STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

March 9, 2026

​

Professors Are Inviting Dialogue; That’s Not the Same as Free Speech

 

Editor’s note: Last week’s Newsletter had excerpts and a link to a recent study by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation saying that while a large percent of Americans remain highly skeptical about what has been taking place at America’s colleges and universities, others see it differently. The following op-ed by Stanford alum and Sarah Lawrence Prof. Samuel J. Abrams takes a closer look at the issues.

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“I regularly teach a freshman seminar at Sarah Lawrence College. And every semester, without fail, the same scene plays out. A student lingers after class, or appears at my office door, or sends a carefully worded late-night email, sharing a view they would never dream of voicing to their peers. Sometimes it’s a defense of Israel, or abortion rights, or gun control, or simply to confide that they are not extremely liberal. Sometimes it’s skepticism about a campus orthodoxy everyone seems to take for granted. Sometimes it’s something as basic as having a different opinion about an assigned text. They tell me these things because they’re not afraid of me. They’re afraid of the room.

 

“I thought about those students when I read the new Gallup and Lumina Foundation report, ‘The College Reality Check: What Students Experience vs. What America Believes.’ Its central message is reassuring: the critics of higher education are exaggerating. Between 64% and 74% of Democratic, Republican, and independent students say their professors encourage open dialogue. A mere 2% of all students, including just 3% of Republicans, feel they don’t belong on campus because of their political views. Nothing to see here, the report implies. Move along.

 

“But before accepting that reassurance, it helps to know who’s offering it. The Lumina Foundation is one of the most influential funders in American higher education, with an endowment of roughly $1.4 billion and a mission organized explicitly around equity and increasing college access and graduation rates. Those are laudable goals. But they shape the questions a researcher thinks to ask and, just as importantly, the questions that never make it onto the survey. A foundation whose work depends on students trusting and enrolling in colleges is unlikely to commission a study asking whether the climate inside those colleges suppresses minority viewpoints. The report does ask whether professors create safe environments for students with minority views -- and the answers are broadly positive. But those questions measure only faculty behavior. They cannot capture whether students themselves feel free to take the social and intellectual risks that genuine dissent requires.

 

“Scrutinize what actually is there, and the problems multiply. And FIRE’s data makes clear just how deep they go....

 

“The Gallup questions ask whether professors have encouraged dialogue and created safe classroom environments, but they do not measure whether students themselves feel able to take the social and intellectual risks that genuine dissent requires. Even beyond the survey’s design, there is reason to question whether a professor’s stated openness to diverse views translates into a classroom climate in which students are comfortable expressing disagreement. Harvard President Alan Garber offered a candid admission about his own institution that cuts to the heart of the problem. In rare and unusually candid remarks on the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Identity/Crisis podcast in January 2026, Garber acknowledged that Harvard ‘went wrong’ by allowing professors to inject their personal views into the classroom, arguing that faculty activism has chilled free speech and debate....

 

[Followed by discussion of how the survey is measuring the wrong thing, what FIRE’s data actually shows, why the problem is structural and not individual, and what needs to be done to get the diagnosis right.]

 

“Garber’s admission -- that Harvard went wrong, that faculty activism chills speech, that students won’t go toe-to-toe with a professor who has already taken sides -- is the most honest thing a university president has said about this problem in years. The Gallup report, for all its data, cannot see what Garber finally described: that the invitation to speak and the freedom to speak are not the same thing, and that on most campuses, one has been systematically undermining the other for a very long time.”

 

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

 

The Ongoing Problems with Stanford’s Housing Accommodations

 

Editor’s note:  Our Newsletter dated February 9, 2026 had excerpts from an article stating that nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates now claim they are disabled and need special accommodations for their on-campus housing, test-taking and/or other matters -- a number that significantly exceeds anything that exists at any of Stanford’s peer institutions. We present below still another student op-ed and some more recent developments on the subject.

The concern is that this problem largely arises from the fact that Stanford has failed to provide adequate undergraduate housing not just in recent years, but for decades, now made all the worse with the announcement that Stanford is in the process of increasing its undergraduate enrollment by 1,000 or more but with no increase in housing. All of this has, in turn, sent a strong signal to students to ignore the Fundamental Standard and do whatever is necessary to get a decent place to live. Hardly a way to teach critical and honest thinking.

 

Possible solution: Pause any increases in the undergraduate enrollment until there is truly adequate housing, not just in numbers but also in quality. In the process, consider adopting the plan proposed years ago by former Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education John Bravman where 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).

 

One of the easiest ways to remedy the problem would be to re-purpose, at the start of the 2026-27 academic year, 1,000 or more on-campus living spaces for undergraduates that are currently occupied by graduate students. It’s a matter of priorities. The obligation to provide adequate campus facilities, including on-campus housing, was a high priority of Senator and Mrs. Stanford and, under the Founding Grant and related documents, falls directly upon the Trustees. In any event, this is a problem that needs a solution.

