University president Jonathan Levin ’94 told the Faculty Senate that the University will “vigorously defend” Stanford’s right to maintaining a “vibrant exchange of ideas” amid federal policy threats to funding at the Senate’s Thursday meeting.
Levin’s update follows staff reductions at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) last week, as well as congressional consideration of higher taxes on the University’s endowment funds.
“There is a genuine threat to the university research model that has served the United States so well for such a long time,” Levin said. “[Stanford] helped to ensure the country’s scientific leadership and provide an innovation agenda for the country.”
Levin also spoke about a letter that the Department of Education (DoE) sent to Stanford on Feb. 14 warning against race-conscious practices. Levin said the letter takes a “quite broad interpretation” of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions that “goes beyond prohibiting consideration of race and admissions decisions and extends it into other areas of campus life,” including employment and student housing.
“The letter gives quite a short timeline for coming into compliance, and it suggests penalties for not doing so, in particular the loss of federal funding,” Levin said. “We’re now getting legal advice from a variety of experts so we can evaluate the implications of the new letter, recognizing that there may be legal challenges and some of the aspects of it are unclear.”
Levin identified two values for the University moving forward: academic freedom, which he asserted is “the core of our ability to fulfill our educational research mission” and “supporting and celebrating” members of the Stanford community. Levin emphasized the importance of moments when “the entire Stanford community comes together, including around particular cultures or areas of study to learn from each other and celebrate each other.”
Provost Martinez provided updates on budgeting, stating that the University’s budget groups are “working hard” on contingency planning.
“I do want to emphasize that Stanford is a resilient institution,” Martinez said. “We’re developing different scenarios and contingency plans given [policy] uncertainty, and we’re doing everything we can in the budget process to give ourselves the flexibility to be resilient in a variety of scenarios.”
The Faculty Senate unanimously passed several proposals from the Committee on Research (C-Res) — and introduced by photon science professor Megan Mauter — which expand eligibility for principal investigators (PI), or lead researchers, on campus.
Two other proposals passed unanimously: one revising the PI waiver approval process to allow exceptions and streamline approval for incoming faculty, and another modifying Stanford’s research policy handbook to improve tone and clarity.
“[These revisions] enhance the efficiency through which we execute PI waiver processes, as well as clarify policies around some unique settings that have emerged over the past decade since the last review” Mauter said.