Colloquium Examines Expression, Integrity, Knowledge Production, and the Academy

Disputes over the purposes and methods of higher education have put academic institutions under scrutiny. The 29th annual Liman Colloquium, “The Complex Academy, circa 2026,” took up this topic. The topic frames the work of the dozens of former Liman fellows who teach at law schools and the work of Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law and its students.

The opening panel for the colloquium, held at Yale Law School in April, explored the concepts underlying liberal and legal education as well as the importance of academic freedom and expressive autonomy. How do universities and law schools understand their missions at present? How do they respond to new federal rules seeking to impose limits on academic freedom by tying it to funding? How do they respond to longstanding critiques from progressive and conservative circles about elitism and insularity? Addressing these questions, the panel suggested ways for the academy to make reforms and uphold its core ideals of quality research and creating informed, engaged citizens.   

Brian Soucek ’11, the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law, opened the discussion with ideas from his 2026 book “The Opinionated University,” which examines academic freedom and what he calls the “illusion” of institutional neutrality. Soucek noted that universities have debated institutional neutrality for decades. 

During the 1960s, student protests over the Vietnam War and civil rights raised the question of whether an academic institution should take positions on political issues. In 1967, the University of Chicago issued a statement drafted by a faculty committee chaired by law professor Harry Kalven Jr. What became known as the Kalven Report stated that a university protects academic freedom by not speaking as a corporate body on political issues. The report reasoned that institutional silence leaves space for faculty and students to speak as individuals, without concern that the university has taken a position.

Soucek observed that this approach has been invoked as campuses respond to protests over Gaza and other issues. Some colleges have cited the Kalven Report to explain decisions not to take positions. Legislatures in Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, and Utah have urged or required public universities to adopt policies of institutional neutrality.

The Trump administration’s 2025 “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” calls for universities adopt institutional neutrality, stating that “all university employees, in their capacity as university representatives, will abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university.” The compact rejects affirmative action in admissions and hiring, criticizes what it describes as the suppression of conservative ideas on campus, and calls for limits on student protests. The current administration has tried to condition federal funding to adherence to its policy preferences, including defining two genders, increased scrutiny of international students on national security grounds, and reductions in university operating costs.

About 160 universities have committed to “institutional neutrality” — by adhering to the Compact or by other means — contributing to what Soucek termed the “homogenization” of U.S. universities. All the above pressure, Soucek argued, has made universities less distinctive, as they are “selling out their autonomy” in return for greater security and less scrutiny. 

“Nobody wants to be the tallest nail,” Soucek said. 

But, Soucek argued, a university cannot be “neutral. A university declares its values through its actions, from admissions standards, research priorities, and hiring and firing decisions to decisions about which portraits hang on the walls and whose names adorn buildings.”

Universities are not interchangeable, Soucek explained. Some are large research institutions, while others are small liberal arts colleges. Some serve specific populations, while others provide specialized training in particular fields. These differences, along with the diversity of students, faculty, and ideas, contribute to the growth of knowledge and should be supported. Soucek said that university administrators responding to the current climate might weigh the question of what their individual institution’s mission is, and whether its policies, budgets, and speech practices reflect that mission. 

The discussion turned to the structure of university funding to understand institutional values in practice. Universities rely on a mix of tuition, federal grants (both direct research funding and indirect cost recovery), endowments, state appropriations, and philanthropy.

“Show me your budget and I will tell you your values,” said Natasha Sarin, professor of law at Yale Law School and co-founder of The Budget Lab at Yale. 

Sarin placed the relationship between universities and federal funds in historical context. After World War II, the government began to fund basic research at universities, and that stream of support made U.S. universities “the envy of the rest of the world” as they demonstrated their abilities to generate technological innovation. Sarin pointed out that 99% of pharmaceuticals approved in the past decade had federal grants behind them, with returns on that investment estimated at between 150 and 300%.

The current administration has changed the relationship between government and universities, and “a lot is being broken in ways that will be hard to repair,” Sarin said. Cancelled grants and spending freezes have affected more than 600 universities and thousands of grants. As a result, universities have had to cut course offerings, doctoral programs, and their support for international students, who in the past have been drivers of U.S. innovation. Sarin added that threatened increases to the tax on university endowments, used as fiscal leverage, mark a broader shift from a rules-based system of federal funding to a deals-based approach. 

Amid dismay at what has happened, Sarin cautioned against defending the status quo. As she explained, a “grain of truth” underlies some of the critiques. Many universities suffer from organizational bloat and are insulated from the realities of many Americans’ day-to-day lives, she said. In addition, the cost of attending puts opportunities out of reach for a substantial share of the population. She also pointed to studies about a narrowed scope of acceptable viewpoints that has affected who gets hired and published at elite universities. Sarin encouraged people to engage with these criticisms by exploring ways to reduce costs for higher education and by guarding against viewpoint bias.

