STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

July 28, 2025

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Editor’s note: Click here to view recently added as well as past reader comments. And as always, we welcome your own comments and suggestions here.  

 

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How AI Laws Are Reviving the Worst Ideas of Campus Censorship

 

Excerpts:

 

“One of the more frustrating things about working on free speech for over two decades is watching the same bad ideas come back wearing slightly different outfits. It’s like déjà vu, but with better fonts. Dealing with them over and over again can be tiring, but doing so remains incredibly important -- particularly when it comes to AI....

 

“Followers of FIRE and [Eternally Radical Idea] will be very familiar with speech codes. These were policies enacted by colleges and universities, dating back at least four decades, designed to restrict certain kinds of speech on campus. And more often than not, they used 'anti-discrimination' as their rationale. Recent regulations proposed and imposed in multiple U.S. states are also invoking 'anti-discrimination' -- only this time, it’s for technologies that seek to define objective reality itself.

 

“These laws -- already passed in states like Texas and Colorado -- require AI developers to make sure their models don’t produce ‘discriminatory’ outputs. And of course, superficially, this sounds like a noble endeavor. After all, who wants discrimination? The problem, however, is that while invidious discriminatory action in, say, loan approval should be condemned, discriminatory knowledge is an idea that is rightfully foreign. In fact, it should freak us out....

 

“Nobody wants to be anywhere near the sin of discrimination -- especially racial discrimination. That’s a noble impulse, and quite the cultural evolution from even fifty years ago. It’s a great sign that we find it so reprehensible that people will do backflips to avoid even the appearance of it. But when that instinct becomes so strong that we start reshaping reality, we’re not helping anyone. We’re just making ourselves -- and now, our machines -- less accurate, less honest, and less effective in navigating the world as it really is.

 

“If we continue this trend, we will be manufacturing an epistemic crisis that will be unprecedented in its scope and scale. Our budding AI technologies will inevitably become the primary source and manufacturer of the world’s information. If that information is tarnished or tampered with to spare our feelings -- especially if it’s done pre-emptively -- there will be no changing or correcting course, because our map, our compass, and even our intuitions will be completely wrong.”

 

Full op-ed by Stanford alum and FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff at Substack. See also our prior articles about “Stanford’s Roles in Censoring the Web” at our Stanford Concerns-2 webpage. 

 

We Need a New Theory of Academic Freedom

 

Excerpt (links in the original):

 

“With their wealth, exclusivity and global clout, American universities are an easy target for populist resentment. For Americans frustrated by inequality and cultural alienation, there may be a certain satisfaction in seeing these elite institutions humbled.

 

“But the Trump administration’s coercive offensive against institutions like Harvard and Columbia, which clearly isn’t about antisemitism, isn’t really about elitism or populism either. It's about something deeper. It throws into question ordered liberties that are deeply rooted in America’s history and traditions.

 

“If that point’s hard to explain, part of the blame lies with us academics. We’ve spent too long defending academic freedom on the basis of professional norms, free speech jurisprudence and administrative due process.

 

“Some of these defenses might win in court, but none are winning in the court of public opinion. Whether academic freedom survives in the coming years won’t be decided by the Administrative Procedure Act or even the First Amendment. It’ll depend on whether ordinary Americans can say that academic freedom is their freedom, too. The question, in other words, is whether or not the idea of academic freedom has legitimacy.

 

“Today, academic freedom’s legitimacy is fraying. Rising tuition, student debt, concerns over free speech, allegations of political bias, administrative bloat, billion-dollar endowments and doubts about the real-world value of degrees have made many Americans question what universities are for and who they really serve.

 

“Legitimizing academic freedom under these conditions will be an uphill battle....”

 

[Followed by detailed discussion of historical and philosophical precedents in academic and other contexts.]

 

Full op-ed by Amherst Prof. Adam Sitze at Inside Higher Ed.

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See also our Back to Basics webpage. 

 

Achieve Legitimate Workplace Goals Without the Bureaucracies and Dogma of DEI

 

Excerpts (link in the original):

 

“During the past few years, DEI programs have been rolled back in both private and public organizations, and the trend may well continue. For champions of workforce diversity, who feel their work is being undone, this is a difficult time. But there is promising news. A growing body of evidence suggests that many management innovations designed to improve performance actually boost workforce diversity in the bargain -- and do so without inviting the backlash that formal DEI programs can incur....

