The 26th Undergraduate Senate (UGS) began and ended with senators trying to rig the process for themselves. Thankfully, they failed and left office in disgrace. Nevertheless, the Graduate Student Council (GSC) calling for new elections over alleged misconduct this year casts doubt on the student government’s legitimacy.
If free and fair elections are beyond the ASSU’s abilities, it will naturally look childish in the eyes of university administrators. This is alarming, as the University’s anti-transgender, Trump-complicit administration could simply dismiss ASSU advocacy as incompetent posturing. This is the University’s golden excuse to put its endowment coffers and media relations before us and our rights.
Two issues of particular importance to the student body, campus conduct and free speech, were already rigged against them before Trump returned to the White House. The Office of Community Standards (OCS) director was selected without serious student input, and the Faculty Senate’s Ad Hoc Committee on University Speech has had zero voting student members since its inception.
From institutional neutrality to immigration and free speech, it has only gotten worse during Trump’s second term. He repeatedly abducts international students over their constitutionally protected pro-Palestine protests. He defies the Supreme Court’s immigration orders, believing himself to be justified in targeting those that are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He even pulls all federal dollars from Harvard University for not sufficiently bending the knee to his agenda.
The response from Stanford’s so-called leadership thus far leaves much to be desired. University President Jonathan Levin ’94 and Provost Jenny Martinez issued mere words of support for Harvard, saying that its resistance efforts are “worth defending.” Levin has called on Stanford to “not be a political actor.” The Faculty Senate’s Institutional Statements decree restricts leadership from properly opposing Trump’s inhumane, anti-Constitutional regime. Levin, Martinez and the Faculty Senate, appear timid. Our safety, educational autonomy and democratic vibrancy require that they take action
This certainly doesn’t bode well for Stanford’s approach to campus conduct and free speech going forward. Leadership’s record suggests that it may preemptively buckle under the pressure and, looking to Trump’s demands of Columbia University, centralize campus conduct under Levin’s office, which would tear student-faculty shared governance on the issue to shreds. The OCS director, who previously worked in Stanford’s Office of the General Counsel (OGC), could put institutional interests ahead of shared governance and undermine students’ equal role in conduct proceedings. Trump’s criminalization of dissent (opposition to Gazan expulsion and Israeli occupation) that runs afoul of his foreign policy agenda (emboldening the Israeli government) is a not-so-subtle signal for Stanford to, like Harvard, surrender international students’ disciplinary records.
With Stanford leadership effectively turning into White House puppets, the incoming ASSU must replace the moral ineptitude with something better. Freshly elected into office, they must abandon their predecessors’ record of being soft on Trump. The ASSU president, the UGS and the GSC must pursue the nuclear option that this situation calls for: a halt on confirming students to university conduct panels. The panels that oversee charges against students must include students, and those students can only be appointed by the ASSU. While unprecedented, a panelist freeze would be within the powers of the ASSU.
The ASSU must not surrender even an inch on its panelist freeze without serious concessions from university leadership. The President, Provost and Faculty Senate should leave institutional neutrality in the past in order to explicitly oppose Trump’s policies and their hateful foundations. They should force the Ad Hoc Committee to give students one-seat majority representation given the unique free speech vulnerabilities they are under. They should even bring the OCS director and the Board on Conduct Affairs into public meetings to get the transparency on free speech and campus conduct we deserve.
Nothing short of swift, bold action is needed for the ASSU to earn back students’ faith in them and administrators’ respect for their power. ASSU candidates have peddled their buzzwords and platitudes on student advocacy ad nauseam. Looking at campus conduct and free speech in Trump’s second term, business as usual has to become a thing of the past. That is why the ASSU must fight like never before.