STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

February 2, 2026​

 

Is a Four-Year Degree Worth It?

 

Excerpts:

. . . . 

“American higher education has a trust problem. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise, and it won’t solve itself. In 2026 I’d like to see colleges and universities across the country take steps to restore trust. As president of Dartmouth College, I’m committed to this goal, and how to restore public confidence in higher education animates conversations among my presidential peers.

 

“Assuming that most Americans value our mission is a recipe for irrelevance and decline. We must demonstrate to students and families -- and to the broader public -- that we’ve heard their criticisms and will address them. I see five areas where we can build back trust.

 

[Followed by discussion of these five points:

 

1. Make college affordable

2. The return on investment matters

3. Re-center higher education on learning rather than political posturing

4. Emphasize equal opportunity, not equal outcomes

5. Testing is important]  

 

“Next month, I’ll join other university presidents at a summit in Washington hosted by the Association of American Universities to continue the conversation about how universities can take responsibility and be held accountable for our actions. I hope we’ll move beyond defensiveness and talk of federal compacts and instead take action.

 

“We should leave the table having made specific commitments. We won’t agree on everything. One size won’t fit all. But we must agree that the status quo is untenable. If we’re willing to reform ourselves -- to listen, change and recommit to our core mission -- we can again be a trusted engine of the American dream, scientific breakthroughs and the global economy. This work can’t wait. It starts now, with us.”

 

Full op-ed by Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock at WSJ.  

 

See also our long-existing webpages “Stanford Concerns -- Warning Signs in the Numbers” and “Back to Basics at Stanford.”

 

Fixing DEI's Damage to Academic Science Could Take a Generation

 

Editor’s note: In our view, diversity, equality of opportunity and inclusion have always been important elements for teaching and research and, at least in recent decades, already widely existed at U.S. colleges and universities nationwide, including at Stanford. Frankly, it's hard to find places that are more diverse, supportive of equal opportunity and inclusive than any of our contemporary U.S. campuses. Rather, the concerns have been the huge and costly bureaucracies that were created in recent years (see the charts re Stanford and other major universities at our Stanford Concerns webpage) and which in turn fostered what have increasingly appeared to be anti-intellectual policies and activities on our campuses. We don’t necessarily support the solutions proposed in the following article, but we present these excerpts to help focus on the possible problems and urge readers to consider these and other possible solutions.

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

. . . .

“The National Association of Scholars (NAS) just spent several years examining how deeply embedded DEI ideology has become in undergraduate and graduate science education and research. As part of this effort, we conducted forensic case studies of the growth of DEI ideology in three of America’s top institutions of science and technology: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). These case studies show in detail how identity politics took over institutions that had built stellar reputations on competence, ingenuity, and intellectual merit. The message is clear: DEI has had a profoundly corrosive effect on academic science. Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you to ‘follow the science.’ ...

 

“Both for the long-term goal of reforming science, and for the short-term goal of stopping DEI’s corruption of American science, federal science funding should be reformed to remove taxpayer dollars as much as possible from university science, and universities as much as possible from scientific research. Possible solutions include: 

 

• Legislation (following up on existing executive orders) to limit research grants’ indirect costs to universities to 10% of the total. 

• Elimination of government policies that support the ‘total cost reimbursement’ model of supporting academic research. 

• The creation of legislative support for Independent Science Faculties, so that government monies can go to scientists independent of universities. 

• The redirection of federal grant money wherever possible to intramural research and to private industry research, so as to minimize the involvement of universities. 

• The broadening of the model of portable funding both for graduate students and for faculty research, so as to reduce the lock hold of universities on scientific research. 

   

“These reforms would bring with them, as a corollary, the division of scientists into a dedicated research track and into an academic track focused on teaching students. The argument for giving students the possibility to undertake research with leading scientists is strong -- but the unfortunate consequence has been that a great many science professors have abandoned actual science education and left it to ill-trained graduate students. America would benefit from a reorientation of its university science education toward dedicated science teaching, with professors devoted to classroom instruction rather than to securing government grants.” ...

 

Full op-ed at Real Clear Science.

 

See also Stanford's renamed Office of Inclusion, Community and Integrative Learning with an estimated 70 or more total staff, including the Eight Centers for Equity and Community Leadership, plus still more people with similar full-time and part-time responsibilities in individual schools and departments.

 

The Age of Interdisciplinary Slop

 

Excerpts (link in the original):

. . . .  

