The bottom line
I am the president of Turning Point USA at Duke University. We applied for RSO status, met every objective criterion they published, and they denied us anyway. Twice. We are now in the final appeal stage and I have no real expectation it ends differently. I want to walk you through exactly what happened, because when you see the numbers they gave us, you are going to have a hard time explaining it any other way than political bias.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
How this chapter started
Our chapter at Duke has been running for about a year and a half. Charlie Kirk DM’d my freshman roommate and asked if he wanted to start one up. We said yes. My roommate and I were Co-Presidents while we were both playing football. When I finished playing, I took over as president and we made the decision to file for RSO status.
For anyone who doesn’t know how this works: at Duke, RSO status is what allows you to actually exist as an organization on campus. Without it, you can’t reserve classroom space, you can’t table, you can’t participate in the club fair, you can’t host speakers, you can’t recruit at freshman orientation. You can call yourself a club but you functionally cannot operate. So filing for RSO was not optional if we wanted to be a real presence at Duke.
The application process is supposed to be objective. Duke’s RSO review system grades applicants on four categories: group mission and purpose, group uniqueness from existing groups, potential to create community at Duke, and potential for longevity. Each category is scored zero to three. You need at least eight total points to be approved. A zero in any single category is an automatic disqualification regardless of your total.
I went through our application line by line. I want to show you what we wrote and what they scored.
Category one: mission and purpose
We wrote this for our mission statement: “The mission of Turning Point USA at Duke is to identify, educate, and empower students to articulate and defend the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and constitutional rights. We aim to foster intellectual diversity and challenge the status quo through high-impact campus activism, nonpartisan discourse, and the strategic distribution of academic resources, thereby cultivating a network of principled future leaders.”
That is our actual mission. We are genuinely nonpartisan. We do not endorse candidates. We do not endorse political parties. We endorse ideas. That is a matter of record. There is nothing vague about that statement. It is specific, it is measurable, and it describes exactly what we do.
Duke’s rubric defines a score of one in this category as a mission that “needs clarity.” A two is “fairly clear and understandable.” A three is “highly specific and aligned with the group’s stated goals.” I do not know how that mission statement is anything less than a three. I think you have to be arguing in bad faith to score it below that.
Category two: uniqueness
The two organizations they would compare us to are College Republicans and Young America’s Foundation. Here is what we wrote: College Republicans is centered on electoral politics and candidate support. Our chapter is strictly nonpartisan, centered on philosophical principles rather than ballot boxes. YAF focuses on lecture-style seminars. We do grassroots peer-to-peer engagement, tabling, open forums, high-energy campus activism. We are not the same thing.
We also noted something that I think is genuinely significant: following Charlie Kirk’s assassination last September at Utah Valley University, our chapter now holds a specific mandate that no other campus organization shares. We are the primary custodians of his legacy at Duke. Preserving and debating his contributions to free market thought is a responsibility that belongs to us alone. That is a real, unfilled niche on campus. That should be worth something on a uniqueness rubric.
Duke’s rubric for a score of one in this category is that the group is “notably similar to existing registered groups.” A three is “highly distinct.” I think you would have to squint pretty hard to argue that a nonpartisan constitutional activism organization centered on Charlie Kirk’s legacy is notably similar to anything else on Duke’s campus.
Category three: community potential
We wrote that we would host open forums, guest speaker events, and constitutional workshops designed to bridge ideological divides. We actively recruit members from all class years, programs of study, and backgrounds. We have non-conservatives who come out to engage with us because they like debating ideas with people who hold different views. We welcome that.
This is not a conservative echo chamber. It is literally the opposite of an echo chamber. We build community through disagreement, through deliberate cross-ideological conversation. If any category should have been an easy score for us, this one was it.
Category four: longevity
We laid out a full recruitment pipeline: tabling at the Bryan Center, Instagram and TikTok outreach, a presence at freshman orientation, committee roles to give members ownership, and leveraging TPUSA’s national chapter leadership summits and officer training material to develop future leaders. I have freshmen already lined up who are ready to take over when I graduate. That is not a vague aspiration. That is an actual succession plan backed by a national organization with years of chapter development experience.
The rubric defines a score of zero in this category as “no plan for cultivating membership, engaging members, or fostering participation.” We submitted a multi-page breakdown of our recruitment and retention strategy. They gave us effectively nothing.
What Duke actually scored us
They denied us in three of the four categories: mission and purpose, uniqueness, and longevity. Scores low enough in each to disqualify us. We resubmitted. They denied us again. We are now in the final appeal stage with no timeline given.
I genuinely cannot explain how you read our application and produce those scores unless the conclusion was made before the rubric was filled out.
This is not a Duke-specific problem
What happened to us follows a pattern that has been playing out at campuses around the country. Seton Hall’s student government denied TPUSA recognition while approving the Democrats Club 14-2. Point Loma Nazarene denied a chapter three separate times. Loyola New Orleans denied theirs twice, even after winning an internal appeal. Fort Lewis College’s student government voted no on a TPUSA chapter and the crowd cheered. Campus Reform documented five instances of conservative clubs being discriminated against on campus in 2025 alone.
In every single one of these cases, the stated reason involves some formal criteria the group supposedly failed to meet. And in every case, when you actually read the application and the rubric, you find an organization that clearly met the standard. The rubric is not the problem. The people applying the rubric are the problem.
Georgia’s legislature actually responded to this by passing the TPUSA Act in March 2026, which bars public schools from discriminating against student organizations based on their beliefs. That law exists because this discrimination is systematic and documented, not anecdotal.
Who is actually making these decisions
I want to be honest about something. I don’t think Duke’s senior leadership is the issue here. President Price, in my reading of the situation, genuinely cares about maintaining neutral ground on speech. FIRE gave Duke a green speech code rating in its 2025 rankings and ranked the university 27th overall, which means its written policies are not the problem. The problem is the implementation.
The people who processed our RSO application are not President Price. They are mid-level staff and student government members who sit on review committees, face no professional consequences for how they vote, and bring their own politics into every decision they make. One person involved in this process chose to forgo birthday gifts and asked people to donate to Planned Parenthood in their place. That is her right and I am not putting her name out there. But it tells you something about who you are dealing with when you submit a conservative organization’s application into their queue.
Student government has become the primary mechanism by which conservative organizations get quietly filtered off campus. The decisions look like neutral peer governance on paper. They are almost impossible to challenge externally. And the people making them know exactly what they are doing.
Duke is private, but that is not the whole story
Duke does not have to follow the First Amendment the way a public university does. I know that. It is a private institution and if they decide they do not want us there, that is their legal right.
But Duke markets itself heavily on intellectual diversity and free expression. It has a trustee statement on freedom of expression. Alumni have formed groups specifically because conservative students feel they cannot express their views on campus without social consequences. Duke puts real stock in its FIRE ranking and its reputation as a campus that takes speech seriously.
When your RSO review committee scores an application that obviously meets your own published criteria and produces scores low enough to disqualify it, that reputation takes a hit. You do not get to claim you are a free speech institution while your committees are blocking conservative clubs from forming based on rubrics they are filling out in bad faith.
Where we go from here
I am going to keep fighting this as long as the process allows. If the appeal fails, the options are public pressure and legal pressure. FIRE has moved institutions before by shining light on exactly this kind of situation, and Duke cares enough about its reputation that that means something.
In the meantime, I cannot table. I cannot host speakers. I cannot recruit at freshman orientation. Every other club on campus gets to do all of those things. We do not. Because the people reviewing our application did not like what we stand for and found a way to make their numbers say no.
That is where we are.
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