James Ryan’s time as University of Virginia (UVA) president ended due to federal coercion. Despite the dissolution of UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion office in March, the Trump administration still demanded that Ryan resign to ensure satisfactory compliance with its DEI crackdown.
In the context of Trump’s broader war on higher education, the attack on UVA’s governance must not be viewed as an isolated incident.
Trump has successfully pressured Columbia University into a settlement that — not even for a full restoration of federal funds — strips faculty of their autonomy over Middle East studies and empowers its provost to disregard student, faculty and staff voices when it comes to regulating campus protests. He has even targeted the free speech of Harvard’s international students and strong-armed UC Berkeley into surrendering the personal records of over 150 students, faculty and staff. Trump is out for blood, and he puts Stanford in too precarious a position to continue its complicity any longer.
Stanford leaves much to be desired in terms of responding to the federal government’s attacks on its peer institutions. We have seen Stanford leadership throw its transgender athletes and youth patients under the bus — legitimizing Trump’s premise that they are child-groomer criminals that violate “biological truth.” The University even stays true to the anti-student free speech and campus conduct framework that it had before Trump’s re-election. With a record of putting compliance above community when it matters most, the institution sends the message that it just doesn’t care.
University president Jonathan Levin ’94 and Provost Jenny Martinez’s statement that Harvard’s resistance efforts are “worth defending” is tough to square with their aforementioned policy record. Rather than standing up to Trump and being champions of liberty and inquiry that higher education needs, they continue leading in accordance with Levin’s previous claim that “it’s best for the institution as a whole not to be a political actor.” Levin and Martinez have led, and continue to lead, with institutional surrender atop their agenda.
Levin and Martinez’s moral ineptitude suggests that they would not protect us from the Trump regime. With a record of repeatedly abducting international students over their pro-Palestine dissent, Trump can deprive Stanford of some of its strongest humanitarian advocates. Having targeted local and federal elected officials for defending their undocumented constituents, Trump will likely set his sights on members of the Faculty Senate and Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) for defending theirs. For Stanford to credibly defend its community, irrespective of citizenship status and political ideology, it must abandon institutional neutrality once and for all.
The Faculty Senate’s decree against morally courageous institutional statements is the exact opposite of what we need right now. The policy — under the guise of keeping the University out of “political and social controversies” that don’t directly impact Stanford’s educational mission — excuses leadership to never do more than issue toothless statements in the Stanford Report. In the face of a White House with a record of words and actions laced with Nazi parallels, the Faculty Senate promotes an agenda of moral surrender. Surrender didn’t protect UVA and Columbia from Trump, which is why we must force the University’s hand to prevent the same from happening to us.
When students, faculty and staff are on their own, getting Stanford’s top leadership to do the right thing is a herculean task. But if the history of campus advocacy — from forcing the end of classified Vietnam War research on campus to establishing the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity — is any indication, it’s that collective action extracts real concessions from those in power. Across academic disciplines and walks of life, we must come together in order to show the President, Provost and Faculty Senate that surrendering to Trump is not the way forward.
Our President, Provost and Faculty Senate should permanently end the institutional neutrality policy. They should declare to the White House that immigration authorities won’t receive a shred of University cooperation unless a judge requires it. They should ensure that our community, our scholarship and our activism are afforded the best legal protections that the $36.5 billion endowment can buy. They should loudly and proudly collaborate with fellow institutions to spread Trump so thin that his policies lose their effectiveness.
There is no shortage of what we — the people who make Stanford run in prestige, tuition and image — can do to make change happen. The Faculty Senate must ask the President and Provost pointed questions about the dangers that their complicity poses. Students and teaching assistants must boycott the classes of professors who have defended either institutional neutrality or Trump’s attacks on immigrants and free speech. We must be loud in our messaging to supportive parents, alumni and media figures to bring broader pressure upon the University.
President Trump is a clear and present danger to the diversity and academic vibrancy that makes Stanford so special in the first place. His concerted attacks on our communities, educational rights and peer institutions are a wake-up call for unprecedented collective action. We must lead by example and establish bold resistance as a precedent for all of higher education. It is up to us, the people who make Stanford what it is, to force university leadership to join us in the fight.