“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
Vanderbilt's Declaration of First Principles -- The University and Its Purpose
Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education
Restoring the Academic Social Contract
-- Stanford alum and U Texas-Austin Provost William Inboden
Guiding Principles -- Stanford President Jon Levin and Provost Jenny Martinez
From Our Latest Newsletter
"To Be True To The Best You Know" -- Jane Stanford
November 9, 2026
Stanford Invests $10 Million to Rethink Majors for the AI Age
Excerpt (link in the original):
“A new $10 million provost-funded curriculum innovation initiative will help academic departments at Stanford rethink their undergraduate majors for the artificial intelligence age -- reimagining everything from introductory courses to capstone experiences, and untangling the knotty question: What should students learn, demonstrate, and do on their own when AI tools can write, code, and create at their behest?
“As colleges and universities nationwide race to weave AI into their classrooms, the multiyear initiative aims to help academic departments consider effective ways to build AI use and critical thinking with AI into their majors.
“The initiative will also help departments determine when and how AI should be excluded from a course or major and identify what students should do without the aid of a chatbot.
“‘Stanford has long been at the frontier of artificial intelligence, and that comes with a responsibility to lead in how we educate,’ said Provost Jenny Martinez. ‘There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for teaching in the age of AI, so we want to empower experimentation and encourage faculty to share what they learn. These grants are an opportunity for faculty to come together at the department or program level and comprehensively think about how their curricula might evolve.’” ...
Full article at Stanford Report.
What America Can Learn from North Carolina on Free Speech
Five North Carolina Universities Rank Among the Nation's Top 20 for Campus Free Speech; Here's What They're Getting Right
Excerpts (links in the original):
. . . .
“In the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE) 2027 College Free Speech Rankings, five North Carolina colleges landed in the top 20 out of 261 campuses nationwide....
“So, what are these five North Carolina schools getting right that others might be missing? Three lessons stand out.
“Lesson One: Protect the right to hear controversial ideas, even when they make people uncomfortable....
“Lesson Two: Give students and professors the freedom to challenge ideas and think for themselves....
"Lesson Three: Put free speech commitments in writing....
“Being able to speak your mind matters in every part of life, and nowhere is that more important than in a classroom, where asking questions, challenging ideas, and even being wrong should all be part of learning. So, to the other 49 states: take notes. Free speech is easy to support when everyone gets along, but it really matters what a university does when people disagree, get upset, and demand that someone be silenced.”
Full article at James Martin Center.
Students Are Trained to Answer Questions, but They Are Rarely Taught How to Ask Them
Excerpt:
“After weeks discussing the U.S. economy and the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, I gave my students an unusual assignment: Act as financial journalists and prepare three questions for a senior Fed official.
“I told them I would not be grading their answers.
“I would be grading their questions.
“The reaction was immediate -- and telling. Students who were comfortable explaining concepts suddenly hesitated. Others leaned in, thinking more carefully than they had all semester. The exercise revealed something simple but unsettling: While students are trained to answer questions, they are rarely taught how to ask them.
“In a world in which answers are increasingly easy to generate, the more important skill is knowing what to ask. Yet our education system is not designed to teach it.” ...
Full op-ed by Sam Houston State Prof. Hiranya K. Nath at Hechinger Report.
This New Record Epitomizes the Campus Free-Speech Disaster
Excerpts (links in the original):
“I’ve spent 25 years watching colleges find new ways to suppress speech. I wish I could say the latest dismal campus record surprises me.
“The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the organization I lead, has tracked more than 200 attempts to shut down campus speakers, cancel performances or otherwise suppress expression in 2026 so far. No previous year reached 200. And for the second year running, of those attempts that had a political tenor, more have come from the political right than from the left: 116 to 64 in 2025, and 96 to 74 so far this year....
[Followed by detailed charts and discussion.]
“School leaders spent years failing to rein in their own censorious administrators. Now they must give administrators the backbone to resist politicians who can cut their budgets. The law is on their side -- the choice is theirs to make. Free expression is essential to the pursuit of truth, and universities cannot compromise one without compromising the other.”
