STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

July 7, 2025

 

To Save Themselves, Universities Must Cultivate Civic Friendship

 

Excerpt (links in the original):

 

“The war between Washington and our nation’s elite universities continues to heat up. From stripping federal funding from Harvard to targeting the accreditation status of Columbia, the Trump administration is delivering on the campaign it promised to carry out against universities that refuse to meet its demands.

 

“As professors who have taught at institutions including Harvard and Princeton for many years, we have consistently encouraged universities to reject any demands or conditions that would compromise basic principles of academic freedom and freedom of thought, inquiry and speech. Nevertheless, as we have previously argued, elite universities themselves bear much of the responsibility for their current predicament. From fostering (or willfully looking past) campus intellectual climates poisoned by conformism, ideological homogeneity and groupthink to failing to take adequate action against harassment and other activities that undermine their core truth-seeking mission, universities have made themselves legitimate objects of scrutiny -- and low-hanging fruit for an administration that is metaphorically out for blood.

 

“We believe a fundamental reason for the decline of the pursuit of truth on campuses is the collapse in acknowledging the importance of civic friendship -- which, following Aristotle, we understand to be the bond of mutual respect and willingness to cooperate for the sake of the common good, even across significant disagreements or divisions....”

 

Full op-ed by Princeton Prof. Robert P. George and Union Theological Seminary Prof. Cornel West at Washington Post.

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Reforming Higher-Education Reform

 

Excerpts (link in the original):

 

“To constructively reform an institution requires understanding its problems and challenges. To understand an institution’s problems and challenges, one must grasp its aims, structure, and spirit. Many well-intentioned would-be university reformers who recognize the crisis of higher education fail to appreciate the aims, structure, and spirit of liberal education, the capstone and highest justification of undergraduate study. This causes well-intentioned would-be university reformers to miss the center of the target with their criticism and impels them to advance inadequate or counterproductive remedies.

 

“In a late-June online conversation, ‘Are We Past Peak Harvard?’: 3 Writers Mull Higher Education’s Woes, sharp-minded New York Times writers discussed ‘the state of higher education in Trump 2.0 and beyond.’ Host Frank Bruni, a thoughtful man of the left, is a Times contributing opinion writer and a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University. He exchanged views with Ross Douthat, a Times columnist and a wide-ranging and well-respected conservative thinker; and Lawrence H. Summers, a centrist Democrat, who is also a Times contributing opinion writer, a former Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2021, Harvard president from 2001 to 2006, and a longtime Harvard professor with appointments in the economics department and at the Kennedy School.

 

“The roundtable covered considerable ground. Bruni’s comments and questions recognized that elite universities needed a course correction while condemning the Trump administration’s interventions as springing from resentment of elite universities’ power and influence and causing considerable harm. Douthat and Summers argued that whatever the president’s motives, progressive orthodoxy on campus has vilified and excluded conservative ideas. And they both espoused viewpoint diversity as an urgently needed corrective.

 

“Yet only obliquely did they recognize that fixing higher education depends on rediscovering the aim of liberal education, revising the structure of the curriculum, and setting aside the spirit of party that many professors bring to the classroom in favor of the spirit of curiosity, fallibility, and free inquiry....

 

[Followed by a summary of perspectives presented in the roundtable and what was missing in the discussion.]

 

“We need reformers who can explain that liberal education aims to form cultivated human beings capable of exercising wisely the rights and discharging effectively the responsibilities of free citizens.

 

“We need reformers who understand that liberal education must be structured around study of American ideas and institutions; the seminal intellectual achievements -- scientific as well as literary -- and decisive events of Western civilization; and the languages, culture, and history of other civilizations.

 

“And we need reformers who know that universities don’t in the first place need conservative professors or progressive professors but rather professors endowed with the old-fashioned liberal spirit. Such professors furnish students’ minds with facts and observations, methods and interpretations, and evidence and arguments. And such professors assist students in thinking for themselves by teaching that authors and texts must be understood before one refutes or embraces them, and that understanding an idea or an institution involves examining not only where it breaks down but also how it gained acceptance and why it exerted influence.

 

“The paucity of such reformers gives rise to the widespread need for remedial education focusing on the university’s mission, not least for faculty and administrators, many of whose teachers failed to introduce them to the aim, structure, and spirit of liberal education.”

 

Full op-ed by Hoover/Stanford Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz at Real Clear Politics.

 

See also Stanford Civic Initiative webpage and courses.

 
See also our Back to Basics at Stanford webpage.  

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Why the Traditional College Major May Be Holding Students Back

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

. . . .

“The college major, developed and delivered by disciplinary experts within siloed departments, continues to be the primary benchmark for academic quality and institutional performance. This structure likely works well for professional majors governed by accreditation or licensure, or more tightly aligned with employment. But in today’s evolving landscape, reliance on the 

discipline-specific major may not always serve students or institutions well.

