STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

 

 

 

​April 13, 2026

​

Teaching in an American University Is Very Strange

 

Excerpts (link in the original):

. . . .

“I’ve been on the faculty at Duke University for five years now, and this past one has been the most challenging and the strangest by far.

 

“That’s not about Duke. It’s about higher education. It’s about America. It’s about dynamics -- chiefly, this country’s tilt toward authoritarianism and the rapidly accelerating advances of A.I. -- that render our tomorrows even hazier than usual. None of us knows what we’re in for and up against, and that confusion crystallizes on college campuses, which are by definition gateways to the future. They’re supposed to leave students with maps, routes, a destination. Not with compasses whose needles gyrate this way and that....

 

“‘If you simply listen to the stories we tell students,’ [former public school teacher Robert Pondiscio] wrote in a newsletter late last year, we promote ‘a view of the world in which everything is broken, corrupt, dangerous or doomed.’ But optimism, he argued, is an essential civic virtue. ‘No society can expect its children to engage with a world they think has already given up on them.’

 

“This world hasn’t. If I’ve given my students the opposite impression, I’ve screwed up. I need to communicate that for all this country’s current trials, it still brims with opportunities, its promise greater than its woes. And a blurry future isn’t the same as a bleak one. It just asks today’s college students to be especially nimble and patient. And it demands that those of us who stand before them work extra hard to find an honest balance between uncomfortable reckonings and reasons not to despair.”

 

Full op-ed by former NY Times staff member and now Duke Prof. Frank Bruni at NY Times.

​

More About Stanford’s Inadequate and Dysfunctional Housing  

 

Editor’s note: During the past year, we have posted numerous third-party articles and op-eds about the serious lack of adequate housing at Stanford; the expensive and illogical neighborhood system which, after years of failure, was finally disbanded at the start of this academic year; the continued irrationality of the Draw system for undergraduate housing; and the extraordinary number of Stanford students claiming disabilities in order to get around this lack of adequate housing. We present, below, still two more, student-written commentaries on the subject that appeared in the Stanford Daily this past week. And to get an idea of just how convoluted the entire Draw process is, click here and here for undergraduates and here for graduate students (be sure to scroll through all of it) for the most recent procedures.

 

Compare this situation to some of Stanford’s peer institutions’ consistent and high-quality housing programs, all of which contribute to significantly higher levels of student and alumni satisfaction, as well as significantly higher alumni donation rates, in contrast to Stanford. For example, undergraduate students live in:

 

• One of Harvard's twelve residential houses for all four years. 

• One of Yale's fourteen residential colleges for all four years.

• One of Princeton's seven residential colleges for the first two years followed by apartment-style living for juniors and seniors.

 

Despite Stanford’s decades-long and well-known housing shortcomings, the university is in the process of increasing its undergraduate enrollment by at least another thousand, but with nothing reportedly being done about the lack of housing and the annual anxiety-provoking uncertainties as to where a student will live the next year, and with whom. 

 

We have suggested that the Trustees and administration put a pause on any increases in enrollment until they finally address these obvious and very serious housing problems. We also have reiterated the Bravman plan whereby freshmen and sophomores would remain in the same dorm for their first two years and would then move into independent style housing for the remainder of their undergraduate years (on-campus apartments; housed fraternities, sororities, co-ops and other types of student-run theme houses; and single room facilities). Instead of fighting Stanford's atomistic housing facilities, take advantage of it. Maybe someone has a better idea and, if so, we’re waiting to hear it.

 

Stanford's Trustees have the ultimate fiduciary responsibility for providing the necessary physical facilities for the university’s operations, including housing. The concern is made all the worse because the long-standing failure to address the shortcomings in student housing has led to years of widespread student cheating to secure adequate housing. So what do the Trustees have in mind here? 

​

------------------

 

The Real Reason 40% of Stanford Students Claim to be Disabled 

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“Stanford has recently been in the news for having over 40% of its undergraduates claim a disability. It started with an article in The Atlantic, then another in Fortune, a sensationalist response by student Elsa Johnson in The Times and recently another in The San Francisco Chronicle. The media has seized on the idea that disabilities are the new way for students to paint themselves as victims and cheat the system.

