STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

February 16, 2026

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The Critical Necessity of Viewpoint Diversity

 

Excerpt (links in the original):

 

“Last week, Professor Jessica Riskin argued that the concern for viewpoint diversity (VPD) is fundamentally a conservative attack on universities, which are already adequately ideologically diverse. Granted that it has been used as a conservative bludgeon, I believe that the concerns about ideological homogeneity (the lack of VPD) are nonpartisan and involve the very missions of higher education.

 

“Why is VPD essential for a university’s missions of teaching and research? The short answer is that it tends to reduce confirmation biases, which inhibit critical inquiry and the search for truth. In John Stuart Mill’s 'On Liberty' (1859), he articulates this elegantly and extensively.

 

“Given his general aim of defending free speech, Mill doesn’t address academic freedom as such. But here’s how VPD contributes to academic freedom. A faculty member’s right to academic freedom can be abridged both by institutions and groups of individuals. Typical institutional actors are state governments (e.g., the Florida Stop W.O.K.E. Act), the federal government (e.g., the Trump administration’s demands on universities) and university administrations (e.g., Texas A&M’s forbidding the teaching of materials condoning homosexual relationships). 

 

“But a faculty member’s academic freedom can also be effectively curtailed by the actions of fellow faculty members and students. This is most evident when a faculty member is, or reasonably fears being, ostracized, cancelled or doxed because of their views on academic topics. Less obviously -- but still pernicious -- being surrounded by colleagues who collectively hold views that differ from their own creates social pressures to conform and therefore to refrain from expressing contrary views in their classroom or their scholarship. This can result in self-censorship as destructive as institutional sanctions. Moreover, an ideologically homogeneous faculty will tend to hire faculty who share their beliefs, thus exacerbating the social pressure and its adverse effect on academic freedom.” ...

 

Full op-ed by former Stanford law school dean and Prof. Emeritus (active) Paul Brest at Stanford Daily.

 

See also paragraph 1.d. of our Back to Basics at Stanford webpage regarding viewpoint diversity.

 

Counting Vice Presidents Misses the Point

 

Excerpts (link in the original):

 

“I’ve spent much of my career working as a college administrator. I’ve held senior roles, carried expansive portfolios, and had titles that critics of higher education increasingly cite as evidence of ‘administrative bloat.’ I understand why those titles and the organizational charts behind them can feel alienating to faculty. They can reinforce an unhealthy sense of ‘us versus them’ on campus.

 

“But after years inside those roles, I’ve come to believe that title inflation is not the core problem it’s often made out to be. It’s visible. It’s frustrating. And it’s easy to blame. However, focusing solely on titles risks mistaking a symptom for the disease, and in the process, leaving the real cause of administrative overload unexamined.

 

“That’s why Austin Sarat’s recent Inside Higher Ed essay asking, 'How Many Vice Presidents Does a College Need?' [also linked in our January 12, 2026 Newsletter] resonated with me, even as I think it ultimately misdiagnoses the challenge. Sarat is right to be uneasy about what he calls the ‘vice presidentialization’ of higher education. Titles matter. Hierarchies matter. And the proliferation of vice presidents deserves scrutiny.

 

“But the growth of administrative titles is not what is hollowing out institutional capacity or widening the divide between faculty and administrators. It is what happens when leadership repeatedly avoids the more challenging work of setting priorities and enforcing limits....

 

“. . . It’s not that administrators take their titles too seriously. It’s that institutions take on too many priorities without making corresponding choices about what not to do. And while many of those initiatives might be 'good,' too many of them fall outside the core scope of educating students. The result is not just administrative strain, but less institutional attention devoted to teaching and learning itself....

 

“Which is why the solution cannot simply be fewer vice presidents or humbler titles. It must start with presidents, boards and faculty leaders willing to exercise real leadership discipline. That means distinguishing between core academic work and aspirational initiatives. It means abandoning programs and committees as readily as launching them. And it means acknowledging an essential truth that higher education often avoids: Adding priorities without subtracting others is not strategic ambition -- it is organizational debt....

 

“We need to do a better job ensuring that our institutions are designed around teaching our students rather than running an ever-expanding business enterprise.”

 

Full op-ed by former Indiana U Vice Chancellor P.J. Woolston at Inside Higher Ed.

See also our Stanford Concerns webpage including charts and graphs from third parties that document the extraordinarily high number of managerial and professional staff at Stanford as compared to its peers. See also proposed solutions at our Back to Basics at Stanford webpage including significantly reducing Stanford's administrative bureaucracy in both size and costs and spinning off the 200 to 300 centers, accelerators, incubators and similar entities if not primarily or even exclusively engaged in support of the core teaching and research of tenured members of the faculty.

  

Other Articles of Interest

 

Some Concerns About the Current Campus Climate

 

• Disagreement Itself Has Become Morally Legible -- Brown Prof. Emeritus Glenn Loury critiques self-censorship at Stanford Daily: "Argumentation becomes ritual, compromise becomes betrayal. This culminates in what can be described as the collapse of common knowledge.”

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• No Stanford Kids -- They’re Cowards at Stanford Review: "Stanford mythology holds that students built remarkable things and changed the world not because they were enticed by a McKinsey title, a Google badge, or a six-figure salary, but because they had conviction. They didn’t try to look normal. They threw parties that felt (or actually were) illegal. They said things that made people mad and didn’t immediately apologize.... That Stanford had a distinct and different flavor: courage.”

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Two Colleges, Two Different Responses to the Heckler’s Veto

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

  

Stanford Student Startup Pairs 5,000 Singles and Has Taken Over the Campus

Full article at WSJ.

 

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.

 

First-Ever Map of Rare Earthquakes Enhances Preparedness

 

Synthetic Biology Boosts Plant Defenses Against Pests

 

How Math Learning Disabilities Affect Problem-Solving​

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