December 19, 2023

A Note to Our Readers:

When we launched our website and these weekly Newsletters over 14 months ago, many current and past Stanford administrators and Trustees were questioning the value of these efforts. How times have changed, both locally and nationwide, and we hope Stanford will finally take the actions that have long been needed. See, for example, our Back to Basics at Stanford white paper and our compilations of the Chicago Trifecta which we believe would largely address the issues now in front of university leaders.

From the President of Heterodox Academy: Campus Hypocrisy

Excerpts:

“As many have noted, there was profound hypocrisy in the spectacle of prominent university presidents claiming to be staunchly committed to free expression, when their own institutions have been anything but. For years, a practice of silencing offensive ideas has run rampant on college campuses -- including at Harvard, MIT, and Penn. Just ask Carole Hooven, Tyler VanderWeele, Amy Wax, or the admitted Harvard students who were disinvited for sharing the wrong memes online. Any credible change in principles should start by acknowledging and rectifying such mistakes, not brazenly pretending they never happened.

“We have seen this same pattern of hypocrisy in universities’ enforcement of various speech-adjacent rules. Rules about putting up posters, or taking them down, about bullying and harassment -- such as obstructing the passage of students into and out of classes and events -- have been enforced selectively, if at all. At one Ivy League university, whose handbook explicitly forbids the shouting down of speakers, the university president was recently shouted down -- without disciplinary response.

“But the opposite hypocrisy is also visible. Some advocates of free expression have failed to distinguish between true threats and harassment (which are rightly banned), and debatable slogans or offensive ideas about geopolitics and war. As others have argued, asking university administrators to decide which slogans and arguments count as a ‘call for genocide’ – in the absence of a true threat or harassment – is ill-advised. For example, consider the opinions and slogans that could easily be cast as calls for ‘Gazan genocide,’ ‘trans genocide,’ or “genocide of the unborn.’ History shows that speech codes have a way of coming around to bite their advocates.

“Yet this moment is about more than free speech, because free speech is a low bar for a university. Excellence in research and education also requires a positive set of ideals, habits, and cultural norms. It is these norms that distinguish the academy from an ordinary place for clashing opinions. Without open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement, an institution of higher education can easily degrade into just another outpost for this or that constituency, worldview or monoculture.…”

Full letter from Brown University Prof. John Tomasi, who also is president of the Heterodox Academy, at Heterodox website including list of actions for college and university leaders to consider taking.

Colleges and Universities at a Crossroads

Excerpts:

“The Penn rebels have now upped the ante. They have drafted a new constitution for the school that makes merit the sole criterion for student admissions and faculty hiring. The new charter requires the university to embrace institutional neutrality with regard to politics and faculty research. The rebels want candidates for Penn’s presidency to embrace the new charter as a precondition for employment....

“The donor revolt could have broken out at any number of campuses, all of which featured ignorant students cheering on the deliberate massacre of civilians, those students’ faculty enablers and bureaucratic fellow travelers, and feckless presidents. But it first erupted at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, perhaps because of the organization and self-confidence of their alumni.…”

Full op-ed by Stanford law school alum Heather MacDonald at City Journal. See also Part Two of Ms. MacDonald's essay and a similar article at FIRE

[Editor’s note: Rather than reinventing the wheel, as some Penn faculty seem to be doing, we suggest that Penn and other universities, including Stanford, simply adopt the Chicago Trifecta as long posted at our website.]

A Five-Point Plan to Save Harvard from Itself

Excerpts:

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“For almost four centuries, Harvard University, my employer, has amassed a reputation as one of the country’s most eminent universities. But it has spent the past year divesting itself of tranches of this endowment. Notorious incidents of cancellation and censorship have contributed to a plunge in confidence in institutions of higher education, prompting me and more than 100 colleagues to found a new Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. That was before Harvard came in at last place in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s Free Speech ranking of 248 colleges, with a score of 0 out of 100 — originally less than zero, but Harvard benefited from a bit of grade inflation. (I’m a FIRE adviser but had no role in the rankings.) …

“Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context. 

“So for the president of Harvard to suddenly come out as a born-again free-speech absolutist, disapproving of what genocidaires say but defending to the death their right to say it, struck onlookers as disingenuous or worse.”

