“The first step is to remind our students and colleagues that those who hold views contrary to one’s own are rarely evil or stupid, and may know or understand things that we do not. It is only when we start with this assumption that rational discourse can begin, and that the winds of freedom can blow." – Former Stanford Provost John Etchemendy
FEATURED ITEMS
Restoring the Academic Social Contract
-- Stanford alum and U Texas-Austin Provost William Inboden
Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education
Guiding Principles -- Stanford President Jon Levin and Provost Jenny Martinez
From Our Latest Newsletter
"To Be True To The Best You Know" -- Jane Stanford
July 27, 2026
Why Every College Should Disclose Course Reading Lists
Excerpt (links in the original):
“The University of Austin (UATX) recently did something that should be commonplace in higher education but is surprisingly rare. The new university posted its entire undergraduate reading list online -- 224 books, essays, and primary sources, course by course and professor by professor -- for anyone to examine. Regardless of one's views of the school itself, that decision deserves attention and every college and university in America should consider doing the same.
“The reading list itself is serious and demanding. Students read Dante’s Paradiso and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Plato and Machiavelli, Montaigne and Tocqueville, Jane Austen and Melville. A course on the ideological experiments of the twentieth century pairs Solzhenitsyn and Arendt with the primary documents of the regimes themselves.
“More importantly, the school’s list reflects genuine viewpoint diversity and that is exactly what higher education should aspire to. This list is not an ideological monoculture; in economics, students read Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Keynes alongside Hayek, Mises, and Sowell. In a course on the legacy of slavery taught by Coleman Hughes, the students read Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project essay and the historians’ letter challenging it, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘The Case for Reparations’ and Hughes’s own reply, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Thomas Sowell’s history of slavery. This back and forth and the competition of ideas in the classroom because of the well-balanced syllabi is exactly what genuine viewpoint diversity looks like and it deserves recognition.
“What is really unusual here is that because the UATX list is public, we do not have to take the university’s word for being a place that seeks balance. We can directly verify and that is exactly what transparency is so critical to higher education.” ...
Full op-ed by Stanford alum and Sarah Lawrence Prof. Samuel J. Abrams at Real Clear Education.
Even Free Speech Proponents Violate Their Principles; We Need Institutions
That Can’t
New research shows that stated support for free speech often breaks when the speech triggers political biases
Excerpts (links in the original):
“The debate over free speech on campus is usually framed as a persuasion problem: if only more students believed in free expression, the culture would protect it. A new study in Science Advances by researchers at Stanford, Penn, Columbia, and the University of Colorado, suggests the problem runs deeper. The study found that many students already believe in the principle of free speech, but they abandon it when their group loyalties are engaged. For those of us who see free expression as the precondition for the truth-seeking work universities exist to do, this insight is key: persuasion is necessary, but not sufficient.
“The researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of 3,065 US college students in the summer of 2024, at the height of the campus Gaza protests, and found that nearly 75% reported believing that protecting campus free speech is ‘very important.’ Yet when the researchers asked whether speech aimed at a marginalized group should be policed more strictly than the same words aimed at anyone else, 64% said yes. They claimed to value free speech but did not apply it consistently across views. The authors labeled this group ‘particularists.’ In contrast, 36% of respondents said the rules should be applied neutrally and consistently no matter the target of speech. This group was labeled ‘universalists.’
“The particularist position deserves scrutiny: a right that is applied inconsistently is not a right, but a revocable permission. Even if the ‘particularists’ self-identify as free speech proponents, they cannot accurately be viewed as such. The authors conducted a similar survey among US adults and found that the split between particularists and universalists is nearly even, 52% particularist to 48% universalist. It appears that universalism does better off campus than on it.
“However, what the study shows about the universalists is even more concerning. [Followed by more detailed discussion of concerns with so-called universalists.]
“Why do people struggle to uphold their stated principles? [Yale Prof.] Dan M. Kahan’s work on identity-protective cognition explains the incentive structure: for the individual, bias is rational. Your lone opinion rarely changes an outcome, but visibly breaking with your tribe on a charged issue much more often costs you standing, trust, and friends, so the mind protects group membership over accuracy. Tellingly, a survey conducted by Kahan and colleagues on climate change risk-perception found that the best reasoners (those who score highest on tests of numeracy, science-literacy, and cognitive-reflection) show more of this bias, not less, being better at building the justifications their identity needs. The impulse is bipartisan: a meta-analysis of 51 experiments found liberals and conservatives show partisan bias at statistically indistinguishable rates....
“. . . A university whose disciplinary outcomes depend on biased individuals will produce biased enforcement, even if they claim to be principled free speech universalists. Instead, content and identity-neutral rules must be in place before any controversy strikes, and ideally the administrators judging complaints should be as free as possible from any overt biases.” ...
Full op-ed at Free the Inquiry.
