressive of deep values.

[00:27:54] Andrew Keen: I take your point, but on the other hand, Brian, these are complicated, controversial, divisive issues with no clear answer, as you’ve said. They result in one kind of opinion winning over another. But when it comes to renaming a school or taking down a statue or putting up another statue, if we rely on supposedly objective AIs, isn't that a better way of doing it than being all opinionated and pissing off half the people?

[00:28:25] Brian Soucek: But what does that mean to rely on AI in deciding whether to take down Silent Sam at UNC or something like that?

[00:28:33] Andrew Keen: Well, let's use the example of Silent Sam at UNC. You feed all the arguments in to OpenAI or Gemini or Claude, and you say, "Look, this is a really complicated issue. We don't really know the answer as a university, as a government. What should we do?" These AIs supposedly represent our collective wisdom. So, could we trust their objectivity, or are you saying that there's always the myth of objectivity whether it's in a university administration or in a technology?

[00:29:10] Brian Soucek: I would think we would—I think we would have lost something important as a culture, as a society, as people, if we were able to give over questions of that magnitude. You know: what is the best book? What is the best movie? What movie should we make everybody watch? What should the name of our school be? What statue should we take down? What things should we rename? If we were giving that decision over and not allowing those decisions to percolate differently in different places—communities of shared interest to gather—this—this flattening is just terrifying to me.

[00:30:00] Andrew Keen: Brian, a couple of years ago I was at the University of Austin, which is a consciously conservative university set up by some tech people with deep pockets who don't like the left-wing bias, or at least in their mind the left-wing bias, of other universities—maybe the UC system or Harvard or Princeton. Does your argument in The Opinionated University, does that support the emergence of new, more opinionated universities like the University of Austin?

[00:30:30] Brian Soucek: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, that's completely consistent with the idea that universities should have different missions and should lean into them and be expressive of those values that they've adopted. I will say one thing though: I do see limits that are more procedural than substantive. So, University of Austin is an interesting example because, as you said, it's got a lot of funding that comes from a particular direction, but they also had a lot of notable faculty members that were involved in the planning of their curriculum and that sort of thing. And that's something that I look for. So I would contrast that experience with, say, the experience at New College Florida, where there have been great changes—turning it from the Honors College of the state university system into what is now some kind of disaster. But that's been imposed from above. That came from Governor DeSantis, that came from Chris Rufo. Those are not educators; that's not shared governance. And so I see a difference between those examples. But the idea that there would be a university like University of Austin whose mission and whose values are quite different than mine? All for that.

[00:31:55] Andrew Keen: Yeah, I don't think anyone would disagree that Rufo or DeSantis are academics or moral philosophers of any kind. Final question, Brian: one of the things that I think annoy some conservatives, and maybe even some liberals or moderates, is that the universities claim objectivity—Harvard, Princeton, UC Berkeley, many others—but they're actually rather progressive. And that behind it all, if you peel it away, they actually have very strong political biases of one kind or another. Are you suggesting that the administrators at these large universities should be more overt, more honest in their positions, how they're shaping their universities and indeed their students?

[00:32:44] Brian Soucek: I've been struck by statements that have been put out by universities that will say something like, "Okay, we're going to be neutral going forward. We're not going to release any more statements about Gaza; you won't hear us talking about things like that. Oh, and by the way, we are also investing in a new partnership with this Israeli university, and we're hiring ten more faculty in the Jewish Studies program," or something like that. I mean, these are actual statements that schools have put out, and you think: what does that mean then, when you're saying "neutrality"? You're saying you're going to be neutral, but you're acting in these ways that so clearly aren't. Now, I don't think you can avoid taking sides through your action, but yes, I'd like schools just to admit it and not hide behind what I'm calling the myth of neutrality.

[00:33:38] Andrew Keen: Wise advice from Brian Soucek, the author of The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education. I don't think everyone will agree with you, Brian, but I think that's the purpose of the book, isn't it?