Full op-ed by Harvard Prof. Steven Pinker at Boston Globe and republished at MSN, including Prof. Pinker’s five-point plan re free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity and disempowering DEI.

DEI Bureaucracy Fails the Stress Test at MIT

Excerpts:

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“The recent outbreak of antisemitism at MIT and other campuses puts into stark relief the limits of administrative bureaucracies’ ability to solve the problems of human relationships and tribalism.

“. . . the [MIT] administration announced its massive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiative which by some counts added up to about a hundred professional administrators with some variation of DEI in their titles.

“The employment site Glassdoor reports that the low end for salaries of Assistant Deans at MIT is about  $100K. Add up salaries of over a hundred people at this level, their support staff, benefits for all, and ordinary office overhead at average Institute burden rates, and a $20 million annual price tag for all this feel-good bureaucracy (on top of existing student support such as counseling, psychiatric services, etc.) seems like a very fair rough estimate of the total cost.…

“If current trends do not change, there is no apparent end to the creation of administrative bloat with ever more offices perceived to be responsive to discrete identities, denoted by ever multiplying acronyms. In the long run, I can only hope that we move back toward a culture that seeks to attract talent without discrimination from wherever it may come, and that counsels us all to respect each another simply as individuals who, in Dr. King’s words, ‘will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.’ And, along the way, let us reduce administrative costs so they are no more than those at peer institutions and add $30,000 or so in annual per student savings back into student aid!”

Full op-ed by MIT AFSA alumni leader Steve Carhart at The Tech

See also Stanford’s Ballooning Administrative Bureaucracy, including ten DEI administrators for every 1,000 students at Stanford.

From Four Harvard Undergraduates: Harvard's Double Standard

Excerpt:

“On Tuesday, we started our day by reading an email from the Harvard Corporation saying that President Claudine Gay's decision to copy-and-paste another author’s paragraph into her own work without citation did not violate Harvard’s plagiarism standards. Thirty minutes later, we signed an academic integrity pledge on an exam stating that it was against the Harvard Honor Code to misrepresent another’s work as your own. The whiplash was incredible.”

Full op-ed by four Harvard undergraduates at Heterodox STEM

Harvard’s President Gay Copied Entire Paragraphs

Excerpts:

“The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism. Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard’s own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that 'it's not enough to change a few words here and there.'

“Rather, scholars are expected to cite the sources of their work, including when paraphrasing, and to use quotation marks when quoting directly from others. But in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences -- even entire paragraphs -- with just a word or two tweaked....”

Full article at Washington Free Beacon

Progressive Education Isn't What You Think It Is

Excerpt:

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“Educating students in progressive pedagogy involves learning how to establish truth, teaching resilience when mistakes are made, and demonstrating how to grow from errors and misfires. Current thinking involving the promotion of self-esteem and avoiding correcting or questioning students is regressive and harms their intellectual and personal development. This happens too often in too many schools. It has nothing to do with the classic model of progressive education.

“Indoctrination in classrooms is a pervasive problem nationwide and it damages our students and their authentic learning, and obfuscates their moral compasses. But that is a function of bad teaching and administrative oversight, not progressive education.”

Full op-ed by Sarah Lawrence Prof. Samuel J. Abrams at Real Clear Education

University Presidents and Trustees Flunk Out

Excerpt:

… “First came the speech codes. No, those came second. What began the long downhill roll in the 1970s was grade inflation. Students whose work deserved a C demanded an A or B. Professors who resisted this threat to standards gave up.

“That was an early inkling that traditional college norms could be pushed around and politicized. Speech codes emerged at many schools, not least Harvard, arguing that certain words were—another new vocabulary addition – ‘hurtful.’

“After establishing that words alone could bring reprimand by the university, the speech coders expanded the prohibitions to include something new called microaggressions, or inadvertent slights. Microaggressions had a fraternal twin, trigger warnings, which required profs to warn students that a text or even a thought might distress them.

“It sounds like a joke now, but we know it was no joke. This was the moment when the adults in the room -- presumably the universities’ presidents -- should have intervened to protect free speech and inquiry from being diminished. They did not. Virtually without exception, they were pusillanimous. Fellow ostriches included hundreds of spineless boards of trustees.…”

Full op-ed at Wall Street Journal

See also our article from many months ago about Stanford’s Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative including a PDF copy of the over 100 words and phrases that Stanford’s IT department somehow felt empowered to start censoring.

