Faculty Senate votes to table recommendations aimed at addressing personal attacks designed to silence free speech

The Faculty Senate voted Thursday to table a vote on endorsing recommendations from the Planning and Policy Board (PPB) Subcommittee on Campus Climate and bring the matter back for discussion before the end of the academic year.

The recommendations focused on addressing personal attacks over disagreements around ideas, which the subcommittee said in its report are “demeaning and damaging to free speech.”

“We are deeply concerned that as national politics have become increasingly polarized and militant, so too has the climate on our campus,” the report reads. “We fear this will only worsen as we approach the 2022 midterm elections, and the 2024 presidential election. Since the Civil War, our country has never been as radically split, and our belief is that issues of race and diversity lie at the heart of this deepening discord, both nationally and at Stanford.”

The issue, involving concerns of free speech and academic freedom, drew lengthy and passionate discussion from senators during their last meeting of the fall quarter, before the vote to table the issue.

Also at the meeting, the senators heard an update on the new school focused on climate and sustainability, and Provost Persis Drell during her report to the senate talked about the results of the campus-wide Diversity, Equity and Inclusion survey released this week.

Campus climate

While disagreement and criticism are a sign of a “robust campus climate,” when “disagreement lapses into harassment, threats and violence designed to silence or drive other students from the University, it has left the domain of free speech and become a form of assault,” the PPB Subcommittee report reads. “And when anyone of any persuasion engages in this kind of behavior, they are violating Stanford’s core principles.”

In a presentation on the PPB Subcommittee’s report, which culminates two years of work, Subcommittee Chair David Palumbo-Liu said: “These kinds of attacks are meant to use up our energy. They are meant to shackle administrators, make scholars afraid of saying anything because anything can be distorted and put on the web with devastating effects.” Palumbo-Liu is the Louis Hewlett Nixon Professor and a professor of comparative literature and, by courtesy, of English.

The PPB Subcommittee’s report included four recommendations that it asked the Faculty Senate to endorse:

• That Stanford should establish an anti-doxxing policy making it a Fundamental Standard and Honor Code violation to feed information to an outside organization or person affiliated with it, including media outlets, with intent to harm, harass or defame any Stanford student, faculty member or staff member.
• Stanford should interpret the Fundamental Standard in such a way that any malicious attack on anyone will be sanctioned, especially if the perpetrator has enlisted others in the attack.
• Stanford should engage members of the committee and other campus groups working on these issues to draft measures consistent with Stanford’s values and compliant with the law. The Stanford administration was asked to give a progress report to the Faculty Senate by the end of this academic year and a final report within a year.
• The recommendations also called “on the Stanford administration to make clear, strong, and unambiguous statements against the kind of acts we have presented to you, and to actively protect all those who are targeted by such actions.”

Some in attendance, such as Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice, said they didn’t feel like conservative students or faculty members could see themselves in the report.

However, Palumbo-Liu underscored that it was not a conservative or liberal issue, but rather about a pattern of behavior.

“Why not use this as an aspirational document to say let’s bring in all interested parties and reach a consensus of non-harm?” he said.

The report noted that this same form of conflict also occurred at Stanford in the late 1980s when the university first chose to diversify its curriculum and made strides in addressing sexual violence. Today, some are still carrying out personal attacks in response to social and cultural change, the report reads, but are now using well-developed networks and media, making them more dangerous.

Stanford’s commitment to diversity must include protecting and supporting a person from all forms of harassment, attack and malice throughout their time at Stanford, the report said.

Debra Satz, the Vernon R. and Lysbeth Warren Anderson Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, said she agreed on the importance of protecting members of campus but expressed concern that the recommendations are vague, including what counts as “malicious” and what it means to “actively protect all those who are targeted.”

Subcommittee member Richard Ford, the George E. Osborne Professor in Law at the Law School, responded that drafting precise rules wasn’t the subcommittee’s charge, adding that terms like “malicious” and “harm” are often used in legal statutes.

Senators who supported tabling the motion emphasized that it would come back to the senate for consideration after further work was done on it. David Miller, the W.M. Keck Foundation Professor in Electrical Engineering, said he was very much in favor of tabling, noting “it’s not because I don’t want this to happen. I want us to get it right and I think if we get it wrong, it will be more harmful” and may have adverse repercussions.

“This is really a tough time and learning to be able to have this conversation seems to me an extremely important situation and way to model for our community,” said senate Chair Ruth O’Hara, the Lowell W. and Josephine Q. Berry Professor, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and senior associate dean for research at the School of Medicine. “There are disagreements here and I totally believe we can reach consensus here. … I do hope we can engage the committee that did so much hard work in the dialogue going forward.”

Sustainability

The Faculty Senate also heard from Kathryn “Kam” Moler, vice provost and dean of research, and Stephan Graham, the Chester Naramore Dean of the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth), about progress toward creating the new school focused on climate and sustainability, which will launch September 2022.

When it launches, the new school will join together Stanford Earth, the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, the Precourt Institute for Energy, the facilities of Hopkins Marine Station and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (joint with the School of Engineering) and will expand those to include faculty from across the university and new hires that will bring new scholarship in emerging disciplines.

Moler and Graham, who are leading efforts to develop the school, said two teams of faculty are working toward creating a school based on the blueprint that was announced in July 2021. That blueprint includes departments organized into transitional divisions, an accelerator and three institutes, including the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, the Precourt Institute for Energy and a new Sustainable Societies Institute.