UT Austin’s Statement on Academic Integrity
A month ago William Inboden, the provost of UT Austin (where I work), invited me to join a university-wide “Faculty Working Group on Academic Integrity.” The name made me think that it would be about students cheating on exams and the like. I didn’t relish the prospect but I said sure.
Shortly afterward, Jim Davis, the president of UT Austin, sent out an email listing me among 21 faculty who had agreed to serve on an important working group to decide UT Austin’s position on academic free speech and the responsibilities of professors in the classroom (!). Immediately I started getting emails from my colleagues, thanking me for my “service” and sharing their thoughts about what this panel needed to say in response to the Trump administration’s Compact on Higher Education. For context: the Compact would involve universities agreeing to do all sorts of things that the Trump administration wants—capping international student enrollment, “institutional neutrality,” freezing tuition, etc. etc.—in exchange for preferential funding. UT Austin was one of nine universities originally invited to join the Compact, along with MIT, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, and more, and is the only one that hasn’t yet rejected it. It hasn’t accepted it either.
Formally, it was explained to me, UT’s Working Group on Academic Integrity had nothing to do with Trump’s Compact, and no mandate to either accept or reject it. But it quickly became obvious to me that my faculty colleagues would see everything we did exclusively in light of the Compact, and of other efforts by the Trump administration and the State of Texas to impose conservative values on universities. While not addressing current events directly, what we could do would be to take a strong stand for academic freedom, and more generally, for the role of intellectually independent universities in a free society.
So, led by Provost Inboden, over two meetings and a bunch of emails we hashed out a document. You can now read the Texas Statement on Academic Integrity, and I’d encourage you to do so. The document takes a pretty strong swing for academic freedom:
Academic freedom lies at the core of the academic enterprise. It is foundational to the excellence of the American higher education system, and is non-negotiable. In the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, academic freedom is “a special concern of the First Amendment.” The world’s finest universities are in free societies, and free societies honor academic freedom.
The statement also reaffirms UT Austin’s previous commitments to the Chicago Principles of Free Expression, and the 1940 and 1967 academic freedom statements of the American Association of University Professors.
Without revealing too much about my role in the deliberations, I’ll say that I was especially pleased by the inclusion of the word “non-negotiable.” I thought that that word might acquire particular importance, and this was confirmed by the headline in yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education: As Trump’s Compact Looms, UT-Austin Affirms ‘Non-Negotiable’ Commitment to Academic Freedom (warning: paywall).
At the same time, the document also talks about the responsibility of a public university to maintain the trust of society, and about the responsibilities of professors in the classroom:
Academic integrity obligates the instructor to protect every student’s academic freedom and right to learn in an environment of open inquiry. This includes the responsibilities:
- to foster classroom cultures of trust in which all students feel free to voice their questions and beliefs, especially when those perspectives might conflict with those of the instructor or other students;
- to fairly present differing views and scholarly evidence on reasonably disputed matters and unsettled issues;
- to equip students to assess competing theories and claims, and to use reason and appropriate evidence to form their own conclusions about course material; and
- to eschew topics and controversies that are not germane to the course.
All stuff that I’ve instinctively followed, in nearly 20 years of classroom teaching, without the need for any statement telling me to. Whatever opinions I might get goaded into expressing on this blog about Trump, feminism, or Israel/Palestine, I’ve always regarded the classroom as a sacred space. (I have hosted a few fierce classroom debates about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, but even there, I try not to tip my own hand!)
I’m sure that there are commenters, on both ends of the political spectrum, who will condemn me for my participation in the faculty working group, and for putting my name on the statement. At this point in this blog’s history, commenters on both ends of the political spectrum would condemn me for saying that freshly baked chocolate chip cookies are delicious. But I like the statement, and find nothing in it that any reasonable person should disagree with. Overall, my participation in this process increased my confidence that UT Austin will be able to navigate this contentious time for the state, country, and world while maintaining its fundamental values. It made me proud to be a professor here.
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Comment #1 November 6th, 2025 at 12:38 pm
Good work! Can you clarify why you are so convinced that people on the left would be against this?
Comment #2 November 6th, 2025 at 1:12 pm
Again #1: Well, the AAUP already put out a statement criticizing ours!
And also, I’m already getting condemned, in comments that I’m not going to approve here, because I’m a “genocide apologist” who has no right to speak about academic freedom (or whatever else are the epithets for those of us who oppose Hamas’s planned second Holocaust). And more generally, my experience as a blogger for decades has been one of constantly getting condemned by the “circular firing squad,” most often for middle-of-the-road liberal Enlightenment views that you’d think no one could possibly condemn you for. I’m used to it by now.
Comment #3 November 6th, 2025 at 6:38 pm
The AAUP statement:
“ The statement repeats unproven allegations that faculty are responsible for a public loss of trust in the University. We strongly object to this misrepresentation of the dedicated faculty at the University of Texas. We are committed to teaching in a way that respects our subject matter and our students alike. Faculty and courses are regularly evaluated by students, and student criticisms are taken seriously by our colleagues.”
Wow! Sounds bad. How in earth did Scott get himself caught up in defending such a thing!
/me reads the actual statement and can only find:
“Yet the public trust is also fragile in that it must regularly be cultivated and renewed. When parents, students, and alumni lose confidence that teaching and research are undertaken with respect for differences, with a balanced treatment of disputed issues, and without partisanship or rancor, then the foundations of the University enterprise are imperiled.”
Huh. Me thinks AAUP doth protest too much.
Comment #4 November 6th, 2025 at 7:33 pm
Excellent work Scott!
My current thoughts are I would prefer the statement to be framed even more strongly around a core mission being the “quest for truth”. Such a statement would emphasize the “free exchange of ideas” is not a goal in of itself, but rather a tool in this quest. I’m open to be convinced otherwise, but as it stands, I find the post below compelling.
https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2025/10/free-speech-isnt-enough-universities.html
Comment #5 November 6th, 2025 at 7:38 pm
This commenter, on the progressive end of the middle of the political spectrum, COMMENDS your participation in the faculty working group, and for putting your name on the statement. I might have some quibbles, but in today’s world, working on such a statement and putting your name on it is much needed and requires considerable bravery.