Full op-ed by Stanford alum and FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff at Washington Post.
Other Articles of Interest
Students’ Subject Choices Not Matching Workforce Needs
Full article at Inside Higher Ed: “Too many are pursuing degrees in biological sciences and IT, with shortages in business and engineering despite high employer demand, study finds.”
What If You Started a University from Scratch, with AI at Its Core?
Full article at Chronicle of Higher Education: “While AI tutors and other experimental uses of AI are becoming more common at many colleges, [San Francisco Bay University] has taken perhaps the biggest leap: It has handed lecturing duties to large language models, or LLMs. Ladany and his colleagues see AI as a great equalizer for students and a revolutionary tool for instructors.”
Debate Tool Brings Controversy into the Classroom, On Purpose
Full article at College Fix: “Sway is an interactive chat platform that pairs two users together who have opposing views on a topic. It gives the pair a platform to debate their views while having Guide, an AI tool that [former UNC Prof. Simon Cullen] helped develop, monitor their discussion to ensure each side is being fair and respectful.”
UC Santa Barbara Installs Loitering Alert System
Full article at Ed Scoop: “A series of new systems is designed to monitor trouble spots around campus and alert police if anyone stands around for more than 60 seconds.” Editor’s note: We post this article NOT because we support any such surveillance activities but solely as a matter of information and hopefully NOT to be deployed at Stanford with its hundreds of cameras already installed throughout the campus.
See also recent articles at Stanford Daily and Stanford Review.
A Look at the Eye-Popping Endowment Gains at Harvard, WashU, Stanford and Beyond (Updated)
Full article at Higher Ed Dive: “Stanford University saw a 31.7% return on its investment pool for the fiscal year, bringing the total to $61.5 billion. Those investment funds are set to add over $2.2 billion to the private California university’s operating budget in fiscal 2027 -- roughly one-fifth of the total.” With details about other schools as well.
See also “25 Colleges with the Biggest Endowments” at U.S. News (November 2, 2026) and where Stanford was shown third behind Harvard and Yale and with Princeton and MIT as fourth and fifth. Subsequent to publication of our Newsletter, a reader brought to our attention the following more current numbers based on a search at Google/Gemini: Harvard ($68.0 billion), Stanford ($61.5 billion), Yale ($53.3 billion), Princeton ($42.3 billion), Penn ($31.1 billion) and MIT ($27.4 billion).
What Does Cornell Teach?
Full op-ed at Minding the Campus: “The [faculty committee] that produced this report was ‘asked it to examine nearly everything a university does,’ (p. 8). Plainly one of the things that Cornell does is foster an atmosphere of sexual license. This includes its presentation of guides such as Sexual Pleasure: Finding the Sweet Spot and other material in the vein of ‘sex-positive’ health resources. Students are encouraged to pursue sexual exploration, including events with multiple partners. The only restraint on these explorations is that all of the partners must ‘consent.’” See also the Comments that follow this op-ed.
Try Fixing the Core
Full op-ed at Minding the Campus: “Sociologist Neil Gross provides new data on the polarization of American higher education in his latest book, What Happened to College?: How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do to Fix It. His original research and surveys of college students suggest that political views influence where students apply, which organizations they join, what they feel comfortable saying, which majors they choose, and even whom they date and befriend.”
Statement by Bill Ackman on MIT’s Sham Investigation of Former MIT Prof. David Sabatini
As circulated late last week among MIT alumni, faculty and others; full text here.
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 Examines How Universities Serve the Public
Stanford Medicine Builds on a Century of Surgical Discovery
Advanced Gene Editing Tool Suggests New Ways to Treat Disease
Stanford Research Park Celebrates 75 Years as Silicon Valley’s Engine of Innovation (at Palo Alto On-Line)
“The last two years have seen a dramatic increase in the scrutiny of free speech and academic freedom…. However, progress on these core values will mean little if there is not a major effort to address a pressing long-term and deeply embedded problem – the almost total lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty at many universities.” -- Ed Yingling and Leslie Spencer at Princetonians for Free Speech
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.