STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

 

 

 

​May 11, 2026

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Beyond Coddling and Canceling

 

We can, and should, empathize with students’ trauma. But we shouldn’t validate desires to shield them from discomforting course content.

 

Excerpts:

 

“University campuses are struggling to maintain cultures where students meaningfully engage across lines of difference. Over the past 15 years, it has become increasingly common to hear students frame their experiences as traumatic, as a reason for refusing to engage in dialogue or in expressing a desire to shut speech down. ... [Followed by several hypothetical examples.]

 

“Such incidents may lead educators to ask whether the harm is ‘real,’ but this is the wrong question. Asking whether distress is genuine enough to warrant action traps us in an adversarial, unproductive debate over the validity of students’ emotional experiences. The better question is whether the only response available to them is to shut themselves or others down -- an approach that denies students’ agency and resilience. We argue, instead, for modeling and supporting an agentic mindset that acknowledges discomfort while expanding students’ sense of what responses are available to them.

 

“Faculty responses to students’ concerns about engaging with material they find disturbing often fall into two camps. Those in the first camp assert that students lack resilience as a result of being coddled their entire lives and so have a tendency to frame everyday struggles as catastrophic or traumatic when they are not. This may lead to the view that we need not take these concerns seriously, that students must attend classes or events covering this content or face the consequences.

 

“The second camp argues that students’ claims of experiencing trauma, distress, discomfort or offense necessitate a university-level response. This may take the form of 'trigger warnings,' policies that allow students to avoid content without consequences or even prohibitions on sensitive content altogether. Although they have very different perspectives, these camps share some common ground in that each is deciding whether an experience can or should be coded as disturbing or traumatic enough to warrant action.

 

“We reject this dichotomy. Little is to be gained from challenging students’ claims that they have suffered trauma or harm, or their worry that academic content or experiences could be traumatic or harmful. However, that does not mean we should contribute to a narrative of helplessness or victimization that denies or dismisses students’ capacity for agentic, empowered responses. When we do this, we communicate to students that they lack strength and self-efficacy, that they cannot (or cannot learn to) manage their own discomfort and that there are people, situations and topics that they cannot handle.” ...

 

[Followed by discussion of setting expectations, empathizing, and explaining the value.]

 

Full op-ed by Drew Prof. Jill Cermele, Yale Prof. Michael Strambler and Viewpoints Project Executive Director Shira Hoffer at Inside Higher Ed.

 

The Classroom Is the Key to Solving America’s Campus Free Speech Crisis

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“On April 21, students at UCLA disrupted a speech by James Percival, the Department of Homeland Security’s general counsel, at a meeting of the conservative Federalist Society. As Fox News reports, they booed Percival, holding signs with foul language, one of which read ‘F— you, loser.’ The students also set off different sounds on their phones as part of the disruption, and at different points, yelled out the word ‘Nazi.’  

 

“What happened at UCLA is just the latest in a long series of similar incidents that have roiled campuses and fueled the Trump 

administration’s campus crackdown. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, in 2025, there were 172 such attempts to cancel or disrupt speakers or events on campuses around the country. 

 

“Colleges have tried almost everything to protect speech on campus -- so far, without great success.

 

One possible solution is close at hand. It involves teaching students about academic freedom and using the classroom to cultivate habits and dispositions that promote empathy, tolerance and a willingness to listen to even the most upsetting arguments.

 

"What happened at UCLA, and has happened on other campuses, suggests a failure inside, not just outside, the classroom. Colleges and universities won’t be able to fix their free speech problems until they address problems in the way they educate their students....

 

“Students should be asked to engage with perspectives they do not already hold, and taught the importance of investigating claims made to them. The college classroom should require students to support their ideas with evidence, and learn to listen carefully to ideas they don’t embrace before judging them.

 

“In other words, the classroom can be a model and training ground for democratic habits.” ... 

 

Full op-ed at The Hill.

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Why Pedagogy Experts Are Wrong

 

In offloading pedagogical expertise to non-scholars, colleges degrade the classroom.

 

Editor’s note: We don’t know the size of Stanford’s own teaching and learning center (homepage here) but assume its staff are part of the over 17,000 supervisory and management personnel at Stanford (see the numbers at our Stanford Concerns webpage, including Stanford’s unfavorable ratio of faculty to students as compared to other major universities).

 

Excerpts: (link in the original): 

. . . . 

“Much in this story will be recognizable to faculty at each of the 1,200 colleges and universities that host a teaching and learning center in the United States. Work that was once considered the province of individual academic units has migrated to specialized offices populated by nonacademic staff with little (or no) knowledge of the fields whose educational practices they seek to shape, and who themselves spend more time in brown-bag workshops than in classrooms. This development should worry not just the faculty, but also the students they teach, and indeed, the entire society that entrusts these institutions to nurture an educated populace....

 

“With many institutions looking to cut administrative bloat, teaching and learning centers should be considered good candidates for the chopping block. Leave the teaching to those who spend their days in the classroom. But even if these centers remain, it’s not as if we’re without options. Faculty members can simply reclaim the various roles they’ve outsourced. We can resist using pedagogical jargon to characterize what we do; we can ignore spurious advice based on spurious studies; we can spend less time attending workshops about how to teach students and more time actually teaching them.

 

“My suspicion is that if we did all of this, we’d recover the practical wisdom that comes with treating our individual departments as communities of expert educators -- something we might not have even realized we’d lost, and something whose recovery would benefit the society that depends upon us to educate the young.”