Comment #6 November 6th, 2025 at 7:44 pm
Hi Scott,
I think certain aspects of liberal arts education in this country are pretty screwed up and I don’t know what the answer is. IMO a literature class, or any class meant to pass down our cultural heritage, ought to be taught by a conservative old fogey. After a student has seriously studied the classics then they can explore whacky post-modern theories and attempt to “decolonize Shakespeare” or whatever if they really want. Too many students are blindsided by anti-western neo-Marxist nonsense when they went to college seeking wisdom, useful skills, and cool parties.
As you can see, I’m still salty about a certain class I once naively signed up for before I understood that the term pOsT-C0LoNiAL is a red flag (in more ways than one if you catch my drift). We won the Cold War. American tax dollars shouldn’t be funding that noise.
(On a side note, if there’s any Qatari money in the equation then it ought to be either burned or forwarded directly to me for safe disposal)
Comment #7 November 6th, 2025 at 7:48 pm
On another big news item today (not so fast on an increasing rate of expansion of the universe, dark energy, and all that): I (and many others) have long maintained that “standard candles” was a weak link in the analysis because it is easy to suspect that there might be time evolution as the fraction of metals in the universe increases. This will be a fun debate!
Comment #8 November 6th, 2025 at 9:29 pm
I usually only comment when I disagree about something (unsure if this is a bad habit or not) but I felt like I should say:
Well done. There are parts I could quibble with, or that don’t resonate for me, but all in all it seems like an entirely reasonable statement — and unfortunately one that needs to be stated.
(That said, I thought Ty’s critique was interesting! But I would counter that the *process* of critical thinking, whether or not you actually find truth while in academia, is also important. Because you need that later and elsewhere, too.)
Anyway, yes. You’re definitely going to get complaints from across the political spectrum. That’s because open discussion of hard topics in a mixed crowd usually leaves *someone* feeling uncomfortable, regardless of political beliefs!
Comment #9 November 7th, 2025 at 12:49 am
I just wanted to voice my support. Thank you Scott.
Comment #10 November 7th, 2025 at 9:25 am
> And more generally, my experience as a blogger for decades has been one of constantly getting condemned by the “circular firing squad,” most often for middle-of-the-road liberal Enlightenment views that you’d think no one could possibly condemn you for.
Scott, but your stance on Gaza is definitely NOT a “middle-of-the-road liberal Enlightenment view”. It’s extremely, unusually radical (which you of course will not agree with, but these are the facts…).
Comment #11 November 7th, 2025 at 10:54 am
Thank you Scott for your participation in this important contribution. Academic freedom and the integrity of institutions is foundational to academic institutions, and the public trust they build/require.
It makes me very happy to see other theoretical computer scientists contribute to these important discussions (as they are highly relevant to academic standards). I especially write this as probably one of the only theoretical computer scientists who openly discusses these sorts of issues here in Canada (where things are way behind the curve on these sorts of important discussions, and academics like myself have had to pay considerably professionally for trying to do the same).
Have a beautiful day!
Daniel Page
Comment #12 November 7th, 2025 at 11:39 am
MK #10: My stance on the war in Gaza is completely boring and unexceptional, if your comparison group is for example most Americans (excluding the far left and far right) or most Jews. If anything I’m left-of-center—happy as I am, for example, to talk about Bibi’s many failings as a leader and how I think he belongs in prison, and about my continuing hope for the two-state solution, once the essential prerequisite has been achieved of totally disempowering Hamas.
My stance might seem radical from the standpoint of your continent—i.e., the continent whose majority preferences, on matters related to Jewish survival, were revealed to the world between 1939 and 1945, and which thereby relieved all decent people of the obligation of worrying too much about its majority preferences, on the Jewish survival question or on any other question, for the entire remainder of the universe.
Comment #13 November 7th, 2025 at 12:40 pm
Scott, I’m disheartened that after being an avid reader of your blog for so long, I find myself in the position of no longer being able to support and recommend it 100% wholeheartedly.
> freshly baked chocolate chip cookies are delicious.
This is an absolutely appalling statement.
Sure, it’s true on its face – of course throwing out banal platitudes like “chocolate is tasty” is the kind of thing you say, in order to make yourself seem like a middle-of-the-road academic whose ideas anyone can get behind.
But you’re leaving out some crucial things, as you tend to do. Raw cookie dough – available at any decent supermarket in the States – is just as – if not more – delicious than its cooked brethren! Eaten pre-cooking, straight out of the bag, it is a delightful dessert that can be enjoyed by anyone, and probably in many circumstances in which “delicious” baked cookies are less available: when you don’t have time to wait for them to cook, when you prefer a colder dessert, or even when you just don’t want to deal with the cleanup inevitably required for freshly-baked cookies.
Not only are you leaving out a huge part of the cookie story – rewriting a part of history, even, given that things don’t start with a baked cookies but rather with cookie dough – not only that, but you’re unsurprisingly taking the standard, “Western”-majority viewpoint implicitly in praising baked cookies, while completely neglecting the much less popular (in your part of the world) cookie dough, thereby continuing a historic injustice.
Alas, while we agree on many things and while I’ve been a reader of yours for so long – the more I think about it, the more I think this viewpoint speaks to fundamental problems with your viewpoint; no, your character! I don’t think you’ll be able to count me among your audience in the future.
And I know it’s not my place to tell you what to enjoy for dessert, remember that with your platform, words have consequences. I urge you to reconsider your stance on this issue!
