STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

 

 

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​​​​May 25, 2026

  

Stanford Students Deserve Better Than COLLEGE

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“The Stanford Faculty Senate voted [two weeks ago] to extend COLLEGE, a program of three general-education courses – [1] Why College? [2] Citizenship in the 21st Century, and [3] a Global Perspectives menu -- that all undergraduates take in their first year. The vote was nearly unanimous. I voted no. 

 

“I did not take the vote lightly. Many colleagues have worked on this program for years, and I acknowledge these efforts. But I cannot support a program I believe will be detrimental to the education we offer our students. 

 

“My objection is not to general ed requirements. The humanities are indispensable to an undergraduate education, and a Stanford degree is incomplete without some exposure to the best of them. 

 

“My objection to COLLEGE is, first and foremost, about rigor and quality and, second, about balance. These are not the courses one expects from one of the world’s best universities. If these courses were electives, I would not recommend them; I would tell students to seek out the best courses Stanford offers in the humanities instead....

 

[Followed by an analysis of the political and philosophical biases in the required readings and alleged failures of the program’s pedagogy.]

 

“Quality is my primary concern, but one cannot avoid the question of tendentiousness. The Why College? syllabus [which is the theme for all of the first quarter] is organized around the power-and-identity framework that has done so much to divide our campuses and our country. Selecting Freire, Du Bois and Dangarembga in the same course, without including a defender of a more classic universalist view of the human condition, is tendentious. The choice of Tara Westover’s ‘Educated’ fits the same pattern: the only book in the course that depicts a religious, conservative family in any detail presents it as a horror story of right-wing fundamentalism from which the protagonist must escape in order to be educated at all. The fixation of universities on identity politics is one of the reasons they have lost the confidence of the public, and COLLEGE does nothing to address this. It doubles down. 

 

“The Global Perspectives menu [which is the theme for the third quarter] has a different but related defect: it is not, in any recognizable sense, general education. The menu is a list of narrow electives -- on the ethics of eating meat, on avoiding human extinction, on the global history of queer life, and so on. Some of these may be fine electives. But no coherent argument places any of them at the foundation of a Stanford education, alongside the works and questions that every educated person should encounter. They are general only in the sense that they are required....

 

“Stanford deserves better. Our students deserve better. I voted against this program because I believe a great university can still teach the works that have made our civilization worth defending, and that it should. The question is whether we still have the confidence to do so.”

 

Full op-ed by Stanford Prof. Ivan Marinovic at Stanford Daily.

 

See also “Stanford Extends COLLEGE to Three Quarters, Defending Liberal Arts Requirements” at Stanford Daily (May 14, 2026). 

See also “We Must Do Better Than COLLEGE” by Stanford undergraduate Ben Botvinick at Stanford Review (February 5, 2025).

Editor’s note: Stanford students have shown exemplary skills in high school and even before then, and not just in academics but also in their interactions with others. So how is it that the extraordinary students that Stanford has admitted somehow need a course like COLLEGE where, during the first quarter, they are told they need to appreciate the value of a liberal education? Wouldn’t it be better to demonstrate the huge range of courses available at Stanford and that the students actually don’t need third parties (largely underemployed or otherwise unemployed PhDs) to be in the middle? Put another way, rather than telling Stanford’s freshmen to value a liberal education, demonstrate its value instead. 

 

One alternative is to have Stanford’s great faculty give one-hour lectures in Mem Aud on, say, a Shakespeare play, what we now know about the creation of the universe, the breakthroughs being made in cancer detection and treatment, the art of Auguste Rodin including the collection of his works displayed at Stanford, and so on. And then have the students meet in breakout groups, preferably in their dorms that afternoon or evening, discussing questions prepared in advance about that day’s lecture. And questions that are designed to not have a single answer but a range of interesting but very different possible answers and that can stimulate good and respectful give and take.

 

Another possibility is that, instead of requiring all freshmen to take COLLEGE, let them choose among three or four curricular pathways that might include COLLEGE but alternatively would include a shortened study of the Great Books similar to what is done at St. John’s (see below), the classes currently offered by Democracy and Disagreement and/or the classes currently offered by the Stanford Civics Initiative. It's time for Stanford's faculty and administration to acknowledge that Stanford students are capable of making these types of informed choices.

 

Ethnic Groups Over Engineers -- Inside Club Funding at Stanford

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“Stanford’s club funding provides $204,000 to Muslim student groups, which represent only 2% of the campus, while the Catholic community, which represents 23% of the campus, receives only $20,000. Sex and fetish organizations receive roughly as much as all 10 Christian groups on campus combined. Ethnic affinity groups collectively receive $50,000 more than all engineering clubs combined.

 

“Stanford University has a robust club scene, with 815 registered clubs that launch satellites into space and build cars from scratch. All of these organizations are funded by the Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU), an elected student government. All student organizations seeking funding from ASSU must undergo a rigorous process that includes an in-depth application, committee review, and confirmation by either a legislative body or the student body....