University Boards of Trustees in the Spotlight

Excerpts:

“University boards of trustees hold immense power over budgets, presidential picks and campus policies. They are also beset with longstanding challenges, including an often-unwieldy size, confusion over their responsibilities and limited relevant expertise.…

“Board members are volunteers, meet only occasionally, and often are asked to vote on complex issues with limited information. That can leave them heavily reliant on the management they are supposed to be overseeing.…

“But just as disengaged boards can cause problems at a school, there is also danger in trustees being too involved, noted some observers. Citing a common rule of corporate governance, [Morton Schapiro, former president of Northwestern,] said, ‘Not-for-profit boards are supposed to have noses in, fingers out.’”

Full article at Wall Street Journal

Why Top Colleges’ Professors Are Giving Up and Just Giving Everybody an A

Excerpt:

“Professors hand out A’s right and left. This is not because it gives their students a leg up in the job market or because our bosses at big universities require it, but because it is just so much safer.

“Grade inflation has been in the discussion at America’s top colleges for a long time, but even seasoned veterans were shocked by a recent study showing that nearly 80 percent of all the grades given to undergraduates at Yale University last year were in the A range.

“We started giving out trophies for participation in school sports, and now we are giving out A’s at top colleges -- heck, for even less than participation. (‘My mental health and social anxiety was too bad to ever attend class.’) The fight to give fair grades is just too much of a pain in the neck, and way too risky, for a mere lone professor to face.…”

Full article at The Hill

More About Stanford’s Alleged Roles in Nationwide Censorship

Excerpts:

“. . . records in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that show a close collaboration between DHS’s Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) and the leftist Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) [based at Stanford] to engage in ‘real-time narrative tracking’ on all major social media platforms in the days leading up to the 2020 election.

“The records discuss ‘takedowns’ of social media posts and the avoidance of creating public records subject to FOIA [the federal laws that require disclosure of documents if created by, sent by or received by federal agencies].…

“The consortium is comprised of four member organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika. It set up a concierge-like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State’s Global Engagement Center to file ‘tickets’ requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech.

“Three liberal groups -- the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP -- were also empowered like the federal agencies to file tickets seeking censorship of content. A Homeland-funded collaboration, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also had access....

“Setup: [Stanford Internet Observatory] will have dedicated Slack, something like Jira or Salesforce (will ask for donation), separate from Stanford and destroyed once over....”

Full article at Judicial Watch

Still More About Stanford’s Alleged Roles in Nationwide Censorship

Excerpts:

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“According to the leaders of the Stanford Internet Observatory and the other groups, they simply alerted social media platforms to potential violations of their Terms of Service. What the platforms chose to do after that was up to them.

“But during the two years that these DHS-empowered researchers were asking social media platforms to take down, throttle, or otherwise censor social media posts, the President of the United States was accusing Big Tech of ‘killing people,’ his then-press secretary said publicly that the administration was ‘flagging violative posts for Facebook,’ members of Congress threatened to strip social media platforms of their legal right to operate because, they said, the platforms weren’t censoring enough, and many supposedly disinterested researchers were aggressively demanding that the platforms change their Terms of Service.

“It's true that social media platforms are private companies technically free to censor content as they see fit and are under no clearly stated obligation to obey demands by the US government or its authorized ‘researchers’ at Stanford or anywhere else.

“... In the case of the [Election Integrity Partnership] and [the Virality Project, both based at Stanford], four think tanks led by Stanford Internet Observatory, or SIO, and reporting to CISA, demanded and achieved mass censorship of the American people in direct violation of the First Amendment and the prohibition on government agencies from interfering in an election.

“AMITT [Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques] was a disinformation framework that included many offensive actions, including working to influence government policy, discrediting alternative media, using bots and sock puppets, pre-bunking, and pushing counter-messaging.... 

“I believe this dramatic situation requires the abolition of CISA. If it is doing good cybersecurity work, then it should be placed under the supervision of different leadership at a different agency free from the awful and unlawful behaviors of the last three years.