 

“This idea is starkly different from the hard-working Stanford undergraduate population I know, who always seem to be asking what more they can do rather than less. While I do not doubt a few students may seek unneeded academic accommodations, the media frenzy misses the real, far more bureaucratic story. The vast majority of disability claims are not about getting extra time on tests -- they are about navigating a uniquely restrictive housing system.

 

“Nationally, about 16% of undergraduate students live on campus. This number is higher for private universities (43%) and lower for community colleges (a mere 1.5%). Most state schools I know provide first-year dorms and then leave upperclass housing to the free market....

 

“Stanford, however, operates on a different model: Residential & Dining Enterprise (R&DE) guarantees four years of on-campus housing to undergraduate students. 98% of undergrads accept this offer due to a combination of convenience, social benefits and subsidized cost means....

 

“Stanford’s system does not encourage students to claim disabilities to get ‘hidden perks’; it forces them to claim disabilities to gain basic comfort and autonomy. At most other U.S. universities, a student wishing for a private room can just sign a contract for a private room. No endometriosis diagnosis needed! A student wishing to cook their own food could, without converting to Jainism!...

 

“In his op-ed responding to Elsa Johnson, Rob Henderson praises an injured Air Force veteran who refused to claim disability, asserting the virtue of self-determination. The irony is that Stanford students must do the very opposite for the same reason: to gain self-determination within Stanford’s housing system.” ...

 

Full op-ed by graduate student Lindsey Meservey at Stanford Daily. See also “In What Ways Is Stanford’s Undergraduate Residential Housing System Dysfunctional?” at our Ask AI webpage.

 

------------------

 

How Co-op and Greek Life Shape Stanford's Campus Culture

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“Walking up the Row on a Friday afternoon, you might come across a cadre of tofu-eating hippies lounging on the Columbae porch painting colorful messages on the weather-beaten picnic table outside. These are my housemates -- friends and peers I’ve gotten to know over my last two years living in the house. Walk a little farther -- and do ignore Mars, since it messes with my framing device -- and you’ll observe a performatively shirtless game of spikeball on the Sigma Nu (SNu) lawn. Squint through the haze of Axe body spray, and you see preparations for a party.

 

“The differences between Columbae and SNu, and between Cooperative Housing (co-ops) and Greek organizations more broadly, might seem too many to count: hair dye, vegan meals, a willingness to enforce the consent affirmation at the door. On a deeper level, co-ops stake out alternative spaces of community outside the university’s social mainstream, often centering those historically pushed to its margins, while Greek life tends to plant its flag squarely in tradition as a home for students from more enfranchised backgrounds.

 

“Yet co-op and Greek spaces also share certain institutional features within Stanford -- features that increasingly expose them to pressure and outright attack from the administration. It is imperative that all students, regardless of the place they call home, see the assault on both for what it is: an overarching effort by Stanford to homogenize and more neatly regulate student life....

 

“Stanford thrives when students with specific interests are empowered to seek out spaces which affirm those interests for themselves -- when SNu brothers can live in SNu and when Columbae residents can live in Columbae....

 

“Most weeknights, I return home to find friends cooking for each other in our communal kitchen. More often than not, I stay up late because I want to keep laughing and talking and arguing with my housemates in the lounge....

 

“I am grateful and proud to live in a house with such strong moral and political values, and to live alongside people with such compassionate, generous hearts. Columbae is a house that I, and many others, have made a home during my time here. Everyone at Stanford should feel a stake in preserving it -- even if you might never dream of living there -- because the erosion of spaces like this rarely stops at just one corner of campus.”

 

Full op-ed by undergraduate student Simon Lee at Stanford Daily.

 

See also a prior Reader Comment: “I personally believe there is little doubt of the direct and powerful connection between Stanford’s dystopian housing system and endemic shortages of adequate housing, and later alumni donor rates”: Yale at 28.3%, Harvard at 33.1% and Princeton at 46% versus Stanford at 16% to 18%.

 

See also “Stanford’s War Against Its Own Students” (March 23, 2023) at Substack.