 

“In total, race and ethnic affinity groups receive $720,433, more than all funding directed to Stanford's Engineering clubs ($677,635).

 

“$55,994 is allocated to the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Stanford, an organization that the US government recognizes as directly subordinate to the Chinese Communist Party's ‘United Front’ initiative.

 

“ASSU also allocates large amounts of money to explicitly sexual organizations. Stanford Drag Troupe receives $50,000, the Sexual Health and Peer Resource Center (SHPRC), which funds subsidized sex toys and BDSM classes, receives $50,000, and the Stanford Pole Collective and Stanford Furries each receive $10,000. Meanwhile, the Stanford Symphony Orchestra receives $27,154; the Stanford Mathematics Organization, $10,981; the Physics Society, $14,098; and the Society for Veterans, $10,000....

 

“The wide disparities in club funding are a symptom of a few potential problems. One possibility is that ASSU, a student-elected government, is, contrary to federal law, discriminating against certain clubs on ideological grounds. Another is that the funding represents the desires of the student body. A third is that certain affinity groups on campus are far more aggressive in their funding efforts than Christian, right-wing, or even just standard student groups.

 

“Most likely, the answer is a combination of all three, and therefore, the job of students and administrators is to fight the rot that pervades the ASSU.”

 

Full op-ed by Stanford undergraduate Zayd Patel at Stanford Review.

 

The Tradition and Limits of Campus Mental Health

 

Excerpts (footnotes deleted):

. . . .

“Campus mental health services have existed for over a century, with particularly notable expansion especially over the last several decades. But overall student well-being and aggregate academic outcomes have not improved. Both, in fact, are worse today than in decades past....

 

“[Institutions of higher education, or ‘IHEs’] will not benefit by offering more of these services; in fact, allowing these services to become further entrenched risks fostering unrealistic expectations for what IHEs will provide students in terms of treatment options and for how students should expect to feel emotionally during a fundamentally transitional time of life.  Expanding services also invites mission creep. Despite providing ample mental health services, colleges are still blamed by some as one culprit in the current ‘mental health crisis.’...

 

“IHEs should reevaluate their current mental health offerings and determine whether they are improving student outcomes, beyond superficial input measures such as the number of students served, absent any rigorous outcome metric. Schools should make clear to students that higher education will not necessarily be a stress-free experience but, rather, one that expects students to be able to overcome challenges. While IHEs must meet their legal obligations to serve students with disabilities, they should refrain from making those obligations more difficult to meet and inflating demand for accommodations by unnecessarily offering services that encourage students to seek treatment services, particularly if such services are not required or effective.

 

"A disciplined approach to campus mental health requires first understanding what is currently being done on any given campus and determining the concrete ways in which any given service or programming is contributing to the institution’s vision of excellence and success. It is not enough to say that services should continue simply because they have long existed. Are services furthering the institution's mission? In what concrete ways? Particularly given obligations for students with disabilities, to leave these questions unanswered will inevitably facilitate reduced accountability -- whether for students or the institution itself. 

 

"Institutions should also understand that campus mental health services are, in many cases, more akin to a student experience amenity than to health care. If treating mental health conditions is a goal of the institution, current programs that fall within or are related to mental health should be evaluated for their evidence of effectiveness to that purpose. If the primary mission of higher-education institutions is to provide high-value higher learning and facilitate a productive civil society, campus mental health programming should contribute to that mission. The open-ended mandate of ‘improving wellness’ will do, and has done, little more than crowd out core responsibilities.”

 

Full article at Manhattan Institute.

 

See also “Is Therapy Tearing Us Apart?” at Substack: “Therapy promised Americans greater agency and insight. Instead, it delivered a more satisfying story about why someone else is to blame.”

 

See also “Vaden Medical Services to Join Stanford Health Care” at Stanford Daily: “Vaden Medical Services and Mental Health Services will transition to operating as a Stanford Health Care clinic, the University announced [last week].”

  

The Civic Life Success at UNC

 

The faculty hated the idea, but now it’s getting a promotion on campus.

 

Excerpt:

 

“One path to reforming higher education is to develop alternatives to current institutions, and an option gaining steam is for universities to do so within their own gates. An example is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is announcing this week that the School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) is becoming an independent school within the university.

 

“We told readers about the controversy when the UNC board of trustees, supported by the state Legislature, created the new program in 2023 amid faculty protests. The founders have been vindicated, as the program has since been in high student demand, with nearly 1,000 students now taking classes at SCiLL, up from 85 in the fall of the 2024 academic year.

 

“The school has 30 faculty members and is developing a major, a master’s program and a Ph.D. program on American political thought and constitutionalism to supplement the growing work with undergrads. The number of students declaring a SCiLL minor increased 90% in the second semester this year.” ...

 

Full editorial at WSJ. 