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“My first initiative as an undergraduate senator was to run a campus-wide survey about last spring’s housing selection process, which left many students feeling confused and upset. Housing selection will never satisfy everyone, but -- with an average satisfaction score of 2.2 out of 7 -- it’s clear the 2024 process failed to clear most people’s bar.

 

“The biggest concern of students was the palpable increase in Office of Accessible Education (OAE) assignments, which many believe are being exploited to grab the best housing. So I met with many administrators in the Stanford Housing Machine (my umbrella term for R&DE, ResEd, CoRL and the URGC), and I learned this student concern was something very real: OAE accommodations have risen by 200% in the last few years. But housing sees this as a problem beyond their control. ‘We can’t refuse any accommodations,’ they explained in our advocacy meeting, arguing that the only thing to do is raise our concerns to OAE itself.

 

“Housing’s view was understandable: they cannot unilaterally restrict the number of accommodations [among other things, because of the requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act]. But the rest of the University also has plenty of reasons to ignore the ballooning OAE problem. Raising documentation standards could make the accommodation process harder for under-resourced students. A crackdown might also spark an all-school witch hunt for ‘fake OAEs,’ targeting students with less visible disabilities the hardest. And of course, every rejected OAE application risks non-compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.” ....

 

[Followed by these topics: make reassignment easier without OAE, bring back data-informed housing selection, end sophomore-priority, expand the number of themed houses, and renovate-renovate-renovate.]

 

Full op-ed by Stanford undergraduate Mandla Msipa at Stanford Daily (March 4, 2025).

See also this change in policy as announced last week:

 

“Stanford Students with OAE Accommodations Blocked from Forming Roommate Groups Under New Housing Rules” at Stanford Daily (March 3, 2026) followed by “Stanford’s Housing Change Hurts Disabled Students” also at Stanford Daily (March 8, 2026).

​

​Even though it is from June 2024, see also “Stanford’s Housing Disaster” at Stanford Daily that is referenced above (links in the original):

 

“The disastrous housing draw this year has seen rising seniors ending up in one-room triples and quads, with dozens of rising juniors being left unassigned -- meaning that they may not have confirmed housing for months up until move-in. All the while, Stanford has actively reduced both the number and quality of available rooms by slashing availability in [Escondido Village Graduate Residences] and converting doubles -- living spaces intended to fit two people -- into triples and quads in Roble and Toyon.... This situation has led to the creation of Swapford, an unofficial dorm room marketplace where desperate students are buying, selling and trading rooms for thousands of dollars on top of existing room prices.”

 

See also this recently posted reader comment from an alum:

 

“The combination of a chronic housing shortage (indeed getting worse as more students are admitted to each class), housing stock which varies substantially in quality and desirability, and a complicated ‘Draw’ system with arbitrary, bureaucratically derived rules, will inevitably lead to on-going efforts by students to ‘game the system’, which will inevitably lead to the creation of even more rules and regulations by bureaucrats. It’s a completely dysfunctional situation.  

“Surprisingly, it has been that way for decades, class year after class year, without being remedied in a thoughtful way, and is being made a more serious problem by admitting a thousand or more additional students without adding any additional housing stock. 

 

“Not a smart way to run a railroad.” 

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

Responding to Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity

Full op-ed by Harvard Prof. Tyler VanderWeele at Public Discourse: “The culture of self-censorship, cancellation, and lack of exposure to viewpoints has adversely affected the university. The increasing ideological skew of the faculty is largely responsible. Universities need to address these issues to help restore their truth-seeking mission.”

 

See also “Academic Freedom on the Line; the Critical Necessity of Viewpoint Diversity” by former Stanford law school dean and Prof. Emeritus (active) Paul Brest at Stanford Daily (February 10, 2026).

 

See also “Professors Need to Diversify What They Teach; It Isn't Indoctrination, But It Is a Lack of Ideological Diversity” by Claremont Colleges professors Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur and Stephanie Muravchik at Persuasion (October 16, 2025): “We wondered how well professors are introducing students to the moral and political controversies that divide intellectuals and roil our democracy. Not well, as it turns out. Across each issue we found that the academic norm is to shield students from some of our most important disagreements.”

 

Don’t Just Track Foreign Funding of U.S. Universities, Police It

Full op-ed at Minding the Campus. 

 

See also “Stanford Received $2.2 billion in Foreign Gifts and Contracts Since 1986” at Stanford Daily.

 

See also U.S. Department of Education website with interactive charts showing which foreign countries have made the highest total payments to U.S. universities (the top three are Qatar, China and Germany) and which universities received the highest total amounts (the top six are Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Cornell, Penn and Stanford).

​

Indiana Legislation Targets Low-Earning Degrees

Full article at College Fix: “An undergraduate degree is classified as having low earnings outcomes if, four years after graduation, the median earnings of its graduates do not exceed the median wages of certain high school-educated workers.” 

  

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.

 

How a HAI Seed Grant Helped Launch a Disease-Fighting AI Platform

 

A Daughter’s Diagnosis Transforms a Stanford Scientist’s Career

 

Efforts Continue to Develop a Better Alzheimer’s Drug

​

​**********