 

See also “What Would Peter Drucker Say About Organizational Complexity?” at our Ask AI webpage and that includes a detailed discussion of the problems created by organizational complexity, of which the Draw is a glaring example, under these headings: Inefficiency grows with size, meetings are a sign of failure, information overload hinders clarity, the need for planned abandonment and the need to focus on external purpose: “When an organization loses sight of its customer-focused purpose, it turns inward, adding internal complexities and losing its ability to create value.”

​​

US News 2026 University Rankings

 

Full article and listings at U.S. News.

 

Best National Universities:

 

#1 Princeton, #2 MIT, #3 Harvard, #4 Stanford, #5 Yale, #6 Chicago, #7 Duke, #8 Johns Hopkins, #9 Northwestern, #10 Penn, #11 Caltech, #12 Cornell, #13 Brown, #14 Dartmouth, #15 Columbia and UC Berkeley, #17 Rice, UCLA and Vanderbilt and #20 Carnegie Mellon, Michigan, Notre Dame and WashU.

 

Global:

 

#1 Harvard, #2 MIT, #3 Stanford, #4 Oxford, #5 Cambridge, #6 UC Berkeley, #7 U College of London, #8 Washington, #9 Yale, #10 Columbia, #11 Imperial College London and Tsinghua in China, #13 UCLA, #14 Johns Hopkins, #15 Penn, #16 Cornell, Princeton, UCSF and Toronto, #20 Singapore, #21 UC San Diego and Michigan, #23 Caltech, #24 Northwestern, #25 Peking, #26 Chicago, #27 Duke, #28 Nanyang Technological in Singapore, #29 Sydney and #30 Melbourne.

 

Stanford's Rankings for Graduate School Education in the U.S.:

​

Stanford ranked #1 in business, law, computer science, economics and psychology, #2 in engineering, #3 in biology and earth sciences and #4 in chemistry (some were ties). Stanford's School of Medicine in recent years has declined to participate.

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

As Enrollment Peaks, Higher Ed Is in a Slow-Moving Collapse

Full article at Daily Signal.

 

The Real Crisis in Higher Education Isn't Just Ideology, It's Faculty Decline

Full op-ed by Stanford alum and Sarah Lawrence Prof. Samuel J. Abrams at Real Clear Education: “Investments in faculty are not optional or nostalgic. They are foundational. And when they are neglected long enough, the university does not become more open or neutral. It becomes more brittle, more performative, and less capable of sustaining the serious intellectual life a free society requires.”

 

How Higher Ed Can Survive the Demographic Cliff 

Full op-ed at Inside Higher Ed: “As the class of 2029 settled into dorm life this past August, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis offered a startling data point: from 2019 to 2025, the jobless rate for recent U.S. college graduates grew at nearly three times the rate it did for young non-college educated workers.” See also “The Class of 2026 Is Struggling to Find Jobs, and It’s Not Because of AI” at Stanford Review.

 

Why Heterodox Has Failed -- Contrarianism Has Become a New Conformity

Full op-ed by Sheffield Prof. Emeritus Edmund King and Cardiff Prof. Thomas Prosser at UnHerd: “Ironically, the heterodox movement is now characterized by some of the same problems it once took issue with in activist and mainstream academia. In heterodox circles, cancellation has become its own form of ‘lived experience,’ and researchers make regular appeal to their own experiences of it, with these accounts having their own wounded and subjective character.”

 

America’s Universities Have Chosen Foreign Interests Over Their Own Country

Full op-ed at Minding the Campus: “Protecting academic freedom and international collaboration does not require closing American universities to the world. It does, however, require transparency, accountability, and clear safeguards to ensure that foreign funding and partnerships do not undermine the national interests of the United States.”

​

Colleges Ramp Up Offerings to Teach Students to Be AI Ethicists

Full article at Inside Higher Ed.

 

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.

 

Who Decides How America Uses AI in War? "AI companies shouldn’t dictate defense policy, but nor should they be punished for their values."

 

Preparing Robots for an Aging Society

 

Using a Patient’s Own T-Cells for Cancer Therapies

​

**********​​​​​