 

See also the Stanford Civics Initiative.  

 

St. John’s College Is Weird -- Its Great Books Approach Is Anachronistic, and Spreading

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“On a bitterly cold January night in Annapolis, Md., students in puffer coats and hoodies made their way along the wind-whipped sidewalks of St. John’s College and into McDowell Hall, an imposing brick building at the heart of campus, for their twice-weekly Great Books seminar.

 

“Thirteen sophomores and two faculty members gathered around a large wooden table in a second-floor classroom, draped their jackets across the college’s famously uncomfortable chairs, and pulled out copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

 

“Emily Langston, one of the tutors, as professors are called, began by reading a passage from Purgatorio suggesting that Dante came seeking freedom, and now he was free. Quiet settled over the room as Langston asked: In what sense is he free? And has his understanding of freedom changed?

 

“The students opened their marked-up paperbacks, flipping pages as they considered the questions. There was not a laptop or a cell phone in sight. Then they began an increasingly rare activity on college campuses today. They discussed, for more than two hours, a complicated work and the deeper questions it presents.

 

“Here at St. John’s, people believe that good things happen when students come together to study foundational texts. They take virtually no tests or quizzes. Use no textbooks or learning management systems. Are given no course rubrics or learning outcomes. Instead, they read, discuss, and write....

 

“Educators have long argued that those are some of the most important ingredients in an intellectually formative college experience. Students must care about what they are learning, feel connected to one another, and have a sense of agency, with professors serving as mentors and guides.

 

“Those elements are in evidence in the St. John’s seminar. Tutors consider themselves fellow learners, not lecturers or experts. They speak infrequently -- typically to ask a question, point out helpful parts of a text, or redirect a discussion that has wandered off track. But what happens in any given session is largely up to the students, who do most of the talking. That means one section of a freshman seminar might latch onto one part of the text, while another focuses on something completely different.

 

“Class discussions are typically devoid of heated arguments and showy statements, but students are expected to test each other’s assumptions and interpretations. They often begin a comment with ‘I was wondering.’ It is as if, collectively, they are examining pieces of a puzzle, testing out how each fits with the other and with previous texts they have read.” ...

 

Full article at Chronicle of Higher Education.

 

Democracy and Disagreement at Stanford

 

We bring to readers’ attention the Democracy and Disagreement course that is moderated by H&S Dean Debra Satz and former law school Dean Paul Brest and features weekly panels of experts on opposing sides of an issue. The value and methods of civil disagreement are demonstrated first-hand. Sample topics:

 

• Ending the Russia-Ukraine War

• AI and Jobs

• Proportional Representation

• Restrictions on Demonstrations at Private Universities

• Internet Regulation

• Fetal Personhood

• Gender-Affirming Care

• COVID Policies in Retrospect

• And many more.

 

Full description of program at Stanford website including links to video recordings of past sessions (1 to 2 hours each).

 

Financial Aid at Stanford

 

We also bring to readers’ attention these numbers about financial aid offered to Stanford undergraduates this year and that were shown in a recent webinar for donors:

 

• 69% receive some form of financial aid toward the cost of attendance

 

• 60% are awarded funds from Stanford (both athletic and need-based)

 

• 47% (44% of frosh) receive a need-based Stanford scholarship, over 67% average

 

• 32% receive enough scholarship to cover tuition

 

• 18% have zero parent contributions

 

• 14% who graduated last year borrowed student loans, median indebtedness $15,750

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

Stanford to Begin Exam Proctoring Following Pilot Program

Full article at Stanford Daily: “For the first time since 1921, Stanford is moving away from its unproctored past, where students were fully trusted to deliver on academic honesty. The Faculty Senate, Undergraduate Senate and Graduate Student Council have voted to allow exam proctoring in all Stanford classes following the results of a pilot program from the Academic Integrity Working Group, a group formed to combat academic dishonesty.” See also “Princeton to Begin Proctoring Exams to Curb AI-Assisted Cheating“ at EDU Ledger.

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How Higher Ed Is Fighting to Stay Relevant

Full article at Ellucian: “From AI-powered personalized learning to workforce-aligned programs and rethought degree models, the question facing every college and university leader in 2026 is the same: how does your institution use AI in higher education to deliver outcomes that actually matter?”

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Parents Are Fuming About Other Peoples’ Kids Getting Extra Time on the SAT

Full article at WSJ.

 

University Budget Crises Spark Widespread Layoffs and Program Cuts

Full article at Academic Jobs. See also “Flagship Universities Are Flailing” at EDU Ledger. 

 

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.

 

Kevin Warsh -- From the Farm to Chair of the Fed

 

Protein Engineering and Testing Condensed to a Single Day

 

Faculty Use AI to Analyze Text at Unprecedented Scale

 

Stanford Deep Lab Opens New Frontiers in Nanotech

 

In Pursuit of Brain Resilience

 

Five Things to Know about Hantavirus​​

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