STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

September 30, 2024

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Investiture of Stanford’s 13th President Jonathan Levin

 

As longtime readers know, we largely avoid a cheerleading function on behalf of the university. That occurs in lots of other places, and our primary purpose, instead, has been to raise issues that need discussion but where there are few other forums in which to have that discussion. It is in that context that we are providing a link to a video of the investiture last Friday of Stanford’s thirteenth president, Jonathan Levin. At least in our minds, and notwithstanding the challenges nationwide that are discussed in some of the other articles that follow, this is an example of everything that is right about Stanford and its future.

Full video at YouTube (Levin's remarks start around the 32-minute mark, 11 minutes in length; transcript at Stanford Report)​

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Reflections on the New Encampment Culture

 

Excerpts (links in the original):    

 

“This is a story of two political cultures. One of them shapes the attitudes that dominate political discussion in American universities. The other culture persists among a broad and reasonably well-informed public outside the universities and their government and philanthropic tributaries. When, in the academic year 2023-24, the two cultures faced each other with expressions of mutual dismay, the moment had been coming for a long time. On October 7, 2023, scores of Hamas fighters broke through the boundaries of Gaza, killed more than 1200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 200 others: the worst terror attack in Israel’s history. Within hours, 34 student groups at Harvard University had circulated a public letter affirming that ‘We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.’ (The word ‘unfolding’ covered the violence of the past, the present, and the future.) ‘Today’s events,’ the letter went on to say, ‘did not occur in a vacuum,’ and it added: ‘The apartheid regime [of Israel] is the only one to blame.’ The signers concluded by urging solidarity with the Palestinian suffering which was sure to follow once the Israeli retaliation in Gaza had commenced.

 

“What shocked many people about the student letter was its heartlessness. Even as the bodies were being counted, the signers told us not to blame the killers but to redirect our gaze and fix all responsibility on Israel. To anyone acquainted with the climate on American campuses, the timing of the letter was disturbing (not a moment’s pause for grief), but the sentiments were hardly surprising. They reflected the only highly visible political viewpoint that exists in universities today. Other opinions are tolerated, and have a lively presence in the curriculum, but settler vs. colonized, oppressor vs. oppressed, white people vs. persons of color -- these moral antinomies guide the discourse in student-initiated and faculty-sponsored groups and events alike....

 

“Where did this leave Jewish students? ‘I don’t know which I found more discouraging,’ one of them told me, ‘the fact that they hate us, or that they don’t really know why they hate us.’ At Yale, during the first couple of days, I walked around the embryonic protest site and saw a table and makeshift awning with a placard identifying Jews against the bombing and another identifying non-Jews. They joined forces later, but an expansion of aims would have been more impressive. After all, it seemed to begin as an anti-war protest, delivered against the United States as the sponsor of so many wars and proxy wars. Yet the passion and momentum soon went the other way. Enlistment in the cause became indistinguishable from rooting for one side, the Palestinians, against the other side, the Israelis (or ‘Zionism’). The exclusionist temper of the Columbia protest emerged in tactics like one leader's announcement, ‘We have Zionists who have entered the camp. We are going to create a human chain where I am standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe upon our privacy and try to destroy our community. Please join me in this chain’ -- followed by step-by-step instructions to the human chain....

 

“The long-term consequences of the specialization of campus politics have been unhappy for American society generally. Political complexity of mind is rare among students, but the same students will go on to be full-time citizens. Some of the fault is traceable to university administrators: their political position-taking, after recent elections and supreme court decisions and certain shocking local or national events, has seemed to define the boundaries of polite opinion. Such public statements are now being pulled back, with recent moves toward ‘institutional neutrality,’ and that is a good thing. The idea that universities, as if they were a person, should carve out an official stance on social and political issues of the day is a recent innovation; it has had a fair trial and been found useful mainly as an instrument of social control and conformity -- neither of which qualifies as an educational value....”

 

Full op-ed by Yale Prof. David Bromwich at Persuasion. Also see again our compilations of the Chicago Trifecta regarding freedom of speech, a university’s involvement in political and social matters, and standards for the hiring and promotion of faculty. 

 

Why Engineers Should Study Philosophy

 

Excerpts: 

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“One of the most important skills I’ve learned in decades of managing engineering teams is to ask the right questions. It’s not dissimilar with AI: The quality of the output of a large language model (LLM) is very sensitive to the quality of the prompt. Ambiguous or not well-formed questions will make the AI try to guess the question you are really asking, which in turn increases the probability of getting an imprecise or even totally made-up answer (a phenomenon that’s often referred to as ‘hallucination’).  Because of that, one would have to first and foremost master reasoning, logic, and first-principles thinking to get the most out of AI -- all foundational skills developed through philosophical training. The question ‘Can you code?’ will become ‘Can you get the best code out of your AI by asking the right question?’ ...

 

“Generative AI changes our relationship with knowledge, flattening barriers that not only provide access to it, but also explain it in a tailored approach. It creates a gentle slope between your level of knowledge and the level of knowledge required to attack a particular subject.  But the ability to access knowledge that is appropriately tailored and, more importantly, accurate, starts -- and ends -- with the user....” 

 

Full op-ed by Marco Argenti, Chief Information Officer at Goldman Sachs, at Harvard Business Review

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It’s Easy to See What Drove Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway to Quit

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[Editor’s note: Jonathan Holloway is a Stanford alum, Class of ‘89]

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“Last week Jonathan Holloway, the president of Rutgers University, announced he would be stepping down at the end of this academic year -- the latest in a series of university president departures....

 

“‘It’s a punishing job in normal times,’ Holloway, a scholar of African American history, told me when I spoke to him last week. ‘But the standards we’re being held to are impossible. I had to ask myself, ‘What is it I want to do, how can I do it, and is this the right position?’