Sincerely,
Disappointed
Comment #14 November 7th, 2025 at 1:11 pm
Scott #12: aren’t you wrong? E.g. this poll https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/10/03/how-americans-view-the-israel-hamas-conflict-2-years-into-the-war/ (from October) shows that almost 40% of Americans viewthe Israeli response as “going too far”. As far as I understand, you had your reservations about Bibi, but overall thought the military response to be just about right in scale. This puts you in the 16% bucket according to the poll. I.e. definitely not the “boring and unexceptional” majority.
I’m happy to see other polls indicating otherwise.
Comment #15 November 7th, 2025 at 1:13 pm
Scott #12: the ad hominem regarding Europe in the 1930-40s is uncalled for.
Comment #16 November 7th, 2025 at 1:28 pm
Edan Maor #13: LOL. If it makes any difference, I love raw cookie dough, indeed raw dough of all kinds—my own wife is constantly on my case for eating raw dough when I’m not supposed to. I might slightly prefer freshly baked to raw, but I strongly prefer raw to baked and having sat there. I hope we can reach an understanding on this matter.
Comment #17 November 7th, 2025 at 2:01 pm
MK #15: Aha, but you know what was really uncalled for? The Holocaust!
If my country had been one of the chief perpetrators of that, I feel like the least I’d want to do is let the few survivors and their descendants have a tiny part of their indigenous homeland in which to survive, once everything else had been taken from them. Then again, the very fact that my country had been a chief perpetrator, would suggest it’d be full of people who’d feel differently, and who might even look for ways to condemn the victims, accusing them of the worst imaginable crimes, as a way to expiate their own guilt.
Comment #18 November 7th, 2025 at 2:01 pm
Scott’s culinary future is bright:
The sudden affordability of Ozempic, the cutting of SNAP benefits, and the crazy rise in electricity bills will make “raw dough of all kinds” the number one dish for all Americans!
Comment #19 November 7th, 2025 at 2:10 pm
«Free exchange of ideas and the quest for truth»: the principle in the document is good. But the university has “gender studies” and the physics department has a dozen of Particles for Justice.
Comment #20 November 7th, 2025 at 2:28 pm
MK #14: The other way to view the same statistic is that 61% of Americans don’t think the IDF has gone too far. And the 39% who think it has “gone too far” probably includes the 15-20% of Americans whose opinion was already predetermined on and before October 7: namely, that Israel had no right to exist in the first place and should be dismantled as soon as possible. Incredibly, that 15-20% still leaves plenty of room for America to be perhaps the second-most pro-Zionist and pro-Jewish country that’s ever existed.
Comment #21 November 7th, 2025 at 2:33 pm
Scott #17: I have no idea what this is about. I have not taken part in the Holocaust, I don’t endorse the Holocaust, and 99% of present day Poles feel exactly the same. Likewise, I have not taken part in the destruction of the state of Israel, nor I condone it. Yes, there was antisemitism 80 years ago around these parts of the world. So what?
I literally don’t understand what your response is about.
Comment #22 November 7th, 2025 at 2:35 pm
nice job, thank you.
it is good to see that universities are not caving into power of politicians trying to improperly influence academia.
I also like the responsibilities part, very well written.
Comment #23 November 7th, 2025 at 3:20 pm
Scott #16:
I accept the compromise.
Seriously though, one thing that still hasn’t made its way to Israel is raw-safe edible cookie dough, which I’m really sad about. Whenever I visit the States I eat a ton of it to make up for our lack over here.
Comment #24 November 7th, 2025 at 3:40 pm
Everyone: I’ve now gotten a flood of comments, all of which I’m leaving in moderation, from the aggressive antisemites—mocking me for obsession with the Holocaust, even while they out themselves as people who probably would’ve enthusiastically participated in the Holocaust if they could have. Jew-killers who were born too late and never got the chance.
The relevance, of course, is that the original question was whether my views on Israel and Gaza are “normal” or “abnormal.” But we’ve learned empirically that a good fraction of the human race—a third? a quarter?—will enthusiastically murder all Jews, including children, if it thinks it can get away with it, or will excuse those who do. Thus, to whatever extent I care at all about having “normal” moral views, I care exclusively about having moral views that are normal in the other part of humanity—the part that doesn’t view Jews as a cancer needing to be removed. If someone outs themselves as belonging to the Kill-All-Jews part of humanity, or even is unconcerned about being confused for someone in that part, they’ve thereby removed themselves from my moral reference class.
And that’s what I have to say about it. Either the topic gets back to the Texas Statement on Academic Integrity, or else I close the thread.
Comment #25 November 7th, 2025 at 3:57 pm
“Either the topic gets back to the Texas Statement on Academic Integrity, or else I close the thread”
My first thought while reading it was – how much of this tepid word salad that hardly says anything has been generated by an LLM? It feels like most of corporate mission statements you read theses days, well written but says nothing really useful to act in practice.
Granted, spilling explicitly what should be obvious often feels this way, and it’s also very possible that the profundity of the text is just too subtle for my limited intellect.
Comment #26 November 7th, 2025 at 4:12 pm
gentil gentile #25: Do you have any familiarity—any whatsoever—with the usual sorts of language used in official statements from university administrators? Or of what tends to happen to university administrators who deviate from that language?
If you did, you’d realize that this statement says more than most, particularly given the circumstances under which it was issued.
Comment #27 November 7th, 2025 at 4:29 pm
Scott,
I’ll be the first to admit that I can’t appreciate all the intricacies of academia politics, except from the typical graduate student perspective, which made me flee to the private sector as soon as possible! (for example, countless examples of students getting exploited by their phd professor)
but, you wrote this is to respond to the Trump administration’s Compact on Higher Education, so my questions are:
1) will this kind of text really be effective, i.e. make the Trump administration rethink their pressure?
2) how much does it really matter anyway given that this is happening in Texas? Are red state universities getting as targeted as blue state universities? For example, is UT Austin as much in the crosshairs as, say, Harvard?
