STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

September 21, 2026

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The Value of Open Minds -- Interview of Stanford President Jon Levin

 

Excerpt:

 

“When I started, I had a strong sense of what makes Stanford such a remarkable and distinctive institution: our excellence across disciplines, our ability to collaborate, our location at the center of global innovation, and our culture of openness and optimism. Two years in, I have a clearer appreciation of what matters for Stanford’s future. We help to define the frontiers of knowledge. We’re going to be at the forefront of how advances in technology, especially artificial intelligence, enable discovery and reshape education and the world. We’re also reaffirming the value of humanistic and civic thought. They’re at the core of liberal education, and essential to the creativity, reflection, and vibrant debate at the heart of Stanford’s curriculum and culture. Finally, it’s an important moment for American universities to renew the broad public support that’s critical for our country to lead the world, and we’re working nationally with our peers to do this.”

 

Full interview at Stanford Magazine.

 

See also full text of President Levin’s remarks at the convocation last week welcoming new students.

 

Princeton Alumni Document Lack of Viewpoint Diversity at Their University

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“A first of its kind study by Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) of reported Princeton faculty political contributions shows an alarming lack of viewpoint diversity as measured by donations to political candidates. Our findings are in line with similar studies of Yale and Harvard faculty.

 

“Contributions by current Princeton faculty reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) show 98% went to Democratic candidates or Democratic affiliated groups; 2% went to independent candidates or affiliated groups; and 0% went to Republicans or affiliated groups.

 

“Similarly, at Yale, a 2025 study of faculty donations reveals that 97.6% of faculty donations went to Democrats; 2.4% went to independents; and none went to Republicans. And Yale's Buckley Institute issued a major report, based largely on voter registrations, showing 82.3% of faculty are registered Democrats or support Democratic candidates; 15.4% are independent and 2.3% are Republican. Twenty-seven of 43 Yale undergraduate departments have no Republican faculty.

 

“A 2022 Harvard Crimson survey found that 82.46% of faculty reported being liberal or very liberal; 16.08% reported being moderates; and 1.46% reported being conservative -- an over 56 to 1 ratio of liberals to conservatives....

 

“By comparison, according to many polls, the U.S. voting population is roughly 30% each Democrat and Republican and 40% independent. We certainly do not argue that faculty should mirror such ratios, nor do we argue that registrations or contributions are exact measures of faculty thinking. Furthermore, we know that, while our study correctly shows that only 2% of reportable contributions went to independents and 0% went to Republicans, there are of course some independent and Republican faculty at Princeton.” ...

 

[Followed by discussion of how the study was done, the fact that this is more than a Trump-era problem, an analysis of similar data regarding Princeton’s trustees, the push-back by faculty, why viewpoint diversity is important, a focus on reformers, the need for university leadership, and the importance of faculty support.]

 

Full op-ed by Stanford and Princeton alum Ed Yingling and Princeton alum Leslie Spencer at Princetonians for Free Speech; a copy of the study is available here.

 

The Third Part of the Chicago Trifecta – The Shils Report on Faculty Hiring

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“When it comes to theories of institutional neutrality and free expression, two of the pillars of the ‘Chicago Trifecta’ -- the 1967 Kalven Report and the 2014 Chicago Principles -- are well known. But the third, the so-called Shils Report (named after its primary author, the sociologist Edward Shils), has been given much less attention in recent years. That’s too bad, because the report’s recommendations are especially germane in the current moment of disciplinary self-reflection and soul-searching.

 

[Followed by a detailed history of how the Shils Report was written in response to the termination of a specific faculty member and the student protests that arose as a result, as well as references to subsequent writings.]

 

“I distil from these essays five concerns that Shils had about the state of the American university [followed by these headings and where we also have included an excerpt from the more complete text that appears under each heading in the original]:

 

• A concern for maintaining the unity of research and teaching and resisting the politicization of both. “Shils seemed truly committed to a scholar-teacher model of faculty work. He warned the university against chasing societal influence by appointing professors who were, in the words of the report, ‘participants in contemporary events.’... He also suggests that it’s hypocritical for faculty to condemn outside political interference in their affairs while at the same time imposing political uniformity or orthodoxies of thought within their own units.”

   

• A concern about the rapid expansion of government into university affairs, as primarily reflected by the huge amount of federal grant money that was being made available for faculty research in the 1960s. “Shils expresses sympathy for Barzun’s critique of the ‘cult of research’ and the competition between universities to hire academic ‘stars’ who do little or no teaching. This perhaps explains the Shils Report’s worry about the ‘injurious stratifications’ that divide research and teaching faculty. It might also account for the report’s cheeky reference to ‘affluent mediocrities,’ a phrase which seems to implicate well-funded faculty members who do pedestrian research just because federal money is available for it.”