“The turning against the American people of counterterrorism tactics once reserved for foreign enemies should terrify all of us and inspire a clear statement that never again shall our military, intelligence, and law enforcement guardians engage in such a recklessly ideological and partisan ‘warfare against civilians.’”

Full testimony by Michael Shellenberger at Public

I Teach a Class on Free Speech. My Students Can Show Us the Way Forward

Excerpts:

“Free speech is very hard to get right, especially on campus -- as has been evident all fall at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach a course on the history of free speech and censorship. If colleges and universities are best understood as microcosms of the larger world, they should be governed by the First Amendment alone. This would mean restricting only speech that directly incites violence, threatens specific individuals or constitutes targeted harassment.

“But if colleges and universities -- public or private -- are better understood as special spaces with missions distinct from the world at large, they need some special rules of operation, tailored to the

classroom, the student club and the college green.

“One problem is that neither the left nor the right knows which model fits, making it difficult to determine any fair boundaries for campus speech. The politics around free speech have also shifted. And norms about what counts as dangerous speech, and what ought to be done about its articulation, have been changing faster than any of us can keep up with them.

“No wonder students are confused when it comes to speech on campus right now. Frankly, so are faculties, administrators and, yes, donors and trustees....

“Students go to college largely to gain knowledge that will be useful in the here and now: the workplace, the democratic public sphere and private life. Importantly, that includes how to think about all sides of a given problem. It also includes how to get along with others across differences. But neither of these tasks is done without some informal rules. In my classroom, when we are conversing about the history of speech, we are also following a series of speech protocols that we’ve worked out in practice. No one, for example, can speak on top of anyone else, and no one can personalize the conversation in ways that draw attention to individuals rather than arguments. Free speech was never imagined, even by its earliest advocates, as a free-for-all. This is something that needs to be instilled.…”

Full op-ed by Penn Prof. Sophia Rosenfeld at NY Times

Don’t Create More Safe Spaces on Campus

Excerpts:

“I’m a Jew and, heaven knows, no one has been more critical of elite colleges than I’ve been, but the greatest intellectual threat of these times is neither antisemitism nor Ivy League schools -- it’s to academic freedom and the First Amendment’s protection of speech. Without a rapid course correction, [former Penn president Liz] Magill’s ouster will undermine the values of the American academy and the essence of what it means to be a college student....

“[At the Congressional hearings,] it would have been worth noting that even the advocacy of genocide -- however abhorrent -- would be protected speech. The touchstone here should be the University of Chicago’s free speech principles, which were created following a series of disputes over controversial commencement speakers and have been adopted by over 100 universities and endorsed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the nation’s leading defender of campus speech. Neither Harvard, Penn, nor MIT, have adopted what’s known as the Chicago Statement, though the free speech code at Harvard contains several similar elements and a petition at MIT to adopt the Chicago Statement has 163 faculty signatories....

“Our job is not to promote intellectually safe spaces but rather to challenge students with controversial ideas and views. As the Chicago Statement puts it, ‘education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think.’ It is from engaging with people and ideas with which they disagree that people learn and evolve. This is the essence of the value of college.

“No professor would protect a student who expressed a hateful view with the aim of disrupting a class or making a fellow student uncomfortable. But any teacher worth their salt would die to protect a student trying to articulate their honest conception of justice.”

Full op-ed by Johns Hopkins Prof. Evan Mandery at Politico

Other Articles of Interest

You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Be a College President 

Full op-ed at Chronicle of Higher Education

What Universities Have Done to Themselves

Full op-ed by Peggy Noonan at Wall Street Journal

Education Department Is Investigating Six More Colleges Regarding Campus Discrimination, Including Stanford

Full article at NY Times

Finding Solutions to America’s Civics Crisis 

Full article at Real Clear Education

Diversity Year in Review

Full article at Diverse Issues in Higher Education

Cheering Hamas on Campus, Too Uneducated to Grasp How Grotesque That is

Full op-ed by George Will at Washington Post

The Coming Wave of Freshman Failure

Full article at James Martin Center

Nearly Half of Companies Say They Plan to Eliminate Bachelor’s Degree Requirements in 2024

Full article at Higher Ed Dive