 

Full op-ed by Bates Prof. Paul Schofield at Chronicle of Higher Education. 

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​See also “Colleges, Maybe Try Teaching” by former Yale Prof. David Deresiewicz at Persuasion: “Most college teaching is mediocre at best and often far worse. This is not a guess or an impression (though I’ve seen enough of it myself). In The Amateur Hour, a history of college teaching in America, Jonathan Zimmerman lays out the gory details. We’ve had the same problems, for the same reasons, with the same failed solutions, since the emergence of the research university: professors neglecting instruction; enormous lecture courses (and tedious discussion sections); contingent and underqualified faculty; students feeling bored and cheated; resistance from faculty to supervision, evaluation, or change; innovations, often based on new technology, rolled out with large claims; and no improvement ever. The reason for this last is clear. Under the research model, faculty are incentivized to do a single thing only: create knowledge. Publish or perish.

 

"When good teaching happens, it happens by accident, and often at a cost to one’s career. Which means that if general education is going to be resuscitated -- and undergraduate education in general improved, and academia despised a little less -- colleges and universities need to start seeing themselves, to an extent they never have before, as teaching institutions.”

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See also “How Have Universities Changed from Their Original Purpose?” and  “In What Ways Is Stanford’s Undergraduate Residential Housing System Dysfunctional?” at our Ask AI webpage.

 

Harvard Needs a Performance Review

 

Excerpts:

 

“It’s time for Harvard to copy Yale.

 

“Earlier this month, Yale University released a detailed report outlining a pantheon of issues contributing to an erosion in the American public’s trust in higher education. Among others, they identified the most critical factors as the rising cost of accessing higher education, the opacity of the admissions process, and the state of discourse and pedagogy on college campuses.

 

“Harvard, too, is due for a reckoning -- its walk should match its talk....

 

“Efforts by University Hall to promote institutional neutrality, intellectual vitality, and recentering academics are a good start at aligning our practices with our purpose. But there’s more to go.

 

“The problem is that, so far, Harvard has continued like most others -- cobbling a piecemeal approach to reforms, reactive to the news cycle or the whims of Washington. Harvard instead should take a page out of Yale’s book: we need a comprehensive reflection on our institutional purpose, the extent to which we’ve deviated from it, and how to return.” ...

 

Full editorial at Harvard Crimson.

 

See also “Higher Education Finally Admits It has a Free Speech Problem” at Princetonians for Free Speech which is an alumni organization similar to our Stanford Alumni for Free Speech and Critical Thinking: “The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. For years, the core argument of Princetonians for Free Speech was treated by university administrators as a provocation rather than a diagnosis.... No dramatic reversals have taken shape yet, but something significant is happening. The academy itself -- the ivory tower that prides itself on being above and beyond the slings and arrows of the outside world -- is beginning to acknowledge that the critics had, and have, a point.”

 

See also “Yale Narrows Its Mission Statement to Focus on Knowledge” at Yale Daily News.

 

See also our Stanford Concerns webpage where we have laid out what we believe are serious ongoing problems at Stanford and our Back to Basics at Stanford webpage where we outline specific actions for addressing these problems.

 

Other Articles of Interest

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Why Are So Many Athletes Transferring from Stanford?

Full article by Stanford undergraduate Madisyn Cunningham at Stanford Daily. 

 

In followup, we asked ChatGPT “What strategies can Stanford implement to effectively retain its student athletes?” and have posted the response at our Ask AI  webpage. As always, we welcome your own comments and suggestions here. 

 

UC Berkeley Activists Shut Down Speech by Google AI Chief, Say Tech Aids Palestinian Genocide

 

Full article at College Fix: “When Dean was asked by the protesters about how AI is ‘used to kill Palestinians,’ the Google tech whiz reportedly responded he was just trying to deliver a ‘scientific lecture.’ During a 10-minute back-and-forth between the protesters, event organizers and attendees, the audience largely expressed support for Dean, chanting his name and cheering when asked if they wanted to hear from him, and booed the protesters... Although organizers -- and UCPD officers -- repeatedly asked the protesters to leave the event, they refused, the [Daily Californian] reported, adding: ‘At approximately 1:47 p.m., event organizers announced that they were shutting down the event, and attendees and protesters left the room.’”

 

See also “Radical Students Hold Cornell President Hostage in Car After Israel Debate Clash” at NY Post: “Kotlikoff, however, insisted the group was hell-bent on ‘harassment and intimidation. These individuals followed me from the event space and across campus, while loudly shouting questions and recording on their phones. After answering a few questions, I let them know that I was not planning to engage further, and asked them to stop recording,’ he said in a statement. ‘They continued to follow me to my car and then surrounded the car, banging on the windows, blocking the car, and shouting.’”

 

The Disappearing Male Student

Full op-ed at Minding the Campus: “There is no safe space for masculinity in modern education.”

 

Student-Led Survey Shows Shifting Political Views at Stanford

Full article at Stanford Review.

 

What AI Changes About Viewpoint Diversity

Full article at Substack.

 

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.

 

From COLLEGE 102 – Freshmen Policy Memos Conclude You Can’t Outsource Critical Thinking

Also, click here to read the assignment and here to read the winning memo.

 

What If Luck Isn’t Random?

 

Stanford Merges AI and Data Science Efforts Under Single Institute

 

A Blood Test Reveals Neighborhoods of Cells in Tumors, Predicts Immunotherapy Responses

 

This Week’s Video

 

Drone Tour of the Stanford Campus at YouTube (10 minutes)

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