STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

May 13, 2024

 

No One Knows What Universities Are For

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“Last month, the Pomona College economist Gary N. Smith calculated that the number of tenured and tenure-track professors at his school declined from 1990 to 2022, while the number of administrators nearly sextupled in that period. ‘Happily, there is a simple solution,’ Smith wrote in a droll Washington Post column. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, his modest proposal called to get rid of all faculty and students at Pomona so that the college could fulfill its destiny as an institution run by and for nonteaching bureaucrats. At the very least, he said, ‘the elimination of professors and students would greatly improve most colleges’ financial position.’

 

“Administrative growth isn’t unique to Pomona. In 2014, the political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg published The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, in which he bemoaned the multi-decade expansion of ‘administrative blight.’ From the early 1990s to 2009, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew 10 times faster than tenured-faculty positions, according to Department of Education data. Although administrative positions grew especially quickly at private universities and colleges, public institutions are not immune to the phenomenon. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent from 2004 to 2014.

 

“How and why did this happen? Some of this growth reflects benign, and perhaps positive, changes to U.S. higher education....

 

“But many of these jobs have a reputation for producing little outside of meeting invites. ‘I often ask myself, What do these people actually do?,’ Ginsberg told me last week. ‘I think they spend much of their day living in an alternate universe called Meeting World. I think if you took every third person with vice associate or assistant in their title, and they disappeared, nobody would notice.’

 

“In an email to me, Smith, the Pomona economist, said the biggest factor driving the growth of college admin was a phenomenon he called empire building.... As Tyler Austin Harper wrote in The Atlantic, university administrators have spent years ‘recruiting social-justice-minded students and faculty to their campuses under the implicit, and often explicit, promise that activism is not just welcome but encouraged.’ …

 

“Complex organizations need to do a lot of different jobs to appease their various stakeholders, and they need to hire people to do those jobs. But there is a value to institutional focus, and the past few months have shown just how destabilizing it is for colleges and universities to not have a clear sense of their priorities or be able to make those priorities transparent to faculty, students, donors, and the broader world. The ultimate problem isn’t just that too many administrators can make college expensive. It’s that too many administrative functions can make college institutionally incoherent.”

 

Full op-ed at The Atlantic and also republished at MSN  

 

See also “Stanford’s Ballooning Administrative Bureaucracy” at our Stanford Concerns webpage.

See also our “Back to Basics at Stanford” webpage.

 

Stanford Review Special Series: Censorship and Academic Freedom

at Stanford

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

"'Die Luft der Freiheit weht,’ translated as ‘The Winds of Freedom Blow,’ sits boldly on Stanford University’s insignia as its guiding motto. Yet in the past several years, Stanford has become notoriously intertwined with academic censorship and the suppression of free speech. To adjust our sails correctly, we must first understand where and how we went wrong....

 

“In November of 1900, [Stanford Economics Professor Edward] Ross was forced out of the University at the demand of Jane Stanford, and his resignation initiated a stunning chain of events at Stanford and across the country. While seen as a villain by a few on campus, he quickly emerged as an American hero to the working class and supporters of academic freedom alike. As one op-ed in the Oakland Enquirer proclaimed, ‘When it is known that science in a university is under bonds to prejudice or dogmatism, the usefulness of that university is at an end and its further existence is without reason.’ …

 

“Fast forward over sixty years to when Bruce Franklin, like Ross, was a young and outspoken Stanford professor in the 1960s and early 70s....

 

“A few years after Franklin’s dismissal, a Stanford PhD student of anthropology named Steven Mosher had an exclusive opportunity to travel to China. On his expedition to the Guangdong province, Mosher documented something striking: forced abortions and sterilizations thrust upon women living under the Chinese government and its now notorious one-child policy....

 

“The Chinese government leveraged Mosher’s case to pressure American institutions to comply with stringent demands when sending researchers to its country. Eventually, the committee of eleven Stanford anthropology faculty members, possibly as a result of this Chinese pressure, unanimously voted to expel Mosher, stating that he was guilty of ‘illegal and seriously unethical conduct.’ His research methods and style were deemed dubious and said to jeopardize the integrity of his research, but Mosher maintained that Stanford expelled him to placate China.

 

“In 1992, Stanford President Gerhard Casper stated that ‘A university's freedom must be first of all the freedom that we take mostly for granted, though the humanists had to fight for it and others must still do battle for it even today: the pursuit of knowledge free from constraints as to sources and fields.’...”