Firsthand experience of being targeted for viewpoints outside the accepted scope came from former Liman fellow Jamelia Morgan ’13, professor of law and founder of the Center for Racial and Disability Justice at UCLA Law School. She explained that navigating academia as a critical race theory, or CRT, scholar amid the changing political landscape of the past decade has had rocky moments, as institutions that might have clamored to have her kind of scholarship have distanced themselves as they became “risk-averse.” x

Morgan entered the critical race theory field early. As a law student at Yale Law School she was part of a reading group that focused on the theory. She credited Gerald Torres ’77, Professor of Environmental Justice at Yale School of the Environment, Professor of Law at Yale Law School and co-author with Lani Guinier ’74 of “The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy,” for his pioneering work in the field. After her Liman Fellowship at the National Prison Project, where she documented the pain of being a person with physical disabilities held in solitary confinement, Morgan practiced law at the Abolitionist Law Center. She joined the academy in 2018, first at the University of Connecticut School of Law and then at UC Irvine School of Law. In 2021, Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law recruited her and she joined the faculty, founding the Center for Racial and Disability Justice. At that time, many universities were doing “some of the things they are walking away from now,” Morgan said. 

In 2024, Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences (FASORP) — a nonprofit organization with the stated goal to “restore meritocracy at American universities by eliminating the use of race and sex preferences” — sued Northwestern, alleging that the university’s hiring practices were discriminatory, favoring racial and gender minorities over white men. Morgan was one of four faculty named as examples of that practice. In January, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois dismissed the case because FASORP did not present a plausible legal claim.

In December 2025, Morgan joined the faculty at UCLA. She noted that faculty in fields often viewed as politically charged, such as critical race theory, abolition studies, immigration, and gender studies, face recurring controversy. Yet such scrutiny reflects the influence and continuing relevance of critical scholarship.

Returning to broad concepts of academic freedom, Robert C. Post, Sterling Professor of Law and former dean at Yale Law School, discussed the relationships among free expression, university norms, and democratic values. Academic freedom is a central — but often misunderstood — protection for faculty work. Post explained that “unlike free speech, academic freedom is not a constitutional right within universities; it is a contractual and institutional norm.” Its scope and enforcement vary across institutions, and some universities, including Yale, do not have formal academic freedom protections.

Like Soucek and Sarin, Post provided historical context for the academic freedom debate. Before the Civil War, Post related, U.S. institutions of higher education were cultural “finishing schools for elite Christian men.” After the Civil War, exposure to German research universities introduced a different model, in which universities were expected to produce knowledge. Under this model, faculty were hired to conduct research and produce scholarship, while trustees retained control over institutional direction. This shift created tension between academic expertise and lay governance. 

Post described one such conflict. In 1896, Stanford economics professor Edward Alsworth Ross came under scrutiny after publishing populist pamphlets criticizing the railroad industry, the source of the Stanford family’s fortune. Jane Stanford — at the time, the institution’s only trustee — pressured the university’s president, David Starr Jordan, to fire Ross. Jordan balked. Four years later, at a United Labor Organization meeting, Ross opined that Japanese immigrants should be expelled. His remarks caused controversy, not because they were racist, but because Jane Stanford deemed them too political. Ross, Stanford, and Jordan feuded, and in 1900, Ross resigned, as did seven other professors — a tenth of the faculty. 

The Ross case illustrated that universities were owned and run by those who funded them, and faculty were at-will employees who could be dismissed for controversial research, teaching, and speaking out in public, Post explained. He continued that the formation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915 was a response to these concerns. Its 1915 Declaration of Principles, later codified in the 1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure, established three core dimensions of academic freedom: freedom to research and publish, freedom to teach, and freedom of speech when speaking as a private citizen and not a representative of the university. As Post explained, it was this freedom to pursue research without constraints that paid dividends in the post–World War II period Sarin had described.

For Post, law schools occupy a complicated place in this dynamic. Because laws schools are professional schools, many, including figures like Thorsten Veblin, considered law faculty as akin to athletic coaches and unworthy of academic freedom. Post disagreed. Law professors, he said, attempt to create internal perspectives on the law that are both coherent and legitimating. They test these perspectives against the objective effects of the law, as measured by the tools of social science. But it is true that the rule of law, which is foundational to legal education, is itself a social construction, Post said. He added,  “it exists only because we are dedicated to it.” 
The lively exchange following the panelists’ comments focused on whether academic institutions can find their footing in the current environment by returning to basic principles of academic freedom and producing quality research. A range of ideas should be considered, so long as they meet a basic question, as Post put it: “Is this good work?”  

Daniel Markovits, Guido Calabresi Professor of Law, founding director of the Center for the Study of Private Law, and author of 2019’s “The Meritocracy Trap,” argued that one way to understand centuries of evolution in universities was to see how they interacted with the political economy. Universities are themselves institutions with economic clout that they do not always use. Markovits pointed out that today, academia represents a $1 trillion sector of the U.S. economy and yet, he said, “Nobody is afraid of us.”

Universities have both “profane” and “sacred” functions, Post said. The profane function, producing technical knowledge and workforce skills, may be shared with or displaced by technology and private-sector actors. The sacred function, forming individuals capable of independent judgment and civic engagement, remains the academy’s domain. 

To close the discussion, Judith Resnik, Arthur Liman Professor of Law and the Liman Center’s founding director, raised the question of what institutions of higher education should look like. She told a story about Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. When someone said Stein did not look like Picasso’s portrait of her, he is said to have replied, “She will. Now she does not look like it. But never mind, she will.” As universities respond to challenges to academic freedom, the story implied, they may adopt reforms before they recognize them as such.