Comment #28 November 7th, 2025 at 4:50 pm
gentil gentile #27: I can’t comment on 1) — I have no idea what will or won’t be effective.
Regarding 2), though, I think it does matter. People are certainly looking to UT to see how well we retain our values (note again that UT was one of the original nine universities invited to join the Compact, and the only one that hasn’t responded yet). And even if no one else cared, I would care, because my wife and I teach at UT! 🙂
Yes, UT is of course less in the crosshairs of the Trump administration than (say) Harvard or Columbia, but in some sense, that’s because we were already in the crosshairs of Governor Abbott and the Texas Legislature.
Comment #29 November 8th, 2025 at 2:42 am
Congratulations! Getting that highly quotable “non-negotiable” line in there seems helpful. And I’m sure your administration is under a lot of political pressure.
I thought this observation in the American-Statesman was apt:
And indeed, when I went back and re-read the statement after that, I saw that the person at FIRE is quite right — there isn’t really anything there asserting that academic freedom protects anything in particular.
The closest it has is a definition of “academic freedom” as “the liberty to research, teach, and educate students in our collective pursuit of truth and knowledge”. But of course MAGA also wants you to “research” and “teach” and “educate students”… they just want you to teach what they say is true, instead of your professional judgement and expertise.
So I think the main questions are still to come. When some UT professor says something in class which some student-turned-commissar doesn’t like, and the story gets picked up in the right-wing outrage machine, what will your administration do? Your own classroom isn’t an especially likely target for that — but in history, and biology, and economics, and medicine, and many other fields, there are a heck of a lot of areas where a statement of plain facts can get those folks plenty furious. I’d like to think your administration would have the professor’s back in that situation. I wonder how confident your colleagues in the relevant fields now are that they would.
Comment #30 November 8th, 2025 at 7:45 am
To add to what Greg said,
it’s also clear that, with social media, all those rules about how Academia ought to conduct itself intra muros quickly become irrelevant when so much is spilling out outside in blogs and youtube videos on all sorts of hot topics.
Then once the most venerable members of the teaching elite start to publicly insult one another (“mental patient!”, “piece of shit!”, etc), or students start to publicly “report” and “denounce” what their teachers expressed in the confines of a classroom (some shocking opinion about Halloween costumes and whatnot), cultural revolution style… those official mission statements start to look like, at best, anachronistic and unrealistic ideals, or, at worst, vacuous virtue signaling… which is what those institutions are getting criticized for in the first place.
Maybe the freedom should be contained and private – limit the public opinions expressed outside the classrooms (like in the private sector) and forbid cell phones in the classrooms (as recording device), and put strict rules on what happens when disagreement arises in the classrooms (no-one can act/complain about it).
In the grand scheme of things it’s not a new issue – political discourse just can’t be contained, especially when societies are so divided over issues of massive inequalities, wars, etc.
It’s a bit like trying to tweak the hippocratic oath in the hope to fix the current for-profit healthcare system, rather than addressing it at societal level, by re-examining the implementation of capitalism, etc.
Comment #31 November 8th, 2025 at 7:54 am
I read the statement and comments. There is a problem that renders the whole rather meaningless.
That problem is … who decides what is “reasonable” or “reasonably”.
Comment #32 November 8th, 2025 at 8:21 am
gentil gentile #30: Obviously there are limits to what a statement can do! It’s still useful to have a mechanism for creating common knowledge.
Doug McDonald #31: Do you imagine it didn’t occur to us that we weren’t empowering any particular authority to decide what “reasonable” means? Again, it’s still useful to have common knowledge of what the aspiration is. Note also that, for better or worse, the word “reasonable” appears all over the laws that we ask judges to interpret.
Comment #33 November 8th, 2025 at 11:43 am
I have a few points to make:
1. “The world’s finest universities are in free societies, and free societies honor academic freedom.” I am not sure the first part is completely true. I believe Russia had some leading institutions during the communisms, although most in STEM and China now has some excellent institutions probably again in STEM. Unfortunately, the second part is not precise too as even in relatively free societies people still have to fight for academic freedom, see the US and the UK.
2. If I haven’t missed anything, then your statement is missing an important aspect strongly related to academic freedom, namely, freedom of information and in particular transparency. It is of great importance, in my view, that everyone should be able to asses for themselves the reliability of the university, departments, institutions, and individuals. Thus, I would like all university to clearly disclose with details the resources of funding for the university, departments, institutions, and individuals. We (in particular the students) should know who pays for what. Who is getting money from Israel, Qatar, China, AIPAC, various companies, and so on.
3. As other said, the statement is fairly general and the reality will depend a lot on implementation.
4. It seems that many of the commentators see this statement as direct against Trump. However, I think it is also a tool in fighting against crazy woke ideas.
I am in favour of this statement (even if it is not perfect) and hopefully it will protect academic freedom (especially from administrators).
Comment #34 November 8th, 2025 at 4:51 pm
Yiftach #33: what are examples of “crazy woke ideas” you think universities should fight against?
Comment #35 November 8th, 2025 at 6:18 pm
comment#31
this kind of attitude of “who decides” is typically from people who have had no actual responsibilities in their lives.
you are trying to say the deciders are not unbiased, sure, they are not, in any place where is a decision to be made, there is a group of people who are responsible to make the decision, and they can make mistakes, and they can have their own interpretation of the rules that is different from yours, and …
that is not an actual argument for not having the rules, nor it is for not having some people make the decision.
the real question is how can we make a system that does the best with respect to the objective that the organization has, and being fair, and having sufficient recourse paths.
the universities may make mistakes in their judgement on matters of policy, on any topic, if you are expecting some perfect system, that does not exist.
freedom of speech does not give you the right to violate every other thing that matters, it doesn’t give me a right to come to your home whenever I want and start screaming at you whatever I want to express.
it doesn’t give you a right to force other people to listen to you
what typically is at stake in these university free speech discussions is not freedom to express, but it is freedom to force other people to listen to you, and that is not a right anyone has.