“Seven years ago, I argued in these pages that ‘interdisciplinarity,’ originally a way of forging connections between well-established modes of inquiry, had degraded into a slogan weaponized by administrations to run universities like corporations. What I was observing was a new language taken from business schools and Silicon Valley that emphasized innovation, efficiency, and relevance, whether to solve the world’s problems or create marketable skills. That language took aim at the expertise and special methods of individual disciplines, representing them as so many silos that should be broken down to facilitate the flow of information across a flexible workplace.

 

“I concluded by defending a pluralist university, one that values genuine interdisciplinary collaboration while preserving the disciplinary integrity from which it occurs. Academic disciplines are not arbitrary bureaucratic units, but historically developed forms of judgment tailored to distinct objects of study. Keeping them is not a retreat into tradition but a necessary condition for intellectual resistance in an era increasingly dominated by managerial logics....

 

“. . . In its heyday, the jargon of interdisciplinarity was not merely a managerial device but a utopian promise.... That confidence has evaporated, even as the vocabulary remains. Today the jargon lingers on in a kind of zombie state: animated, repetitive, and oddly untethered from belief. Administrators still speak of ‘flexibility,’ ‘dynamism,’ and ‘future orientation,’ but no longer with the conviction that these words name an educational transformation anyone actually expects to arrive....

 

“What remains, then, is interdisciplinarity as slop: a residue of once corrosively ambitious ideas, endlessly reheated to justify mergers, eliminations, and the hollowing out of intellectual life. No one seriously imagines that folding English into ‘Human Narratives and Creative Expressions’ will produce Davidson’s world of empowered learners and creative problem-solvers. The jargon persists not because it convinces but because it obscures, masking loss with abstraction and austerity with euphemism. The problem today is no longer that the jargon of interdisciplinarity promises too much, but that it promises nothing at all while continuing to do real damage to the disciplines that once gave the university its purpose and its authority.” ...

 

Full op-ed by Yale Prof. Jonathan Kramnick at Chronicle of Higher Education. 

 

See also “How Politicized Philanthropy Is Corrupting Charity” in our January 19, 2026 Newsletter and where we questioned the elimination of school and department names that are based on well-established academic disciplines and the substitution instead of whatever is a currently desired political or social outcome. For example Stanford’s long-existing School of Earth Sciences is now the Doerr School of Sustainability -- an area of potential inquiry, but does that mean the faculty here are now professors of sustainability? And if not that, what are they professors of? As we also noted in our prior Newsletter, “once you establish a desired outcome in an entity’s name or its foundational documents, how do you then foster viewpoint diversity within the entity?  And what happens when society's priorities change over time?”

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

An Ancient Answer to AI-Generated Writing -- Go Back to Speaking

Full op-ed by Brown U Prof. Stephen Kidd at Inside Higher Ed.

 

Embedding AI in the Curriculum

Full interview of UNC Vice Provost Jeffrey Bardzell at James Martin Center. See also “90% of College Faculty Believe AI Is Dumbing Down Students’ Critical Thinking Abilities” at NY Post.

 

COVID's Long Shadow Looms Over a New Generation of College Students

Full article at SF Gate.

 

Rutgers Athletics Has Lost $516.9 Million Since Joining the Big Ten in 2014-15

Full article at The Comeback. See also “College Athletics Is Breaking Universities” at Minding the Campus. Editor’s note: Stanford has proved for decades that there are college students who can simultaneously excel in both their academic work and their athletic specialties, including at Stanford. We are presenting these two articles not because we oppose college athletics (quite the contrary) but rather to remind readers of the serious issues now facing Stanford and other comparable schools.

 

How a Few Foundations Shape Academic Culture

Full op-ed at Future of the American University. 

 

The Pace Is Relentless -- How College Leaders Are Adapting to an Increasingly Hectic Job

Full article at Higher Ed Dive.

 

Can Tenure Endure?

Full article at Minding the Campus. See also “Tenure Under Threat” at Inside Higher Ed.   

 

Stanford Settles Lawsuit with Family of Katie Meyer

Full article at Stanford Daily.

 

Yale Will Go Tuition-Free for Families Making Up to $200,000

Full article at Inside Higher Ed.

 

Thomas Sowell Discusses Modern Education (video)

Full interview of Hoover Senior Fellow Emeritus Thomas Sowell at YouTube (1 hour, 11 minutes, and with discussion of universities starting at the 33-minute mark). 

 

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 Face Scars Less Than the Body, and a Stanford Medicine Study Unravels Why

 

New Atlas of Brain Proteins Could Help Researchers Studying Neurological Disease

 

Even Small Amounts of Online Math Practice Can Improve Skills

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