Last week, the State Department announced that they’d be explicitly targeting future visa applicants from mainland China and Hong Kong to receive blanket enhanced “scrutiny.” Less than 24 hours after the release, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said there would be mass visa revocations for Chinese students in “critical fields.” The order was accompanied by a nationwide pause on new student-visa interviews to allow expanded social media vetting.
When federal power blocks graduate students at the border, Stanford, with its core research mission, can no longer be a neutral bystander.
I know because my own Stanford education already runs on borderless trust. As a student at Stanford University Online High School (OHS), I log in besides classmates in Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul and Singapore — often when it’s 1 a.m. in their local times. One swipe of a bureaucrat’s pen could strand half the friends in my chemistry breakout room. “Neutrality” stops being abstract when your classmate’s passport decides whether tomorrow’s group project happens at all.
Even Harvard, the Ivy League colossus with a $53 billion endowment, learned that immunity is a myth. On May 22, the Department of Homeland Security summarily terminated Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification, instantly stripping its power to enroll foreign students. Harvard raced to court and won a temporary restraining order on May 23, but that relief lasted only days. By May 29, the school was back before Judge Allison Burroughs, pleading for a preliminary injunction to keep the restraining order alive while the lawsuit proceeds.
The message is clear: the federal administration is testing how far it can weaponize immigration law to discipline universities whose politics displease it. If the richest campus in America can be marched to the brink of deporting more than 6,700 scholars, Stanford cannot imagine that “institutional neutrality” offers protection. Silence merely invites the next executive order to write the rules — and write them in pen.
From my side of Canvas, that court docket isn’t a headline: it’s a countdown clock attached to college admissions letters.
On campus, the cost of silence is now measured in weeks without food and nightly medical check-ins. The hunger strike that started with 15 students on May 12 has grown; by May 27, it had rolled into its third week, and the tents at White Plaza were still filling each evening with solidarity vigils that have continued into June. Strikers say dizzy spells and plummeting blood-sugar haven’t shaken their central charge that University president Jonathan Levin ’94 is “hiding behind neutrality,” while administrators confirm they are tracking vitals but “do not plan to negotiate.” With each day, the human toll makes Stanford’s silence harder, not easier, to defend.
The tension is more than rhetorical. In April, 12 protesters were charged with felony vandalism and conspiracy to trespass for barricading themselves in Levin’s office during a 2024 sit-in to protest Israeli military actions. Prosecutors cited “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in damage; activists cited the University’s refusal to condemn civilian deaths. Neutrality did not prevent the criminalization of dissent — it intensified it by treating moral outrage as disorder.
Stanford’s stance cannot be isolated from the nationwide surge in neutrality codes. 140 U.S. institutions adopted such policies in 2024 — most after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack — after donor backlash. Billionaire megadonor Ken Griffin paused his $500 million stream to Harvard over its perceived softness on antisemitism, openly warning that universities “face consequences.” Governing boards and presidents at other elite schools have raced to neutrality not from philosophical conviction but from fear of financial revolt.
Levin’s refusal to sign the “Call for Constructive Engagement” from the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) — despite 400 university president signatures nationwide — adheres to this pattern. Levin told the Faculty Senate he “prefers not to sign open letters,” declining to defend the University’s academic freedom on record. When wealthy donors and influential alumni closely watch (and sometimes threaten) to withhold gifts, university leaders often find it easier to stay quiet than risk angering those benefactors. But choosing silence for that reason doesn’t make it any less silent; it still means the institution failed to defend academic freedom publicly.
The American Association of University Professors warned that neutrality often “means a chosen or imposed silence” that endangers shared governance. Stanford’s own policy, approved by the Faculty Senate in May 2024, limits official statements to issues with “direct institutional impact.” The problem is that visas, research embargoes, felony indictments and donor blacklists — all now on Stanford’s doorstep — are direct impacts. By refusing to speak when the criteria are plainly met, the university converts a policy meant to protect inquiry into a tool for avoiding accountability.
At OHS, that muteness is informal but unmistakable. Several of my instructors told us last fall that they had been instructed “not to discuss politics” with students. The rule hasn’t eased anyone’s anxiety; it has simply pushed honest conversation off the official grid and into Discord servers that Stanford can’t moderate. Our conversations are not silenced. Instead, they are held in echo chambers that risk false information and unproductive, often hostile discourse.
I hereby call upon Stanford to do the following:
- Defend scholarly mobility. Publicly oppose nationality-based visa revocations, create a legal-aid fund for affected scholars and lobby California’s congressional delegation to amend the House bill. Neutrality here is complicity.
- Protect collaborative research. Commit to transparent, case-by-case reviews of Chinese partnerships rather than blanket cancellations. Shield scientists from retroactive punishment tied to Washington’s shifting enemy list.
- Speak when core functions are attacked. Issue institutional statements when federal or state actions block students from enrolling, criminalize campus protest or condition donations on political litmus tests. These are not “distant controversies” — they strike the University’s lungs and heart.
- Teach the conflict. Expand public forums and discussions on the ethics of war, economic sanctions and academic freedom. Turn the campus battlefield into a classroom — not a police zone.
From federal visa bans to felony charges in Main Quad, the war on higher education has already breached Stanford’s gates. Institutional neutrality was conceived as a way to keep scholarship above the fray; in 2025, it functions as a gag order that leaves policy to politicians, morality to billionaires and speech to whoever shouts loudest. Levin has a choice: continued silence or principled engagement that defends the very conditions under which universities exist.
As one of more than 1,000 OHS teenagers in 45 countries, I cannot afford that silence. Neither can Stanford. Silence will not place the university “out” of this war — it will only decide whose pen writes the next chapter of its history.
Xinyue Wang is a student at Stanford University Online High School.