STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

​April 6, 2026

 

The Information State

 

Editor’s note: We call reader attention to this recently published book, “The Information State -- Politics in the Age of Total Control” by Jacob Siegel because so much of what is discussed in the book, at least in our view, goes to the heart of free speech and critical thinking and including, secondarily, the role Stanford has played in all of this.

 

Excerpts from Amazon's read sample:

. . . . 

“What caught my attention as a journalist was the uncanny speed at which politicians and the media converged on a new consensus that bad information lay at the root of the world’s problems. In the campaign to eradicate dangerous narratives, I recognized tools and techniques of information warfare that I had first encountered as an army officer serving in Afghanistan....

 

“The abuses committed in the name of fighting disinformation were not isolated exceptions carried out in a panicked and temporary state of emergency. Rather, they represented the proper functioning of a parallel system of government regulation -- which is to say a parallel system of government -- that had been designed and built up expressly for the purpose of controlling the information environment to shape public opinion....

 

“And herein lies a central paradox of the information state. The great ills that it seeks to remedy, such as disinformation, are themselves products of the very thing, namely the surveillance- and attention-based Internet, on which the state relies. That is why, throughout the outcry about the evils done by Facebook or Twitter, the politicians who are loudest in condemning those platforms do not take the obvious step of seeking to make them less powerful. Their aim is not to reform or rebuild the repressive infrastructure of the Internet, only to make it serve their own interests.” ...

 

From Real Clear Investigations:

. . . . 

“Censorship became a routine and informal agreement between the various parties who had been brought together in the fight against disinformation. Fact-checkers, content moderators, nonprofit anti-hate speech representatives from groups like the Anti-Defamation League, counterterrorism veterans, trust and safety officials, countering violent extremism experts, social scientists, political operatives, FBI agents, millennial journalists, and CIA officers all rubbed shoulders on the counter-disinformation party but housed inside the social media companies.” ...

 

From pages 223-225 and 233-234 in the book itself:

. . . . 

“Over a hundred employees in the [Election Integrity Partnership network, run primarily by the Stanford Internet Observatory] maintained nearly round-the-clock coverage of social media. To more effectively monitor and regulate what Americans talked about online, they grouped topics into narrative categories. On average, it took the tech platforms less than an hour to respond to their alerts and takedown requests. In a postmortem published after the election, the EIP reported collecting more than 859 million tweets for analysis and classifying 21,897,364 tweets on ‘tickets’ as unique ‘misinformation incidents’ just between August 15 and December 12, 2020.... 

 

“Shortly after the vote in November, with the Election Integrity Partnership having fulfilled its purpose, [one of its leaders] Renee DiResta started a new initiative, still under the auspices of the Stanford Internet Observatory, called the Virality Project.... One email sent by a Virality Project staffer to multiple social media companies recommended that the platforms take action even against posts that described ‘stories of true vaccine side effects,’ specifically ‘true posts which could fuel hesitancy.’

 

“Without any public deliberation or legislative debate, without any formal amendments to the Constitution, the authority to censor that which was true but deemed harmful had become the law -- not quite of the land, but of the society online that was ruled by code. The more arbitrary the health policies became, the better they propped up the authority of the information regulators.” ...

 

See also paragraph 4.d. at our Back to Basics webpage: “Under no circumstances may any of these [200 to 300 centers and similar entities at Stanford], whether on or off the core campus, be engaged in censorship activities, either directly or in coordination with government entities, and especially regarding members of Stanford’s own faculty.”

 

We welcome your comments here. 

 

The Gatekeepers Are Failing; Why We Must Reform Higher Education Accreditation

 

Excerpts:

 

“Each year, roughly two million Americans borrow sums they may never repay to attend programs that a federal accrediting system has solemnly declared ‘high quality.’ But while some will earn degrees that open doors, many will earn nothing but debt....

 

“For decades, American higher education has operated under a peculiar fiction: ‘quality’ is ‘guaranteed’ by a club of private accrediting agencies that have government approval. In fact, the current bureaucratic system drives up costs, shields mediocre institutions from accountability, enforces ideological conformity, and systematically resists giving any true market signals about the wisdom of pursuing a degree in a particular field....

 

“But that may be about to change.... [The Accreditation, Innovation and Modernization Committee, AIM] is a federally chartered negotiated rulemaking panel charged with rewriting the regulations that govern accreditation itself. Because accreditor approval is the prerequisite for colleges to access federal student aid, whoever controls the accreditation rules effectively controls key elements of American higher education policy. AIM is the administration’s bid to wrest some control from the accreditation guild and limit its abuses of power.

 

“AIM should enact four reforms: further break the accreditor cartel, make student outcomes the performance metric, curb trade association rent-seeking, and constrain concentrated ideological capture.” ...

 

Full op-ed at Real Clear Education.

 

What We Learned in California -- Even Ethnic Studies Teachers Want Something Different

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“Last month, FAIR [Fairness for All] attended the California Council for the Social Studies (CCSS) conference in Garden Grove, and what we encountered there reinforced our belief that we have created a solution educators genuinely need.

 

“Dr. Adam Seagrave’s presentation, How to Teach the Declaration of Independence and Ethnic Studies Together, drew a standing-room-only crowd. Educators were invited to explore the Declaration’s meaning across diverse American historical experiences and its global resonances, while engaging directly with primary sources, lesson plans, and other materials from Many Stories, One Nation. The interest was visible in real time. While Dr. Seagrave was still speaking, I watched several attendees visit FAIR’s website to examine the curriculum for themselves....