 

“The animating idea of high-performance management is simple: If you can create a work environment in which all employees are valued, supported, and motivated in ways that allow them to do their best, you’ll get higher engagement from them and better business outcomes. Diversity isn’t the goal -- but it is a natural by-product.

 

“Our research on workplace diversity -- conducted in the United States but relevant globally -- confirms that notion. We’ve run statistical analyses of data from some 800 companies in a variety of industries. Many of the techniques that companies use to improve performance have a better record of fostering inclusion than do diversity trainings and grievance processes -- popular DEI measures that tend to be counterproductive, as we detailed in HBR almost a decade ago, in ‘Why Diversity Programs Fail’ (July-August 2016). That’s true not just for frontline jobs but for all sorts of positions, including management....

 

[Followed by detailed discussion of five companies: Oracle, Walmart, IBM, Gap and Amazon.]

 

“For years, diversity and human resources experts have been calling for firms to change their management systems to open opportunity to all. The approaches we’ve identified in this article do just that -- even if that was not the intention of their creators. In these tumultuous times for DEI, performance innovations that help employees be their best selves at work may be the best hope for the dream of equality.”

 

Full article by Harvard Prof. Frank Dobbin and Tel Aviv U. Prof. Alexandra Kalev at Harvard Business Review.

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

Student Concerns at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business

Full article at Poets and Quants: “Stanford Graduate School of Business, long considered among the most elite MBA programs in the world, is facing a storm of internal criticism from students who say the academic experience has fallen far short of expectations.... Students voiced concerns about outdated course content, a disengaged faculty culture, and a broken curriculum structure that they say leaves them unprepared for post-MBA careers.”

 

Stanford Is Creating a New Office of Investigations

Full text at Stanford website: “As the inaugural head of Stanford’s new Office of Investigations (OI), the Executive Director will oversee a team of investigators responsible for conducting independent and neutral fact finding on a variety of subject matters involving students, faculty and staff.... The expected salary range is $250,000 to $330,000 per annum.” See also new listings for “Senior Investigator, Office of Investigations,” expected salary range of $200,000-$260,000 per annum, along with others.

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See also “Stanford to Reduce Budget by $140 Million and Lay Off Employees for Next Academic Year” at Stanford Daily.

 

University of Chicago Looking at Cuts in Humanities and Language Majors

Full article at College Fix: “University leaders cite historic funding pressures and possibility of new tax on endowment.”

 

Tracking the Cancel Culture in Higher Education

Full article at National Association of Scholars ("Reasoned scholarship is traded in for the cheap, vapid substitute of political activism. And in the long run, higher education itself dies.") including this link to an updated PDF chart of cases.

 

The Ivy League Apology Show -- Princeton and Penn as Case Studies

Full op-ed at Princetonians for Free Speech: “The apology has become a peculiar ritual in American public life. Our age of perpetual offense is also one of perpetual contrition.... Nowhere is this dynamic more pronounced than on university campuses, where the machinery of apology has become as essential as the campus bookstore or dining hall.” 

 

We Need to Restore Credibility to Accreditation

Full op-ed at Real Clear Education: “If the U.S. truly wants to have the greatest higher education system in the world, the archaic system of college accreditation needs to change fundamentally -- and it needs to change now.” 

 

Harvard and the Trump Administration Face Off Over Funding Cuts

Full article at Washington Post. See also “Even if Harvard Wins This Court Case, the Fight Won’t Go Away” at WSJ.

 

Shared Governance and Academic Freedom

Full op-ed by National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood at Real Clear Education: “The single most important responsibility of college trustees is picking the college president. The task is difficult because so few people measure up to the job. And it is all the more difficult because so many people have an interest in the outcome.”

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Eight Books Regarding the University Crisis

Full article and recommended book list at The Atlantic.

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Samples of Current Teaching, Research and Other Activities at Stanford 

 

Click on each article for direct access; selections are from Stanford Report and other Stanford websites.

 

In-body CAR-T Cell Generation Proves Safe and Effective in Mice

 

Unexpected Windows into Neurodegenerative Disease

 

VR Training Can Help Build Empathy in the Workplace​​

 

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