STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

July 13, 2026

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Academic Civics -- What Does It Mean to Be a Citizen of Your University?

 

To Safeguard the Future of the American University, We Need to Reconnect with Our Institutions, and One Another

 

Excerpts (link in the original):

 

“The current pressures on American universities have produced something unexpected: a genuine opportunity to establish a new kind of civic commitment that can bind the university together even as a wave of pressures threatens to pull it apart. Across campuses, students, faculty, staff, administrators and trustees are paying attention to their institutions in ways they rarely do in quieter times, asking what universities are for, what they are committed to and what kinds of communities they wish to be. Universities have the civic frameworks required to reverse ingrained patterns of alienation and disengagement; the challenge is to activate them.

 

“Over the last nine months, a group of 18 Cornell University faculty were charged by the provost with divining the Future of the American University amid a moment of extraordinary disruption driven by AI, a collapsing relationship with the federal government and the erosion of public trust in our teaching and scholarship. In countless meetings, town halls, deliberations and debates, we constantly found ourselves returning to a common theme: The future of the American university depends on a reinvention of the principles of solidarity that bind the academic community together.

 

“This new form of academic civics requires that universities make three institutional commitments: to bridge our silos, to inform our communities and to honor the deliberation we invite. Together these commitments represent the difference between a university able to govern itself with a coherent voice and one that remains mired in fragmentation and alienation....

 

“The forces driving disengagement have accumulated over decades. Regulatory and compliance obligations have made administration an increasingly specialized professional culture, operating under constraints it often cannot fully share with the communities it serves. The expertise required of faculty, staff and administrators alike has made specialists of us all, leaving little bandwidth for fluency beyond our own domains.

 

“Faculty are embedded in disciplinary communities that extend around the world even as they may be less fluent in the institutional life immediately around them. Staff contribute indispensably to daily operations while the work they do remains unappreciated by many of those who depend on it. Students typically move through their programs with little meaningful understanding of how their campuses work.

 

“The result is a community of strangers created not by deliberate choice, but by the quiet, cumulative pressure of the modern university. This estrangement cannot be cured by nostalgia for institutional arrangements long past. What this moment demands is not civic restoration but reinvention.” ...

 

[Followed by discussion of possible actions to be taken.]

 

Full op-ed by Cornell associate dean and secretary of the faculty Adam T. Smith at Inside Higher Ed. 

 

See also our Stanford Concerns webpage where we provide comparative data and charts and highlight related concerns. See also our Back to Basics at Stanford webpage with proposals re faculty leadership, student life, administrative staff and concerns regarding the 200 to 300 centers and similar entities at Stanford. 

 

Simplify, Then Simplify Again

 

Cutting Red Tape to Make Stanford Work Better

 

Excerpts:

 

“When I was appointed president, I went around and talked to many people at the university. I kept hearing stories about being frustrated by bureaucracy and red tape. I was dismayed. I think Stanford needs to be an entrepreneurial place where faculty, students, and staff can make good things happen, and the university allows smart risks....

 

“One thing that infuriates people is filling out thickets of paperwork. There’s a whole genre of academic stories about going to give a seminar and being forced to register as a vendor to get reimbursed for an Uber. The students in Computer Science 247S: Service Design, helped to set up a simple online portal and cut Stanford’s reimbursement times from 13 days to two.

 

“By now, there have been around 100 simplification projects. Students proposed ways to speed up approvals for class T-shirts and improve planning for events. Stanford staff, who suffer the most from bureaucratic sludge, have been responsible for the lion’s share of the successes....

 

“Stanford is known for producing problem-solvers. That should apply to how the university works for its faculty, students, and staff. If there’s a problem, we solve it.” ...

 

Full interview of Stanford President Jon Levin at Stanford Magazine.

 

See also our Back to Basics at Stanford webpage.

See also this sample of Reader Comments from recent years:

 

• “For a considerable amount of time, we have been reading articles about the administrative bloat affecting Stanford. Is there a plan to start trimming the excess? I should think the Board of Trustees would be actively working with President Levin to trim administrators and hire more professors.”

 

• “17,000 staff members is shocking. With the one-to-one ratio between students and staff, every student has his/her own corresponding staff member. For an institution on the cutting edge of tech innovation and societal productivity, it is instead structured like an old-time, bureaucratic, outdated institution of the distant past: GE, GM, etc. Really in need of a serious re-structuring.”

 

• “Wow! 17K Stanford administrators [and staff] is absurd. Does a master organizational chart exist to show the density of administrators in all specific areas of responsibility? Would love to see it, if it exists.”

 

Reclaiming Liberal Education in America

 

Excerpt:

 

“With this collection of 40 columns written for RealClearPolitics from 2014 through 2025, [Hoover Senior Fellow] Peter Berkowitz offers a short history of the decline of liberal education in America and provides a concise case for, and sketches measures essential to, reclaiming it.

 

“The essays clarify liberal education’s aims, structure and content, and spirit. They illuminate the stakes for freedom and democratic self-government in America, placing contemporary controversies about higher education -- especially at the nation’s most selective colleges and universities -- in their larger intellectual and political context. And they explore the variety of dysfunctions that plague American campuses, including censorship, curtailment of due process for those accused of sexual misconduct, invidious and unlawful allocation of benefits to students and faculty based on race and other forms of group identity, and politicization and hollowing of the curriculum.” ...

 

Pre-publication summary at Amazon.

 

When Did the Academy Become Illiberal?