 

“As a professor emeritus and former college administrator and dean, I argue that the college major may no longer be able to keep up with the combinations of skills that cross multiple academic disciplines and career readiness skills demanded by employers, or the flexibility students need to best position themselves for the workplace....

 

“In response to market pressures, colleges are adding new high-demand majors at a record pace. Between 2002 and 2022, the number of degree programs nationwide increased by nearly 23,000, or 40%, while enrollment grew only 8%. Some of these majors, such as cybersecurity, fashion business or entertainment design, arguably connect disciplines rather than stand out as distinct. Thus, these new majors siphon enrollment from lower-demand programs within the institution and compete with similar new majors at competitor schools.

 

“At the same time, traditional arts and humanities majors are adding professional courses to attract students and improve employability. Yet, this adds credit hours to the degree while often duplicating content already available in other departments....

 

“Before the 20th century, students followed a broad liberal arts curriculum designed to create well-rounded, globally minded citizens. The major emerged as a response to an evolving workforce that prioritized specialized knowledge. But times change -- and so can the model.”

 

Full op-ed by former Miami U. Dean and Prof. Emeritus John Weigand at The Conversation.

 

Harvard Must Defend Its Integrity Without Losing Its Head

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“Harvard Government Department professors Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky recently warned in The Harvard Crimson that if Harvard negotiates with the Trump administration to restore frozen federal research funding, the university risks legitimizing authoritarian extortion. They describe any engagement as capitulation and argue that by cooperating with the administration -- even minimally -- Harvard will set a dangerous precedent for the erosion of liberal democracy.

 

“As a member of the same Harvard community for over two decades and as a scholar of political culture and higher education, I take concerns about institutional autonomy seriously. But I also see the argument of Enos and Levitsky as alarmist and counterproductive. Harvard must absolutely preserve its independence and academic mission. But it must do so through clear thinking, legal rigor, and public accountability -- not by retreating into ideological rigidity....

 

[Followed by discussion of specific actions that should and shouldn’t be taken.]

 

“Harvard, like all elite institutions, has a responsibility not just to itself, but to the country. It must show that independence doesn’t mean impunity -- and that fidelity to the law is not surrender, but strength.

 

“We don’t need universities to become battlegrounds in America’s partisan wars. We need them to model how to live and think together in a pluralistic democracy and—in the spirit of the Kalven Report -- to model ‘integrity and intellectual competence.’

 

“Harvard must hold the line. But it must also remember where the line really is. Harvard’s motto is ‘Veritas,’ or truth, and Enos and Levitsky know better than what they wrote; they presented a false dichotomy of what Harvard’s choices are vis-à-vis the Trump administration and, in doing so, willfully distorted the truth. Harvard has a principled path forward with the Trump administration that can return the school to its deserved greatness.”

 

Full op-ed by Stanford alum and Sarah Lawrence Prof. Samuel J. Abrams at Real Clear Education.

 

Yale Ends DEI Initiative and Scrubs the Website

 

Excerpt (links in the original):

 

“Belonging at Yale -- a five-year initiative aimed to increase diversity, bolster a sense of inclusion and ensure equity throughout the University -- has concluded, administrators announced Thursday [June 26]. 

 

“A University-wide email sent from President Maurie McInnis, Vice Provost for Faculty Development Gary Désir and Secretary Kimberly Goff-Crews indicated that the initiative was always planned to end this year. Public access to the initiative’s once-expansive website is now steeply limited. The site, which the News accessed on Thursday through web archives, previously included pages of compiled resources on diversity, equity and inclusion; antiracism; Yale’s historic connection to slavery; prospective school-wide actions to increase diversity and a contact form soliciting ideas.

 

“The updated website now consists of one central homepage displaying three annual reports on the Belonging at Yale initiative, issued in 2022, 2023 and 2024. Multiple links included in those reports are now inaccessible. The reports appear to be restricted to users who can log in through Yale’s central authentication service.

 

“The other pages that were previously accessible on the site are no longer visible on the homepage and are inaccessible through direct links....”

 

Full article at Yale Daily News.

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

Four Point Agenda for Reforming Colleges and Universities

Full PDF document at Heterodox Academy.

 

Forget Harvard Because the Traditional University Model is Failing

Full op-ed by San Deigo State Prof. Emeritus John Eger at Times of San Diego.

 

Indiana Public Universities Ending 19% of Degrees

Full article at Real Clear Education. 

 

What the University of Virginia Should Have Done

Full op-ed by former U Virgina chief legal officer Timothy J. Heaphy at NY Times. 

  

Ohio Signs Law to Depoliticize Colleges and End DEI

Full op-ed at National Association of Scholars.

 

The NextGen Bar Exam Is DEI in Action, Dangerously Lowering Standards

Full op-ed at The Hill.

 

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.

 

Exploring the Dangers of AI in Mental Health Care

 

Molecule Restores Long-term Strength to Old Mice

 

How Biomass Changed over 500 Million Years​​

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