 

Full article at Stanford Review, first in the series

 

See also second article in the series, “An Interview with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya,” and third article in the series, “An Interview with Dr. Scott Atlas.”

 

See also “Stanford’s Roles in Censoring the Web” at our Stanford Concerns webpage.

 

See also Gerhard Casper, “The Winds of Freedom -- Addressing Challenges to the University," read sample at Amazon.

 

Stanford to Review U.S. Department of Education’s Revised Title IX Regulations

 

Excerpts (link in the original):

 

“The Biden Administration released revised Title IX regulations on Apr. 19, impacting policies across educational settings. The main changes include increased protections for LGBTQ+ students and sexual assault survivors. These changes, which Stanford and all universities are required to implement, will take effect on Aug. 1.

 

“The Stanford Sexual Harassment/Assault Response & Education (SHARE) Title IX Office started its review process. SHARE is ‘just now beginning to review these new regulations, comparing them to what was originally proposed, and determining what is needed in order to comply,’ wrote Patrick Dunkley, vice provost for Institutional Equity, Access, and Community, and Stephen Chen, director of the SHARE Title IX Office, in a statement published in the Stanford Report....”

 

Full article at Stanford Daily

See also from our April 29 Newsletter:

 

• “The Civil Rights Rollback” at Free Press

• "Education Department’s Final Title IX Regulations Draw Mixed Reactions" at Higher Ed Dive

• "New Title IX Rules Erase Campus Due Process Protections" at Reason

 

The Problem with America’s Protest Feedback Loop

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“The country is stuck in a protest feedback loop. In recent months, students opposed to the Israel-Gaza war have occupied lawns and buildings at college campuses across the country. Emulating climate activists who have stopped traffic on crucial roadways, pro-Palestine demonstrators have blocked access to major airports. For months, the protests intensified as university, U.S., and Israeli policies seemed unmoved. Frustrated by their inefficacy, the protesters redoubled their efforts and escalated their tactics.

 

“The lack of immediate outcomes from the Gaza protests is not at all unusual. In a new working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Amory Gethin of the Paris School of Economics and Vincent Pons of Harvard Business School analyzed the effect of 14 social movements in the United States from 2017 to 2022. They varied in size: About 12,000 people marched against a potential war with Iran in January 2020; 4.2 million turned out for the first Women’s March. Pons told me that these large social movements succeeded in raising the general public’s awareness of their issues, something that he and Gethin measured through Google Trends and data from X.

 

“Yet in nearly every case that the researchers examined in detail -- including the Women’s March and the pro-gun control March for Our Lives, which brought out more than 3 million demonstrators -- they could find no evidence that protesters changed minds or affected electoral behavior.

 

“The Gethin and Pons study about the inefficacy of modern American mass movements identified one glaring exception: the protests over George Floyd’s murder [and Black Lives Matter]….

 

“Still, other stances taken by protesters -- such as pushing universities to divest from companies with ties to Israel or, in some cases, calling for an end to Israeli statehood -- have scant support among the general public. And the college protests themselves are widely frowned upon: In another poll from May 2, when asked whether college administrators had responded too harshly to college protesters, just 16 percent of respondents said administrators had responded too harshly; 33 percent thought they weren’t harsh enough....”

 

Full op-ed at The Atlantic and also republished at MSN

 

See also “I Was Once a Student Protester; the Old Hyperbole Is Now Reality” by Princeton Prof. Zeynet Tufecki at NY Times and also republished at DNYUZ.

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

See also our May 9, 2024 Special Edition Newsletter re National Campus Unrest.

 

MIT Becomes First Elite University to Ban Diversity Statements

Full article at College Fix, as republished from UnHerd

 

DEI Ideological Litmus Tests Have No Place in Academia

Full op-ed by Harvard Law School Prof. Randall L. Kennedy at Harvard Crimson as also previously excerpted at our April 8, 2024 Newsletter

 

Tracking Higher Ed’s Dismantling of DEI

Full article at Chronicle of Higher Education

 

Universities and Colleges Search for Ways to Reverse the Decline in the Ranks of Male Students

Full article at Hechinger Report

   

Samples of Current Teaching and Research at Stanford

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Click on each article for direct access; selections are from Stanford Report and other Stanford websites. 

 

Why Exercise Is So Good for You

 

Stanford Medicine Delivers First FDA-Approved Cell-Based Therapy for Solid Tumors

  

Photos from Stanford’s Global Studies Photo Contest