 

Excerpts:

. . . .

“Visit most any university or college campus today, and the vision of the idyllic community -- the stately buildings, well-tended lawns, state-of-the-art athletic facilities, and lively local hangouts -- survives. So do broad fields of genuine excellence, particularly in STEM fields such as biomedical research, astrophysics, and computer science. And universities still play a vital role as educators of future doctors, attorneys, nurses, engineers, and other essential professions.

 

“But the broader argument for universities has become harder to make in recent years. Social mobility? A tough nut to swallow for parents who pay exorbitant tuitions, or for students faced with decades of paying off their loans, or for graduates reckoning with the ever-diminishing prestige and purchasing power of most degrees. Intellectual seriousness? Not at universities where grade inflation is rampant, aggressive ideologues (including tenured professors, adjunct lecturers, and graduate students) teach undergraduates, students are afraid to speak their minds, and social life is, by turns, frivolous, libertine, and censorious. Political independence? Administrators have been required to enforce legally dubious ‘Dear Colleague’ letters from the U.S. Department of Education. University presidents live in fear of being called to testify before Congress, and nonprogressive university faculty (usually moderate Democrats) must bite their tongues lest they fall afoul of prevailing campus orthodoxies.

 

“And then there’s antisemitism. For years, a handful of worried observers had warned, in newspaper op-eds, magazine essays (including in Sapir), and documentaries such as Columbia Unbecoming that campus life was increasingly hostile to Jewish students, at least those who didn’t publicly abjure Zionism. Those activists were treated as semi-hysterics. Then came October 7, and the moral and intellectual rot that it exposed on one campus after another, particularly at the universities that were thought of as elite.

 

“How did universities fall off their pedestals? Many reasons, but one is central: the turn away from liberalism as the dominant mindset of the academy....

 

“There’s a straightforward way out of this mess. It’s a return to the values of the liberal university.

 

“Already, there are academic leaders willing to go there. In his impressive inaugural speech, Jonathan Levin, Stanford’s new president, put the point clearly: ‘The university’s purpose is not political action or social justice,’ he said. ‘It is to create an environment in which learning thrives.’ Sian Leah Beilock, the president of Dartmouth, has been equally clear: ‘Universities must be places where different ideas and opinions lead to personal growth, scientific breakthroughs, and new knowledge,’ she recently wrote in The Atlantic. ‘But when a group of students takes over a building or establishes an encampment on shared campus grounds and declares that this shared educational space belongs to only one ideological view, the power and potential of the university die.’ Daniel Diermeier, the chancellor of Vanderbilt, makes much the same point...

 

“But even if the way out is clear, the obstacles in the way are large. Among them: [illiberal faculty, indifferent faculty, social hostility, a deeply entrenched DEI bureaucracy, students who focus on victimization, the political environment, a selective adherence to free expression and a tenure system ‘that is supposed to guarantee academic freedom but often helps entrench an illiberal and self-dealing faculty’.]"...

 

Full op-ed by Editor-in-Chief Bret Stephens at Sapir (2024).

 

The Conversations We Keep Avoiding

 

Excerpts (link in the original):

 

“If there is one sentence I hear more than any other from students, faculty, and administrators alike, it is some version of this: we don't know how to talk to each other anymore. Not across the political aisle. Not across the pew. Not even across the dinner table. We have become a nation of parallel monologues, each of us shouting into our own echo chamber and calling it conversation.

 

“That is why I keep coming back to a program that is quietly doing something radical on 277 college campuses in 46 states. It is called Unify America, and I believe every college and university in this country needs to take a hard look at what it is building....

 

“Here is how it works. A student signs up for a slot, almost like buying a movie ticket. They are matched with another student from a different part of the country, someone who differs from them politically, geographically, and often generationally in outlook. There is no facilitator hovering in the virtual room. Just two young people and a guided set of questions, walking through issues some of us are too afraid to raise at the Thanksgiving table. Arielle Mizrahi, the organization's director of partnerships, calls it building civic muscle, which is why the flagship initiative is called the Civic Gym. Nobody wakes up wanting a hard conversation with a stranger who disagrees with them about abortion, guns, immigration, or student loan debt forgiveness. But you can be trained to do it, the same way you train a muscle you did not know you had.” ...

 

Full article by Trinity Washington U Prof. Jamal Watson at EDU Ledger.  

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

American Council of Trustees and Alumni Releases a Guide to Artificial Intelligence for College Trustees

Full guide at ACTA website.

 

How Does the First Amendment Apply to AI?

Full article at FIRE/Expression.

 

Decline of PhD Admissions Could Imperil a Generation of New Talent

Full article at NY Times. But see also “America Is Pumping Out Too Many PhDs” from Bloomberg (2021) as reproduced at Yahoo.

 

Forget Wall Street; Elite Students Are Spending Their Summers on Startup Dreams

Full article at WSJ.

 

Study Finds Nearly 90 Percent of Students Fake Progressive Views to Appease Liberal Professors

Full article at Campus Reform (2025).

 

Readying UNC for Another 250 Years of Civic Life

Full article at James Martin Center.

 

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.

 

The Secret to Human Brilliance That AI Can’t Match

 

Stanford’s Gen Z Students Show More Optimism About Bridging Divides Than Any Other Age Group

 

Stanford’s 50 Years of Consistent NCAA Athletic National Championships

 

Breakthrough Use of AI in Pathology

 

Two Opposing Proteins May Hold Key to Healthy Skin

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