On Thursday, dozens of students crowded around a table at On Call Cafe in Old Union to speak with Provost Jenny Martinez, raising concerns about the status of co-ops and making arguments against free speech restrictions on campus. 

The Provost’s office hours followed an announcement from Residential Education (ResEd) that longtime co-ops Synergy and Terra would be converted into self-ops and lose their designated theme housing after failing to fill 50% of their rosters by the initial pre-assignment deadline. 

Students from Synergy began the conversation by presenting Martinez with a letter and a series of testimonies from members of the co-op community, encouraging her to work with student leadership to allow the co-ops to keep their designated status. 

“Why do you think the sign-up [numbers] were so low?” Martinez wondered, before asking the students how they would set up the residential system in order to “balance who gets a house when it seems like there’s more students who want to live in a house as a self-op then as a co-op.” 

In response, students volunteered solutions such as instituting an alumni advisory board and changing the pre-assignment process from a single application to a ranked choice system.

“Synergy and Terra are desperately scrambling to find solutions,” said Hammerskjold Resident Assistant (RA) and co-op council member Mandla Msipa ’26. “I appreciated Provost Martinez looking for solutions and I’m hoping to see that attitude carry so that we can work on actually implementing solutions that preserve Synergy and Terra and the entire co-op community,” he said.

Martinez mentioned that according to ResEd, there are more beds available than students who pre-assigned co-ops. “Every student who wanted to live in a coop could. Why is that a bad idea?” she asked. “What’s the character of each of the co-ops now and how have they changed over time?”

Martinez was invited to dinner at both Synergy and Terra, though she acknowledged that “I don’t think we’re going to solve [ResEd] tonight.”

Following the co-op discussion, other students voiced their concerns about the campus environment under President Trump’s second term. Students asked Martinez how the university was responding to challenges for international students and criticized the University’s silence in the face of federal funding cuts. 

Martinez shared that the University was working with immigration experts to support students. “The students whose visas were revoked and then reinstated — those students were connected with lawyers that the University provided,” said Martinez. 

The conversation quickly escalated when students brought up the topic of free speech and the recently announced felony charges for the 12 students arrested last spring for breaking and entering the Office of the President. 

“The question of the charges is for the [District Attorney (DA)],” said Martinez, as students demanded to know the extent of Stanford’s involvement with the DA’s office and what contributed to the hundreds of thousands of dollars reported in damages. 

One student passionately accused Martinez of “playing a part” in the way the charges were filed, and another asked if she was collaborating with President Donald Trump to “push felony charges as hard as possible.”

“All the students involved in that protest are actually a great example of what Stanford students should look to,” said Poojit Hegde ’24 MS ’25, who compared the incident last spring to historic student protests.

Dohyun Kim ’25 was “deeply frustrated” and called the University’s cooperation with the DA a “deliberate choice to try and punish students.”

Martinez drew on her background as a constitutional historian, defending the time, place and manner restrictions on student speech on campus. “I think people should be able to say whatever content they want to say even if it offends other people, as long as it’s protected by the first amendment,” she said. “The first amendment protects a wide variety of viewpoints, but it does not protect conduct.”

Martinez left at 9 p.m., thirty minutes after the event was originally planned to conclude. 

“I think that her adherence to whatever law is convenient for her is completely unfit for the rising fascist regime we’re seeing in the United States,” said Amanda Campos ’26. “If I were in a position of power like her and I called the police on peaceful student protesters…if I refused to stand up for them, if I hid behind her interpretation of the First Amendment, I would resign.”

Some students felt disappointed by their conversation with Martinez. “It does not feel like she wants to be in a genuine dialogue or discourse with us as students,” said Hegde who felt that “the way that [Martinez] was responding to us was disrespectful because she was really calculating in her way of avoiding addressing her job.”

Also hoping for a more productive dialogue, Martinez held office hours at On Call to make them more accessible. “I hold [office hours] so students can drop in and talk to me about what’s on their mind,” she wrote in an email to the Daily.

“I felt like a few students really dominated the conversation,” especially when discussing student protests, wrote Martinez, who felt “disappointed that other students who might have disagreed with the most vocal students or wanted to talk to me about other things never got the chance.”

“When I was leaving a student pulled me aside and expressed that feeling,” she wrote.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated a source’s quote. The Daily regrets this error.