STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

June 16, 2025

 

The Courage to Converse – Tough Dialogue on Campus

 

Excerpts:

 

“This past spring semester, the College Debates & Discourse (CD&D) Alliance organized and hosted more than 80 campus debates and dialogues, engaging several thousand students at partner institutions across the nation. In total, these events covered a panoramic range of topics and elicited a myriad of student perspectives. A key shared takeaway has emerged: students, faculty, and community members attest that in today’s sharply divided political climate, it is more crucial than ever that universities remain strongholds of free speech and open dialogue. 

 

“National surveys of students and faculty have cast a spotlight on their reluctance to discuss controversial political and social topics. The pervasive culture of fear across campuses can feel overwhelming. Students with widely varying perspectives are increasingly afraid to speak up, unsure if participation in political advocacy or the expression of their beliefs will bring about social repercussions, or worse. 

 

“Sitting in a roomful of people with conflicting perspectives can be unnerving, and listening to someone you vehemently disagree with can be nothing short of infuriating. Sharing the deeply personal stories that influence your social and political ideology with a group of strangers can feel like a dystopian episode of Fear Factor. But these are precisely the kinds of experiences that young people need to develop the humility and empathy so crucial for navigating the diverse voices and perspectives they will encounter once they step off campus. 

 

“The right to express dissent is one of the most fundamental American values and remains critical to maintaining the integrity of our academic institutions. Against the backdrop of campus protests and volatile climate in higher education, colleges and universities should encourage their students to ask tough questions, embrace having their perspectives challenged, and build capacity to listen attentively to others with differing views.”

 

Full article at GoActa. 

 

See also “Civil Discourse Is a Lost Art on Campus but I Learned to Disagree Better” at Minding the Campus.

 

See also “Free Speech and the Philosophy Classroom -- The Wrong Question” at APA Online.  

 

Will the University Survive AI?

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

" . . . it is not ideology, but technology that is precipitating the greatest crisis higher education has ever faced. 

 

"A recent article by James D. Walsh in New York Magazine, widely circulated among academics, reported that “just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT [in 2022], a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments . . .

 

"One problem is that it’s difficult to prove that students have cheated with chatbots. They’ve learned how to detect “Trojan horse” traps in assignments, engineer prompts that won’t make them look too smart, and launder their essays through multiple bot-generated iterations. Nor is AI-powered software a reliable means of detecting such schemes. 

 

"Faced with these difficulties, universities have punted. They’ve done little more than leave faculty to establish their own AI-use policies, which vary widely and are, in any case, largely unenforceable. (What is more, some professors are using chatbots to formulate assignments and grade papers. In their classrooms, machines are talking to machines.) This response is completely inadequate. Universities will not survive if they are little more than expensive diploma mills. Nor will the United States, for what will take their place in preparing future citizens, leaders, and builders to repair our broken institutions and maintain a healthy and prospering polity? 

 

"The ultimate aim of a liberal education is fully to actualize the human capacity 'to form an instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us,' in the words of John Henry Newman. If we are to maintain our humanity in the age of AI, an education that teaches young people to read, write, and think through the investigation of traditional sources of human meaning — goodness, truth, justice, beauty — and the cultural and political conditions in which they acquire a prominent place in human life, will be more necessary than ever.

 

"If colleges and universities have any hope of surviving, they must articulate a compelling vision of what higher education is, and what it is for — of its signal importance for individuals and society alike. If they are to equip students to find their way in an increasingly complex world, they must provide not just a technical education, but a genuinely liberal one. That’s the only way they can convince students not to cheat themselves out of the chance to live rich and meaningful lives by unreflectively turning over their distinctively human energies and capacities to AI. Let’s hope they succeed. For if higher education ceases to preserve, extend, and transmit the wisdom and knowledge our ancestors struggled and suffered to achieve, who or what will?

 

Full article at Unherd.

 

See also “Assessment in the Age of AI – Universities Must Do More Than Tell Students What Not to Do” at The Conversation.

 

See also "AI Ethics in Higher Education: How Schools Are Proceeding" at EdTech.

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

Here’s What Utah’s Colleges Are Doing to Win Back State Funding

Full article at Chronicle of Higher Education.

 

The Alarming Decay of Mathematical Competency in America

Full article at Minding the Campus.

 

Ohio State Will Require AI Classes for All students This Fall

Full article at College Fix.

 

Four Ways Colleges Can Prepare for an Uncertain Future

Full article at Higher Ed Dive.

 

College Students Are Using No Contact Orders to Block Each Other in Real Life

Full article at WSJ.

 

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.

 

How Stanford is Advancing Constructive Dialogue

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Designing Blood Vessels for 3D Printed Hearts

  

Digital Twins Offer Insights into Brains Struggling with Math — and Hope for Students

 

Advance in Creating Organoids Could Aid Research, Lead to Treatment

 

Blood Sugar Response to Various Carbohydrates Can Point to Metabolic Health Subtypes​

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