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 therefore properly subject to some sort of institutional and personal censure.