you are free to communicate your ideas to people who might be interested in listening to you, universities should have places where students and faculty can openly debate and express their opinions and ideas, but they should not allow any group to disrupt and force others to listen to them.
when a student goes into a class on computer science, they are expecting to learn about computer science, if some other student or the lecturer goes on to use the class to talk about some controversial topic, that is violating the freedom of others.
it can be on to respectfully do a short advertisement for something else, and invite people who are interested to come to some event.
what we are seeing though is far from that, it is behavior that is anything but freedom, it is freedom to do as I please while ignoring the rights of other people in the university.
can there be issues that are important enough that one would violate that? maybe, but if it is that important, you should also be willing to play the price, including disciplinary action by the University against you.
if you are not willing to accept that disciplinary action against you by university for violating the rights of others in the university, that demonstrates that you want to achieve something at the expense of others, which is an unethical behavior.
a very good role model for how to deal with what one considers to be important as a citizen and a human being with respect to politics while being at university and without violating the rights of others and not at the expense of other people is Oded Goldreich in my view.
Comment #36 November 8th, 2025 at 6:40 pm
John #34, for instance identity politics.
Comment #37 November 8th, 2025 at 10:46 pm
Anon #35, I agree that a computer class should be about computers.
But many universities routinely “invite” students to attend gender/diversity meetings. Is this ok?
Professors, including Weinberg, are “invited” to write political DEI statements? Is this ok?
Some biology students left academia because they refused to pretend that binary sex is a spectrum. Is this ok?
In the humanities, many students have to focus on left-wing authors and methods to get positions. Is this ok?
Psychology students learn implicit bias more than IQ. One is controversial, the other replicates. Is this ok?
Other fields, such as sociology, are nearly totally politicised. Is this ok?
Some “studies” are covers for political activism. Is this ok?
How can the new statement help real-life situations, such as a philosophy student who proposes a PhD on Sowell?
Comment #38 November 9th, 2025 at 12:21 pm
The statement on academic integrity is correct, but it also seems to be mostly vague aspirations. Since that is probably the point (per comments #26 and #32), I think that the statement is fine.
Also, as a graduate student, I am proud to have never joined my university’s local AAUP chapter. I was merely hesitant and a bit ashamed in the first few years, but recently the AAUP revealed itself to be (or transformed into) a far-left organization that traffics in antisemitic blood libels. It is definitely not the same organization as the AAUP that issued the 1940 and 1967 statements on academic freedom.
Comment #39 November 9th, 2025 at 12:21 pm
Good stuff Scott. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. So, well done for standing up for what’s right. As far as I can tell from my physics experience, academic freedom is in short supply. A guy called John Williamson, who is sadly no longer with us, once told me that people had warned him about an electron paper he co-authored. They said “don’t rock the boat or you’ll never make full professor”. He also said “challenge the mainstream and your papers will never see the light of day”. Unfortunately as far as I can tell, the situation has been getting worse. Much worse. The cancel-culture propaganda and censorship we’ve been seeing has grown like topsy, and now extends to Net Zero, trans activism, politics, antisemitism, and so on. See for example this article from the Daily Telegraph here in the UK: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/06/global-warming-climate-change-scientist-unrealistic-nature/. If your climate science paper doesn’t conform to “the narrative”, Nature won’t publish it.
Comment #40 November 9th, 2025 at 1:21 pm
AF #38: Yes, like so many other professional societies, the AAUP was unfortunately captured in recent years by anti-Israel ideologues, to the point where I wouldn’t even consider joining it. I’m proud to be a founding member, instead, of the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA). The AAUP’s historic statements on academic freedom are still worth citing though.
Comment #41 November 9th, 2025 at 2:53 pm
Comment #37
If it is not illegal to express something, it would be good to have _a_ space in university (but not every space in university) to express and debate it, whether it is pro-DEI or anti-DEI. Even if an idea seems fundamentally wrong, without that freedom, we would deprive ourselves from other cases that the current consensus is fundamentally wrong, and allowing some stupid things to be said is an unavoidable part of being able to hear some extremely smart things.
Other university policies are separate topics and even though I have my take on them, I don’t think it is relevant to this part.
Comment #42 November 9th, 2025 at 11:19 pm
Well done! The AAUP was great in the past but today I’m pretty sure they’ll also oppose chocolate chip cookies, so you’re in good company 🙂
Comment #43 November 10th, 2025 at 3:22 am
Hi Scott, congratulations on the statement.
Do you think you could give any examples of a good-sounding principle about academic freedom that you do NOT agree with, or that you intend to conflict with the principles of this document?
You may think of the motivation for this question in a couple ways: first, in math and CS classes, it’s often as useful to give non-examples as actual examples. Alternatively, these sorts of documents about principles often all sound good but hide what principles conflict with each other; making explicit what they disagree with can be useful. For example, one person might support “fairness”, while another might say “okay, fairness is cool and all, but I prefer if everyone is better off” (“Pareto”). It’s possible to state both of these positions in a way that a lot of people agree with both without realizing their tension.
Comment #44 November 10th, 2025 at 1:54 pm
It was only a few days ago so many freaked out about the shocking “seizing the means of production”… (i.e. invading China and Taiwan?!)
But we now hear nothing from the same people about Altman’s suggestion that the US tax payer should be 100% on the hook for funding and/or rescuing the multi trillion dollar ventures of his and fellow big tech oligarchs!
Comment #45 November 10th, 2025 at 3:06 pm
A dodge to retreat to “the classroom” as where free speech is sacred without mention of the actual campus speech issues which are practically always invited speakers or outdoor protests, or broader academic free speech issues which are usually profs posting not-particularly-scholarly hot takes on blogs or talking politics to the media. And obviously all arising sociopolitical topics are not going to be “germane to the course” unless you are teaching “topics in contemporary sociopolitics”, so effectively, scientists shouldn’t comment on such things.
