Higher education is much in the news these days. And while we know Stanford grads usually do their homework, we also know there’s a chance you might have missed a story or two that could provide helpful background information. Here are some highlights from the past five years on how higher ed works. We invite you to read them in full on our website.
Why You Can’t Just Use the Endowment for That
Published: September 2020
TL;DR: The endowment is not a savings account. It’s more like a retirement annuity, but for a retiree—Stanford—that’s supposed to live forever.
- It’s the investment income, not the principal, that supports Stanford’s operations. Stanford withdraws some of the income each year and reinvests some to keep pace with cost rise. “If we start to consume the endowment principal, there will be less to invest and therefore less income to support the university in future years,” says outgoing vice president for business affairs and CFO Randy Livingston, ’75, MBA ’79.
- The vast majority of the endowment is restricted. It includes several thousand gifts that were made at different times for different purposes, such as professorships, scholarships and fellowships, and research endeavors. One is a scholarship for a football player who wears No. 36.
- There is an emergency fund. The details of it are too long for a TL;DR, but devoted members of Nerd Nation are welcome to read the full story.
Says Who
Published: May 2021
TL;DR: Academic freedom is the principle that protects faculty members’ right to study what they want and say what they think, to voice unpopular views and question conventional wisdom.
- The Statement on Academic Freedom begins: “Stanford University’s central functions of teaching, learning, research, and scholarship depend upon an atmosphere in which freedom of inquiry, thought, expression, publication, and peaceable assembly are given the fullest protection. Expression of the widest range of viewpoints should be encouraged, free from institutional orthodoxy and from internal or external coercion.”
- A wide range of viewpoints enables members of an educational community to pressure-test ideas. Absent that, scholarship can become less credible and public trust in the knowledge disseminated by universities can erode.
- Universities strive to allow scholarly debates to play out, and administrators typically decline to censure faculty members for expressing their views.
Throwing Out the Rule Book
Published: September 2022
TL;DR: A primer on the dramatic changes underway in college athletics. If you can’t use NIL, transfer portal, or conference realignment in a sentence, this story’s for you.
- Until recently, student-athletes could only receive scholarships that covered their cost of attendance.
- Student-athletes can now profit from their name, image, and likeness. (For an update on how they will share in media revenue, see this issue’s President’s Column.)
- They can also transfer to other schools without sitting out a year of competition.
- The major athletic conferences are realigning with little regard for geography, a process that may last into the 2030s because of media rights contracts.
- These changes pose particular challenges to Stanford, where true student-athletes compete at a high level across a broad range of sports.
‘The First Amendment Does Not Give Protesters a Heckler’s Veto’
Published: May 2023
TL;DR: An excerpt from the Martinez Memo, which then–Law School dean (now university provost) Jenny Martinez wrote after student protesters disrupted a talk by U.S. Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan.
- California’s Leonard Law prohibits private colleges from disciplining students on the basis of speech that would be protected by the First Amendment. Under those principles, protest is allowed but disruption is not.
- If the Law School administration were to impose restrictions on speakers invited by a student organization, it would be inconsistent with freedom of speech, freedom of association, and academic freedom.
- “There is temptation to a system in which people holding views perceived by some as harmful or offensive are not allowed to speak, to avoid giving legitimacy to their views or upsetting members of the community, but history teaches us that this is a temptation to be avoided,” Martinez writes. “I can think of no circumstance in which giving those in authority the right to decide what is and is not acceptable content for speech has ended well. Indeed, the power to suppress speech is often very quickly directed towards suppressing the views of marginalized groups.”
‘An Exceptional Model for Scientific Discovery’
Published: Spring 2025
TL;DR: In this President’s Column, Jonathan Levin, ’94, talks about the need to renew the social contract between universities and the federal government.
- Since World War II, the federal government has supported university research through a competitive grant-making process. University researchers have explored ideas and published them openly, and the private sector has picked up those ideas and taken them out into the world.
- This partnership has enabled innovation, fueled economic strength, and made U.S. universities the desired destination for talented young people worldwide. Every federal dollar spent on university R&D has returned multiple dollars in social benefit.
- The perception that universities have become politically one-sided is straining the partnership. “That’s an important criticism for us to engage with because universities need to be places where we wrestle with a broad range of ideas,” Levin says. “And similarly, we need the government to respect the freedom of faculty and students to pursue research and teaching that go against the political winds.”
Disagree With Me
Published: Spring 2025
TL;DR: Polarization. Cancel culture. Self-censorship. Social media. The challenges to having constructive dialogue despite differing views may be novel, but the solutions are time-tested. Through the umbrella effort ePluribus Stanford, faculty are doubling down on them.
- According to a 2023 report, the instinct to self-censor is felt across the student body, regardless of ideology or identity.
- Some of the ePluribus efforts are broad, such as the frosh core requirement Civic, Liberal, and Global Education. Others, such as Democracy and Disagreement, are optional; some, such as Pizza, Politics, and Polarization, extend to the residences. One program begins the summer before frosh year, and another is offered to alumni.
- Among the solutions being taught or modeled are active listening skills, conflict mediation, evidence-based ways to combat cognitive biases and groupthink, and principles such as critical thinking and hypothesis testing. “The way science works—the way all fields work—is that people have hypotheses,” says former Law School dean Paul Brest. “They’re tested. Sometimes they turn out to be right; sometimes they turn out to be wrong. Progress in any area depends on criticism and then revision based on criticism. Fundamentally, that is the most important thing that Stanford has to offer.”