   

• A concern that two competing views of the university were beginning to displace an original view that prioritized knowledge production and transmission. “Shils wasn’t naïve about the university’s embeddedness in society. He acknowledged that intellectual standpoints are influenced by politics and he understood that what is considered ‘truth’ changes. He respected the faculty’s right to engage in extramural political speech. But he saw the first (and perhaps only) obligation of faculty to be the production and transmission of knowledge.”

 

• A concern about how affirmative action on the one hand, and cronyism on the other, would impact faculty hiring. “Shils warned about the risks and consequences of recruiting faculty on any basis other than demonstrated intellectual achievement and potential. He was also against cronyism and what the Shils Report describes as ‘inbreeding’ in faculty appointment and promotion. And he championed intellectual pluralism regarding objects of study, methodologies, and interpretative frameworks.”

 

• A concern about increasing specialization in research and teaching and the growing autonomy of academic departments.  “He laments the erosion of ‘institutional loyalty’ (or what today is sometimes called a ‘duty of care’ to the university) as personal and professional concerns ascend. This keeps the university from becoming more than the sum of its parts.”

 

“ . . . Shils was surely prescient in anticipating threats and challenges to the university with respect to institutional autonomy, shared governance, faculty hiring and tenure, activist scholarship, accountability to the public, and other matters that are currently the focus of significant controversy and conflict. Any contemporary study of the humanities and social sciences would benefit from the kind of analysis manifest in the Shils Report and Shils’s other writings, and a reconsideration of the academic values and ideals that he held dear.”

 

Full op-ed by Denver Prof. Emeritus Dean Saitta at Chronicle of Higher Education. 

 

Editor’s note: Instead of reinventing the proverbial wheel, we have long advocated that Stanford’s faculty, administration and trustees simply adopt all three parts of the Chicago Trifecta, as posted at our webpage here, and we are glad the Shils Report is finally getting the attention it deserves.

 

Higher Ed’s Middle-Manager Problem -- It’s Time to Get Serious About Administrative Bloat

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“For decades, faculty members have sounded the alarm over rising administrative costs: They’ve objected to expanding bureaucracy -- the proliferation of rules, processes, and layers of middle management -- and the migration of authority and money from academic units to central administration. Books like Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty and essays like Paul F. Campos’s 'The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much' in The New York Times and Derek Thompson’s 'No One Knows What Universities Are For' in The Atlantic occasionally carried the argument beyond campus, but it never became a sustained public concern. One of the two of us (Nicholas Zeppos) worked in academic leadership for three decades, and encountered it most often in faculty senates, occasionally in boardrooms, and rarely -- if ever -- in conversations outside the academy. Administrative bloat was, for the most part, inside baseball.

 

“That is no longer the case. Administrative costs have moved to the forefront of public debate and become a public trust issue. Vanderbilt University’s June 2026 Unity Poll, conducted by SSRS, asked 1,030 adults from a national sample their opinions on higher education: 37 percent identified growth in administration and bureaucracy as a leading cause of high college costs -- more than twice the share that blamed faculty salaries and benefits. Respondents also ranked decisions by college administrators as the largest source of problems in higher education. As this spring’s ‘Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education’ put it: ‘In public discourse, the most common critiques [of rising costs] point to administrative bloat, spending on buildings, and the ‘corporatization’ of the university.’ The public wants to know if colleges are exercising discipline and sound stewardship over the resources entrusted to them, or whether they are failing in their responsibility to manage their overhead....

 

[Followed by graph showing the outsized growth between 2010 and 2024 of non-academic salaries as compared to instruction salaries and core educational and research revenue and including discussion of why this is not mostly due to regulatory and compliance issues, an argument that is usually used to justify the significant administrative growth: ‘As the Yale trust report admitted, we reviewed Yale’s internal records on administration and staffing and found that answering even basic questions proved remarkably difficult.’]

 

“Administrative growth is not an unavoidable consequence of regulation or institutional complexity. Nor can it be controlled through periodic budget cuts. But it can be governed if leaders establish accountability for costs and services and redesign discrete functions end to end.

 

“Taken together, these practices define a new stewardship that should lie at the heart of the social contract between universities and society. Universities must bring to administration the same rigor, evidence, and willingness to challenge inherited assumptions that they bring to scholarship. They will restore trust only by reducing administrative complexity, bending their administrative-cost curve, and redirecting resources to the academic mission.”

 

Full op-ed by Vanderbilt Chancellor Emeritus Nicholas S. Zeppos and analyst Haseeb Kamal at Chronicle of Higher Education. 