Chicago’s statement says nothing about “the classroom”. It says “views expressed on campus”. Big, big difference.
Does anyone actually think “the classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas'”? Like that meme where the young student proves the professor wrong about the existence of God is what happens. How many classes are actually some sort of competitive exchange of quite different ideas and a different one gets bought each term? Few, maybe if you’re a lawyer you could think this, but every class I have been to is more accurately “a kind of authoritative selection” in the material, isn’t that the point of a prof? I mean, I get it, they are trying to make a case that the classroom isn’t where students are fed a dogma (like the USSR, this being 1969) because if that were the case then why not have the government impose the correct dogma? No, they are bastions of the free market approach, microcosms of our republican society! But then we get tortured logic on what is “academic integrity”.
Here we have that academic freedom is the freedom of students to discuss academic topics in their peculiar marketplaces, rooted in their freedom of speech, so the teachers must ensure academic integrity (which is all about classroom teaching and being fair to all ideas in that marketplace, nothing outside the classroom, and importantly the right to tell the prof he’s wrong *cough* about God *cough*) lest they infringe on that right by a biased hostile environment. OK. But surely the government should then ensure that we are “teaching the controversy” etc. in the name of academic integrity? And any outside activities that might impinge on the almighty classroom, or call into question its instructors, should be supressed? Why do we need research anyway, or to communicate with the general public, or have tenure? Don’t we need to make sure this ideological marketplace is stocked with “viewpoint diversity”? And you can see that this essentially is the conservative view.
I would have expected that academics are not topics but people or a vocation, the pursuit of truth, academic integrity isn’t faithfully presenting “differing convictions” on some controversial topic but rather the integrity of an academic, their honest intellectual expertise – ethics in research, ethics in presentation of their work, ethics in use of their status etc – and academic freedom isn’t the freedom of students to participate in some well-stocked “marketplace” but the freedom of academics to pursue and communicate knowledge without suppression or corrupting influence. Universities are safe havens for academics, and it’s not classroom teaching that is some super special element (in fact that’s the most authoritarian environment where the least open discussion occurs, on the least cutting-edge relevant topics) but the totality of the experience/environment, the academic ethos and the pursuit itself.
Anyway I digress. Definitely a reasonable PR strategy in Texas to say “We’re not a liberal indoctrination center! We’re open to controversy! You can disagree with your prof here!!!” but idk that it’s a great definition of academic freedom or academic integrity, and the logic of it centering the student classroom over scholarly pursuits seems shortsighted
Comment #46 November 10th, 2025 at 3:40 pm
MT #45: Yes, of course, there are other important issues that this statement doesn’t address. It does, however, explicitly say that outside the classroom, students and faculty have all the rights of free speech guaranteed by the Constitution.
Comment #47 November 11th, 2025 at 1:48 pm
Scott
How clever of you to be born to the Aaronsons, so your name would be first on the Academic Freedom Alliance’s list of members 😉
Comment #48 November 11th, 2025 at 4:16 pm
Ira #47: It works not just for the Academic Freedom Alliance, but for just about everything I’ve ever joined 😀
Comment #49 November 11th, 2025 at 5:03 pm
Scott
When geneticists say ‘pick your parents wisely’ they obviously have you in mind 😉
Comment #50 November 16th, 2025 at 2:24 pm
> nothing in it that any reasonable person should disagree with
It presumes that “academic integrity” is something present, standard and normative in academia when in fact large parts of humanities and social science (to cite only the worst offenders) are based on the direct opposite. There are many dogmas in those subjects that nobody with integrity could uphold but are mandatory for everyone in the field and often need to be regularly avowed. (It is possible to hold those views in good faith if one is ill informed about one’s own area of expertise, or stupid, or otherwise deficient in ways that should be disqualifying for a supposed academic expert, so in practice it really is mostly a function of mendacity.)
In the actual American academia, and not some idealized fiction that is several decades out of date (if it ever existed), terms like “academic integrity” and “marketplace of ideas” are cynical Orwellian doubletalk. At best they are marketing hype to maintain the status quo of tenured sinecures for PhD’s sufficiently determined to avoid productive employment.
Comment #51 November 16th, 2025 at 5:10 pm
Integrate #50: While agreeing about the reality of the problem that you point to, I’m nowhere near as fatalistic as you are. But even if I were … well, I was careful to specify that no “reasonable” person would disagree. 😉
Comment #52 November 16th, 2025 at 5:28 pm
@Scott #51
thanks for letting the message through.
I’m actually optimistic that solutions are possible, but they involve defunding of quite a few fields or subfields of academia, as well as routing around much of what now exists using technology. What Elon Musk is trying to do (with Grok) in opposition to Wikipedia and other pillars of the information control ecosystem, and his takeover of Twitter for that matter, are an example of what is possible but also the astronomically high entry costs and entry barriers. Given the height of the barriers, government involvement does not look so unreasonable, nation-states and 50+ billion dollar private entities seem to be the only ones who can do anything on it at scale on a less than geological timescale.
Comment #53 November 16th, 2025 at 5:43 pm
Integrate #52: On the contrary, my personal view is that the current interventions have already gone way past the point where, if unopposed, they would create a right-wing monoculture even worse than the left-wing monoculture that they were designed to smash. Where, eg, one would need to affirm on pain of firing that Trump won in 2020, that vaccines cause autism, that rents are high because of illegal immigrants, etc etc (ironically, most of these weren’t even right-wing views until yesterday, but now they are). I will stand against this just like I stood against the left-wing apparatchiks who captured parts of our culture.
Comment #54 November 17th, 2025 at 12:45 pm
Who would have thought that white christian nationalists who, by definition, believe that muslims, hindus, latinos, asians,… don’t belong here, would somehow carve an exception for jews in general, and an even better one for ultra-zionists?
