After law students disrupted a federal judge’s speech on campus, President Marc Tessier-Lavigne underscored Stanford’s commitment to academic freedom in an email marking the first day of spring quarter.
Apr 14, 2021
As part of their IDEAL fellowships, the scholars will be assigned to the schools and departments corresponding to the fields of their doctorate, and they will teach one course per year while they expand on their research. Each fellow will be given a faculty mentor selected from among Stanford’s Academic Council faculty. The IDEAL fellows also will be involved in organizing a major Stanford conference that will bring together scholars who are at the forefront of the study of race and ethnicity.
“I am delighted to welcome our first IDEAL Provostial fellows to Stanford,” Drell said. “They are some of this country’s most promising young scholars conducting research on race and ethnicity. Their presence on campus represents a wonderful opportunity for students and faculty to interact with them and learn more about their research. Their work holds exceptional promise, and we are excited to support them at this early stage in their careers.”
Atlas, Ferguson, and Hanson: On Free Speech at Stanford
What is the purpose of academic freedom?
Is it to allow all kinds of ideas to be expressed and explored, protecting even speech that people in the past considered hereticalâprotecting free expression that some people today would like to âcancelâ? Or is it to allow co-workers in the ideological minority to be personally and selectively disparaged with impunity?
The answer for some faculty at Stanford University would appear to be the latter.
In a recent meeting of the Stanford Faculty Senate, four professors (Joshua Landy, Stephen Monismith, David Palumbo-Liu and David Spiegel) presented and then subsequently published a farrago of falsehoods directed against various fellows of the Hoover Institution. Their complaint was, first, that the Hoover fellowsâ views were unapologetically conservative and, second, that they appeared antithetical to the majority of those of the Stanford communityâand were ther