 

See also “Princeton Confirms Deep Benefit Cuts as Financial Belt-Tightening Widens” at EDU Ledger: “Princeton University employees will pay significantly more for healthcare and see reduced retirement contributions starting in 2027, the latest sign that one of the nation’s wealthiest universities is pressing ahead with a multiyear austerity campaign that has already reshaped faculty hiring, staffing levels, and campus operations.”

 

See also the detailed numbers as long posted at our Stanford Concerns webpage comparing Stanford with other major universities -- including the fact that Stanford has the highest administrative cost per student of any university in the country -- as well as our proposals for action at our Back to Basics at Stanford webpage.

 

Too Many Faculty Are Working in Disciplinary Echo Chambers

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“Imagine being a faculty member on a university campus. Your job is to discover, produce, and disseminate knowledge. Now also imagine that you have no regular interactions with colleagues in which you have substantial disagreement about your area of scholarship and teaching....

 

“Yet, for nearly 30% of U.S. university faculty, this is the reality. In a new survey, Heterodox Academy, in partnership with National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, asked over 3,500 faculty how many colleagues they regularly engage with who disagree with them on important scholarly matters. Twenty-nine percent of them said the answer was zero -- zero. For faculty who are on contingent or adjunct teaching contracts, this number is 41 percent.

 

“This amounts to a significant and non-trivial number of faculty effectively working in disciplinary echo chambers, which matters given the proliferation of criticism surrounding universities on how they shape student politics, the public dislike of campus political agendas, and the observed political lopsidedness among faculty. The fact that so many faculty tasked with teaching college students get no regular pushback from their colleagues about matters they are teaching or researching should be a cause for concern for every faculty member, department chair, and dean responsible for the education our students are getting and the knowledge our universities are producing.” ...

 

[Followed by discussion of possible solutions.]

 

Full op-ed at Heterodox.

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

Aristotle and AI

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Full op-ed by Utah Prof. Hollis Robbins at Substack: “Aristotle was among the first to divide language into parts, beginning with sounds and syllables and moving up to words and sentences. He sorts words into the ordinary ones a community uses and strange ones that strangers use. He defines the probable as what typically happens. He defines plot and argument by what a listener expects to hear. Most importantly, he assumes his reader knows nothing. He cares about language at a basic level and communication as something performed.” See also the link contained in this op-ed to Stanford Computer Science Course #324 re large language models.

 

The Diversity Hypothesis -- A Literature Review

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Full op-ed by Concordia Prof. Zachary Patterson at Heterodox STEM: “The hypothesis is stated in different ways but is generally of the form that ‘diversity’ improves science.... To undertake the study we followed an internationally recognized methodology.... We conclude that there is little evidence to support the Diversity Hypothesis (with the possible exception of disciplinary diversity) and that as a hypothesis it should be rejected. We also conclude, based on this, that the Diversity Hypothesis should not be used to justify policies to ‘diversify’ science or scientific research.”

  

What Donors Should Know About Universities

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Full op-ed by Columbia alum Tao Tan and George Washington President Emeritus Stephen Joel Trachtenberg at Sapir Journal: “In a healthier era, the features of this enterprise would support, nurture, and protect scholars of all backgrounds. But they have a consequence that donors do not always absorb: The normal tools of corporate influence, the ones that work so well in every other institution that a major donor has ever touched, do not work here. Directives are ignored. Ultimatums produce martyrs. Even a polite expression of concern, if framed in the ‘wrong’ terms or expressed through the ‘wrong’ channel, is experienced as a violation of intellectual autonomy, and resisted on principle. Over a thousand years of storied history, the university has developed powerful institutional antibodies against perceptions of outside meddling.”

 

The Race to Scientific Mediocrity

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Full op-ed by SUNY Prof. Emeritus J. Scott Turner at Minding the Campus: “Any reform will start with the realization that these perverse outcomes are incentivized. In science, the perverse incentives trace to elevating the meaningless concept of scientific ‘productivity’ above scientific discovery, which itself traces to the federalization of science that began in 1950. Reverse that, and science will gradually return to its natural ethic of discovery, where it was prior to that misbegotten 1950 experiment.”

 

NLRB Official Says Stanford Residential Advisers Can Unionize

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Full article at Reuters; see also Stanford Daily and Stanford Res 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.

 

A Blueprint for Keeping Humans in Control of AI

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Stanford Faculty Paired with Student Athletes

 

Stanford Releases Long-Term Campus Plan

 

AI Model Opens New Horizons for Cell Biology

 

Forecasting Toxic Metals in Wildfire Smoke

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