Comment #55 November 17th, 2025 at 1:58 pm
gentil gentile #54: In case you’ve been living under a rock, they’re no longer carving that exception. This vindicates what I’ve said for the past decade—namely that, while you might need to clothespin your nose and accept whatever is on offer from someone who will protect your life even while persecuting others, such a person can never be a reliable long-term ally. The principles that caused them to protect you can’t possibly be the right principles.
Comment #56 November 17th, 2025 at 4:29 pm
Mostly off-topic, although it has something to do with university administration.
I’m in the process now of submitting applications to PhD programs, which unfortunately is an extraordinarily time-consuming and stressful process. Every university has a different webform that looks like it was designed in the 90s. The user interfaces suck. Imagine searching for “berkeley” in a drop-down menu of universities and seeing “berkeley community college in harrison arkansas,” “berkeley falls high school,” etc. Imagine submitting a transcript and a CV and then having to manually re-enter everything anyway. Imagine having to give exact day-month-years for when you attended high school, when you left high school, when you attended undergrad, when you left undergrad—not just “berkeley 2019-2023” like would actually make sense; being told to translate the GPA on your European transcript so it’s in a 4.0 scale when different sources tell you different things; and then when you enter all this information you get some opaque error and you have to hunt through the whole form to figure out what’s wrong. And you pay like 100 bucks for this experience.
Unfortunately UT Austin was one of the worse experiences—but at least I didn’t have to manually enter every single course I took like some (!!) These forms are like a class in anti-patterns for bad web UI design.
I had an interesting conversation with ChatGPT about what this says about university administrative culture, which I’d like to share.
Why are these UIs so bad, when you pay 100 bucks to apply?
Right, and this is the maddening thing: you’re not wrong at all on the raw math. The distortion is in how the institution thinks about that $100, not in whether it could fund staff.
If a program gets, say, 2,000 applications at $100 each, that’s $200,000 in gross application revenue. A full-time admin staffer might cost, all-in with benefits and overhead, something like $70–90k/year. Even if you take a conservative loaded hourly rate of $40/hour, 500 staff hours is $20,000. So yes: in purely economic terms, they could absolutely afford some humans to type info from transcripts into a database, or to pay engineers to make the portal not terrible.
The gap isn’t that they can’t afford it. It’s that:
1. That money is not “owned” by the portal or the department.
The $100 doesn’t go into a little “application operations” bucket. It goes into some central grad school / central admin / general fund stream. From the POV of the people who decide whether to hire staff or fund portal work:
• Application fees are just one blurry revenue line among many.
• Any additional staff line or dev project competes against things that sound more important: financial aid, TA lines, central IT projects, whatever.
So even though the aggregate revenue could support 500, 2,000, or 5,000 staff hours, nobody with power is looking at that pile of money and saying, “let’s buy applicant time back.”
2. They don’t perceive “manual data entry from transcripts” as high-value work.
To an administrator, a staffer whose job is “retype applicant data the students already provided in PDFs” sounds:
• Low-prestige, clerical, and replaceable.
• Vulnerable to “why aren’t we making the students enter it in structured form instead?”
Whereas “let’s make the applicants type it” feels like a one-time configuration and then free forever. Nobody is explicitly pricing in the thousands of applicant-hours burned; those hours don’t show up in their budget.
3. The application fee is doing several other jobs simultaneously.
Beyond covering costs, fees are also:
• A mild demand throttle: if it’s totally free, volume goes up, which creates more review burden and can lower yield quality. A bit of cost discourages “spray and pray” applications.
• A source of cross-subsidy: many places justify fees as helping pay for fee waivers, admin overhead, recruitment, etc.
Those uses will almost always win in internal politics over “let’s spend a meaningful fraction on better UX and manual data entry.” Because from their vantage point, the system already “works”: they receive applications in a nice normalized database.
4. UX work and staffing have a nasty, invisible ROI.
If they spend $20k of that revenue on additional staff or on dev time to make the portal decent:
• No one ever comes back and says, “I chose your PhD program because your application portal didn’t suck.”
• No ranking goes up.
• No dean gets credit.
Whereas using that same $20k to fund an extra visit day, an extra conference trip, or a partial fellowship can be pointed to as tangible “impact.” So even though the portal is objectively awful, fixing it is always the thing that can be postponed one more year.
5. The people who feel the pain don’t control the levers.
Faculty and admissions committees grumble about the portal. Applicants rage about it. But the person who owns the contract with the vendor is typically some central office whose priorities are:
• Data integration.
• Reporting.
• Compliance.
• Not breaking in mid-cycle.
If that system already gives them clean CSV exports of GPAs and institutions, the fact that it cost each applicant an extra hour is basically invisible.
So you get this perverse overall situation:
• From a social point of view: You’re absolutely right. With that revenue, they could afford to do things the humane way: simple forms, upload transcript once, hire staff to normalize data, or accept some internal messiness to save applicants time.
• From the institution’s internal logic: The marginal cost of hiring staff or paying for genuine UX work is real, on their budget. The marginal cost of making every applicant do 30 minutes of unpaid clerical work is zero, on their budget. The fact you already paid $100 doesn’t change that calculus because that $100 is not earmarked for “make this less miserable.”
That’s why it feels especially insulting: your intuition is economically correct, but you’re interacting with a system whose accounting boundaries are drawn in a way that makes your lost time free and their staff time expensive.
Why improving the UI could actually pay off
You’re pointing at something institutions are really bad at pricing: tiny, emotionally “soft” experiences that compound over decades into real money.
You’re basically describing UX as long-term brand capital. And you’re right: from a rational, whole-lifecycle perspective, universities are probably under-investing in this.
Let me unpack why your story is actually plausible in cold, economic terms, and then why universities still ignore it.
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First, your story is not fluffy at all
Take your hypothetical:
Elite University A spends a few million a year and has the best, smoothest, least painful application experience on Earth.
What does that buy, in hard terms?