The New Chilling Effect
Excerpts:
“Too many institutions are teaching young people to stay quiet....
“And people are definitely afraid. This problem, as we see it, is much bigger than our school newspaper. The era of social media came with the promise of hyper-democratization -- no longer do you need to be an established pundit to get your message out. (All of us, born in the 2000s, struggle to imagine it any other way.) Although there is much to celebrate about the ways in which the internet has connected us, the permanence of the internet has given rise to censorship pressures -- both individually and institutionally. People are so nervous about saying the wrong thing that they choose to say nothing.... [Followed by examples of external and self-censorship].
“Administrators owe it to their students to support a culture of free expression, and high schoolers need to keep contributing to that culture by saying what they think. Free expression is a principle that seems easy to uphold in theory, but requires some degree of courage in practice. To start, we must reaffirm that our individual and collective right to free expression transcends the substance of anything that any one of us might say. A robust -- and sometimes messy -- marketplace of ideas is in the best interest of all of us.” ...
Full op-ed by high school journalists Jacob Blane, Annabelle Garland and Sam Gross at The Atlantic.
Other Articles of Interest
Mental Health Has Become an Important Element in America’s Higher Ed Environment
Full article at Newsweek: “According to a 2026 survey by UnitedHealthcare, 69 percent of college students reported experiencing a mental or behavioral health concern during the previous year, with anxiety, stress, depression and ADHD among the most commonly reported challenges.”
From the Hiring Side of the Table
Full op-ed at Minding the Campus: “It amazed us how often new grad interviewees had no clue about our company, its business, or its technology. My preparation for my first interview, while nearing the end of my postdoctoral work, was very different and was something I knew I had to do to be properly prepared and demonstrate my interest in the opportunity.”
90% of Students Use AI in the Classroom
Full article at Higher Ed Dive: ‘“The challenge now is making sure people have the training, judgment and clear expectations to use it well,’ [a university administrator] said.”
California Medical Schools Eliminate Required Social Justice Courses
Full article at College Fix.
Law School Accreditor Questioned About Its Required Standards
Full article at Just the News.
The Principle of Institutional Neutrality Is What Matters, Not the Name
Full article at Free the Inquiry.
Why We Care -- 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.
Stanford and SLAC to Lead Genesis Mission Projects
New Exhibition Shows the Storied Life of Jane Stanford
Breakdown of Immune Cells’ Interaction Is a Key Driver in Aging
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“Institutional neutrality protects the university’s fundamental mission of pursuing, preserving, and transmitting knowledge. This mission requires not only academic freedom and viewpoint diversity, but also principles and policies that enable us to avoid contests among people of competing ideological stripes for control of the university and its individual units.” -- Princeton Prof. Robert P. George
Comments and Questions from Our Readers
See more reader comments on our Reader Comments webpage.
Need Dialog, Not Prohibitions
I suggest the university produce forums in which ultimate concerns about war and peace presently unfolding be formally debated, subject to the rules of decorum. This is what the university is for, not prohibitions on argument or advocacy. Silence renders learning impossible.
Hoping for Balanced Speech at Stanford
I am so in support of the opinions expressed here and hope Stanford will adopt a more balanced approach to free speech. I can only hope.
Teaching Young People and Others How to Disagree Civilly
While I believe that supporting free speech is very important in and of itself, I also believe that there is a related component that is often ignored. That component is teaching people, especially young people, how to disagree civilly/how to constructively respond to free speech they might not agree with.
Question About Ties to the Alumni Association
Q. I notice that the SAA website contains no links to the Stanford Alumni for Free Speech and Critical Thinking website. Why is that?
A. Our website is not linked at the SAA website since we intentionally did not seek to become an affiliate of SAA. Among other things, we wanted to maintain independence, including since SAA became a subsidiary of
the university in the mid-1990’s. That said, there are a number of current and former Stanford administrators and trustees who receive our Newsletters and read the materials that are posted at the website.
About Us
Member, Alumni Free Speech Alliance
Stanford Alumni for Free Speech and Critical Thinking is an independent, diverse, and nonpartisan group of Stanford alumni committed to promoting and safeguarding freedom of thought and expression, intellectual diversity and inclusion, and academic freedom at Stanford.
We believe innovation and positive change for the common good is achieved through free and active discourse from varying viewpoints, the freedom to question both popular and unpopular opinions, and the freedom to seek truth without fear of reprisal from those who disagree, within the confines of humanity and mutual respect.
Our goal is to support students, faculty, administrators, and staff in efforts that assure the Stanford community is truly inclusive as to what can be said in and outside the classroom, the kinds of speakers that can be invited, and what should always be the core principles of a great university like Stanford. We also advocate that Stanford incorporates the Chicago Trifecta, the gold standard for freedom of speech and expression at college and university campuses, and that Stanford abides by these principles in both its policies and its actions.