 

“Again and again, educators told us they were drawn to Many Stories, One Nation for reasons that go to the heart of how FAIR’s curriculum was designed. Rather than treating the experiences of ethnic groups in isolation, our approach is chronological and integrated. Students encounter different communities in historical context as participants in a shared American experience, grappling together with the forces that have shaped the nation across time. Teachers told us this felt both more honest and more teachable than curricula that silo groups into separate, disconnected units. One educator described it as the difference between a mosaic and a collage: the pieces in Many Stories, One Nation actually connect.

 

“The civil discourse component generated its own wave of enthusiasm. Teachers described classrooms that have become genuinely difficult to navigate, where students arrive with strong, often opposing convictions about history, identity, and belonging, and where a single discussion can fracture rather than build community. Several told us they had been looking for structured tools to help students engage across those differences with both rigor and respect. The civil discourse exercises woven throughout Many Stories, One Nation gave them exactly what they had been searching for: a pedagogically grounded way to model disagreement without division.” ...

 

Full article at Fair for All. See also the curriculum for 'Many Stories, One Nation' here: “Cultivating historical understanding through America’s diverse stories, shared values, and civil discourse.” See also bio for ASU Prof. Adam Seagrave here. 

 

Why the Case for College Isn’t Cutting It

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

“For years, there has been a dominant narrative about college: Earning a degree is the surest pathway to the American dream....

 

“Lately, though, that story line has begun to unravel. Recent college graduates are struggling to find work, with an unemployment rate of 5.6 percent, significantly higher than for older graduates or for all workers. Many are in jobs that don’t match their education levels.

 

"The college-going premium -- the wage differential between degree holders and those with less formal education -- is four percentage points lower today than it was a quarter century ago.

 

“The rapid pace of technological change -- in particular, advancements in artificial intelligence -- and a mismatch between what students study and what employers are looking for are among the causes, economists said....

 

“Many colleges have taken pains to show that they are delivering on [the promise of providing improved future incomes]. But that framing is an anathema to some academics, who object that it changes college from an educational to a transactional experience and fosters a customer-is-always-right mentality. In a recent Chronicle essay, Lee R. Bollinger, a former president of Columbia University and the University of Michigan, called it ‘one of the most pernicious characterizations of the university.’...

 

[Followed by discussion of the impact of AI, what employers are seeking, the increasing costs of college and the focus on graduate earnings, etc.]

 

“The push for such accountability comes not only from the right. More than a decade ago, President Barack Obama instituted a college scorecard for students and families, highlighting data about potential earnings and debt loads. Performance-based funding, which ties appropriations to student outcomes, has been a bipartisan effort. Even the American Association of University Professors, in its election-year campaign, touts that higher education is ‘saving lives, building futures, powering the economy.’...

 

“No single upheaval -- whether technological or economic -- may singlehandedly force higher education to abandon the narrative of college’s real-world returns. But the confluence of pressures bearing down means many colleges will need to craft a case that’s clear, compelling, and built for the 21st century.”

 

Full article at Chronicle of Higher Education.

 

A Faster Degree, or an Inferior One

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“For as long as anyone can remember, a bachelor’s degree has taken a minimum of four years and required 120 credits. But concerns about the value and cost and time needed to earn a bachelor’s have drawn renewed interest in an old idea: the three-year degree.

 

“For decades, the three-year degree was imagined as a way to allow a certain kind of student -- typically an academically focused and self-directed one -- to shave off a year of tuition and living costs to head out early into the work force. It often meant a student packed 120 credits into fewer semesters by barreling through a program on a year-round schedule....

 

“The movement for three-year degrees is animated by the notion that traditional four-year programs are packed with irrelevant courses that students don’t want or need, going far beyond what’s necessary to deliver the learning outcomes of a bachelor’s degree. Sometimes, general education is seen as the culprit. Others see elective courses as fluff.”...

 

[Followed by discussion of the potential benefits and risks of three-year degree programs already underway throughout the U.S.]

 

Full op-ed at Chronicle of Higher Education.

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

What Is Critical Thinking Anyway?

Full op-ed by Georgia State Prof. Rob Jenkins at Minding the Campus: “In my essay, Fixing Stupid, I argued that even though colleges seem to be making many people stupider these days, we can reverse that trend in relatively short order by going back to teaching classical critical thinking.”

 

The Quiet Death of Academic Tenure

Full op-ed at FIRE including how 125 years ago the Ross affair at Stanford was a key motivating factor for the widespread adoption of tenure.

 

College Board Nonprofit Makes AP Exams Easier and More Profitable

Full article at Campus Reform.

 

A Different Kind of AI Disclosure Statement

Full op-ed by Casper College Prof. Chad Hanson at Inside Higher Ed. See also “Students Embrace AI but Fear False Accusations” also 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.

 

Nine Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know Were Invented at Stanford: “The one-handed jump shot, the computer mouse, the klystron, and the human heart transplant are just a few of the game-changing innovations born at Stanford.”

 

What Should Governments Do About AI and Jobs?

 

Using Atomic Disorder to Design Longer-Lasting Batteries

 

How Much Protein Should We Really Be Eating?​

​

**********