 

“Holloway, who previously served as a dean at Yale and a provost at Northwestern, said he struggled with how to balance the role of a college president today, which demands quick responses, with what he described as his own values -- listening to people, carefully weighing potential actions and having the freedom to speak his mind....

 

“His goal, he told me, is to challenge students to be critical thinkers in an era of righteousness, an atmosphere in which people have stopped considering whether someone else may be right.... 

 

“The atmosphere on campus, he realized, has fundamentally changed in discouraging ways. The culture of curiosity, the culture of empathy seemed to have gone. He no longer felt he could function to the best of his abilities as a leader in this charged university environment. He didn’t feel he could do the job and stay true to himself....

 

“If American universities continue to lose leaders like Jonathan Holloway, higher education is in even greater trouble than it already was.”

 

Full op-ed at NY Times 

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Have Americans Actually Lost Faith in Higher Education?

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“In the last year, a growing collection of polls has suggested grim prospects for the public perception of higher education. Most notably, Gallup found in 2023 that only 36 percent of Americans have ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in higher education -- down about 20 percentage points from 2015

 

“At the same time, many higher education institutions have faced sharp drops in enrollment and intense political scrutiny, leading media organizations to link the drop in confidence to a decline in both the perceived value of a college degree and the number of prospective students.

 

“But analysts from the left-leaning think tank New America argue in a policy brief released Monday that that might not be the case after all, and that rumors of higher education’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, to borrow from Mark Twain’s famous words to the New York Journal.

 

“Ben Cecil, senior education policy adviser at Third Way, a center-left think tank, said looking at recent higher education survey data is like walking and chewing gum at the same time -- and Americans are smart enough to do both.

 

“‘There’s a real difference between trust and value, and the definitions of those two have often been conflated when they’re actually two different things,’ he said. ‘You can not trust something as much as you would like to, but you can also still see that it has value.’...

 

““We engaged in a societywide experiment of financing higher education through long-term individual debt, and it went badly,” [Vanderbilt Prof. William Doyle] said. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to say … it’s strictly just what’s going on in partisan politics. There is another aspect of this which has to do with the price, which I absolutely think is related.’...

 

Full article at Insider Higher Ed

 

Reporting Professors for Wrongthink

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“As [Eternally Radical Ideas] readers will likely recall, ‘the Conformity Gauntlet’ is the name Greg [Lukianoff] and his ‘Canceling’ co-author Rikki Schlott gave to the layer after layer of social pressures, ideological litmus tests, and punishments both formal and informal that a would-be academic must endure from high school on up to become a tenured professor. Plenty of research and data was used to back up these claims, and thanks to the 2024 American College Student Freedom, Progress and Flourishing Survey, we now have even more.

 

“The survey shows that the (already stunning) 71% of students who believe professors should be reported for their speech aren't just focused on disagreeable words or rude behavior; many are openly policing professors’ viewpoints.

 

“The survey’s creator, North Dakota State University’s Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth, describes it as follows:

 

“’The survey assesses student perceptions about viewpoint diversity and campus freedom; human progress and beliefs about the future; and student attitudes toward entrepreneurship, capitalism and socialism, and how college is influencing their views.’...

 

“Almost a decade ago, Jeanne Suk Gerson wrote about criminal law professors who avoided teaching sexual assault and rape law because they feared being reported for a Title IX violation. Now imagine that same fear, except it’s about every topic, all the time. In the NDSU survey, one-third of students want professors to drop uncomfortable readings, and a quarter want professors to drop uncomfortable discussion topics. [followed by a detailed discussion of percentages of students who think professors should be reported for even talking about specified topics] ....

 

“In many cases, the proliferation of bias response teams on campus has made reporting a professor or peer for having the wrong opinion almost frictionless. A 2022 study of over 800 schools found that most (56%) have bias response teams of some sort; that study also found that ‘nearly every’ system permitted anonymous reporting. They also encourage it however they can. As Rikki Schlott has pointed out in the past, the number for the Bias Response Line is printed on the back of NYU’s student ID cards....

 

“Given the numbers in all of these surveys, it’s no surprise that people are unwilling to speak up.”

 

Full op-ed by Stanford alum and FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff and FIRE VP Adam Goldstein at Substack

 

See also our September 23 Newsletter about Stanford’s previous bias response program and the articles at our Stanford Concerns webpage, Stanford’s Computerized Case Management System for Student Behavior and Stanford's Program re Title VI/Bias 

  

Other Articles of Interest

 

New California Law Signed in Honor of Former Stanford Goalkeeper Katie Meyer

Full article at NY Times/The Athletic.  

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See also paragraph 2.e. that has long been included in our Back to Basics webpage, “All students facing potential disciplinary actions must be treated fairly, humanely and with a focus on protecting the individual’s constitutional and other rights. Students must also be offered emotional and other support from the outset of and throughout any disciplinary warnings, discussions and proceedings and thereafter.” That section 2 of our Back to Basics white paper also suggests other needed reforms to the student disciplinary process.  

 

See also “Katie’s Save” that has long been linked at our Resources webpage.

 

What Happened to Free Speech?

Full op-ed at WSJ 

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University Cancels Panel Because Author Is a ‘Zionist’

Full article at Free Press

 

When Should Colleges Call the Cops?

Full article at The Hill

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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. 

 

The Neuroscience of Campus Memories

By Stanford junior Lara Selin Seyahi at Stanford Daily

 

The New Tech That Could Improve Care for Parkinson’s Patients

 

The Digitalist Papers: A Vision for AI and Democracy

 

Stanford Researchers Lead Efforts to Cut Carbon in Concrete Production

 

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