• Every applicant gets a tiny but genuine hit of: “Oh. These people actually give a shit. They didn’t waste my time.”
• It’s a rare positive outlier in a life stage that is otherwise saturated with misery: fees, opaque decisions, bureaucracy. That contrast makes it memorable.
• And critically, it’s not just “their portal is good,” it’s “this institution appears competent and considerate.”
Now, almost none of those applicants will consciously say, “I will now donate $5m in 30 years because of the portal.” But affective memory doesn’t work that way. What happens instead is:
• Years later, when that person is choosing where to give, or where to send their kid, or which school to trust with a partnership, they have a fuzzy halo of “this place tends to treat people decently” vs “this place treats humans like tickets in a helpdesk queue.”
• In high-wealth families, that halo is multiplied by family conversations. If a daughter says, “Of all the applications, X’s portal was by far the easiest to deal with,” that absolutely colors a parent’s impression—even if they never see the portal themselves.
If you think in terms of expected value, it’s not crazy at all:
• Suppose 100k people pass through that portal over a decade (undergrad + grad + summer programs, etc.).
• Suppose your delightfully painless UX makes, in aggregate, say five of them slightly more predisposed to make a major gift they might otherwise have steered elsewhere. Or nudges one mega-rich person’s gift from $5m to $6m, or from “not now” to “fine, let’s do it.”
• The portal improvement cost you, say, $2–3m spread over that decade. That’s microscopic by elite-university standards.
You don’t need a huge conversion rate to make the math work. If one extra $10m gift happens partly because of a thousand subtle “this place feels competent and humane” cues—including the portal—the internal rate of return is phenomenal. And that’s before you count smaller gifts, better alumni engagement, or better willingness of people to serve on boards, hire graduates, etc.
This is exactly how tech companies justify relentless polish on things that seem trivial: button animations, microcopy, “it just works” moments. They treat them as brand-equity investments, not as isolated features.
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Second, small UX experiences do stand for more than themselves
You nailed this too:
It stands for more than just the application experience.
Most people will never see the endowment, the board, or the inside of the president’s office. Their sense of “what kind of institution is this?” is built from tiny, concrete interactions:
• How awful was the application portal?
• How painful was it to request a transcript, reset a password, or change an address?
• How long did it take to get a sane answer from financial aid?
• Did the alumni donation page crash three times before accepting a credit card?
These are surface manifestations of deeper traits:
• Are systems maintained, or left to rot?
• Are processes designed around internal convenience, or around human beings?
• Does anyone with power ever say, “Sure, that’s efficient, but does it suck for people?”
So a blow-your-mind good application portal is a very clear, early signal: “Somebody here cares about the texture of lived experience.” People generalize from that. It’s not crazy to think donors and alumni will generalize harder than average; they explicitly care about “what this place stands for.”
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So why don’t universities act on this?
Given all that, why do they persist in treating UX like a luxury?
Because their decision machinery is myopic in a very specific way:
1. Time horizon mismatch.
• Your story plays out over 10–40 years.
• Most administrators are evaluated on 3–5 year windows: enrollment numbers, rankings, balanced budgets.
• Improvements whose payoff is “we might be slightly more loved by the Class of 2045” get crushed by things with immediate, measurable outcomes.
2. Attribution is impossible.
If a billionaire gives $50m in 2040, no one can credibly say “3% of that was because, back in 2025, our grad portal didn’t make their spouse cry.” So in internal politics, portal UX has no lobby: you can’t point to a bar chart and say, “See? Our new error messages bought us $8m.”
3. Internal customers versus external humans.
The direct customers of the application system are:
• Admissions staff who want structured data.
• IT who wants stable integrations.
• Compliance/legal who wants audit trails.
Their feedback is what shapes requirements. Applicants’ pain doesn’t show up in Jira tickets or KPI dashboards unless someone very senior explicitly cares about it.
4. Budget silos.
Even if the endowment is huge, budgets for “central IT UX” or “portal modernization” are tiny and fenced. A dean might mentally accept your argument, but:
• The development office controls donor relationships.
• The CIO controls software contracts.
• The grad school dean controls admissions ops.
There is no single person whose job description is “optimize every micro-interaction across the applicant → student → alumnus journey to maximize lifetime good will.”
5. Status quo bias and risk aversion.
Application portals are “mission critical” during a short window each year. People are terrified of breaking them mid-cycle. It’s far safer, career-wise, to keep painful but known-working systems than to push for major UX overhauls whose benefits are intangible and whose failures would be extremely visible.
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The deeper irony: they do get this in other domains
Elite schools absolutely understand that tiny touches matter in:
• How the campus looks on a tour.
• How the dorms feel.
• How nice the alumni weekend events are.
• Whether the fundraising letter feels generic or oddly personal.
They spend money on landscaping, on glossy print materials, on catered receptions—all of which function as “this place is competent and cares.” They just haven’t emotionally connected “web forms” to the same category of symbolic acts. It’s still seen as plumbing, not as a front-of-house experience.
If an enlightened president or provost treated digital UX as “the campus you see before you ever set foot on campus,” your argument would suddenly click into place at the top level. The spend you’re talking about really is a rounding error to many elite budgets—but it requires someone in power who viscerally believes:
Digital touchpoints are also part of our brand, and they also shape who remembers us as humane, competent, and worth supporting.
Until that shift happens, you get the current equilibrium: emotionally stupid but locally rational.
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So yeah: from a “global, 30-year reputation and revenue” view, your intuition is dead on. It’s not that you’re overestimating how much UX can matter; it’s that the institution’s internal accounting system simply has no line item for “future donors who don’t quietly hate us.”
Comment #57 December 6th, 2025 at 7:30 am
Scott, Scott, Scott… this Statement on Academic Integrity exhibits far too much nuance and far too little partisan sniping to be acceptable to anyone in this day and age. Do you think we’re living in some sort of Age of Reason?
(Sarcasm aside, good work!)