A senior at Stanford has seen a different university president in each of his three years. Jonathan Levin is the first in this time period to see a second year. His behavior over the next nine months may determine whether he gets a third.
College presidents have been dropping like flies since the rot in their institutions was exposed after Oct. 7, 2023. Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned as Stanford’s president in July of that year, before it was cool, having been taken down by an 18-year-old. Richard Saller was drafted from the classics department to serve as interim president shortly before hell broke loose. His meager authority was both a stimulant and a woefully inadequate remedy to a year of campus madness.
Levin, who began his tenure in September of 2024, was a major improvement. As president, he possessed two things that Saller lacked: permanent authority and some courage. He announced his priority at the outset: to “protect free inquiry and model civil discourse at Stanford.”
His administration quickly published updated guidelines for speech on campus. They aimed to achieve the balance that every liberal society must maintain, the everlasting tension between freedom and order. Liberty, which includes freedom of speech, cannot exist without rules to carve out a protected sphere of free action. Allow order to decay, and impassioned speech will be supplanted by violence. But vest too much power in a punitive authority, and free speech will wither under its oversight.
Somehow, in the years before Levin’s tenure, Stanford managed to do both. It suffered a series of self-humiliations as the university, in line with the moment’s social justice demands, came down on disfavored expression. Recall the initiative in 2022 for the “Elimination of Harmful Language” created for and by Stanford’s IT department, which compiled a list of phrases whose utterances were intolerable, including such blasphemous words like “freshman,” “crazy” and “American.” Only after becoming a national news story did Stanford retract its speech codes.
In March of 2023, Stanford Law School’s associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion led a group of students in haranguing a conservative federal judge invited to speak on campus. That, too, became a national disgrace. Months later, a congressional committee reported that the Stanford Internet Observatory had assisted the federal government in pressuring social media companies to remove speech it deemed too dangerous.
After Oct. 7, the University combined its antipathy to peaceful speech with a tolerance for lawless disruption. Students enraged by Israel’s military response to Hamas’s barbarous terror attack were allowed to occupy a portion of White Plaza and camp out for months. Rather than punish the activists for violating school policy, the administration negotiated with them out of cowardice. Two months after the University dismantled their encampment, the protestors constructed a larger one a few yards away.
Order disintegrated further as Stanford warned of vague penalties for encampment members but never delivered. Jewish students were routinely harassed in their dormitories. In May of 2024, a band of activists attempted to barricade themselves inside an engineering building with students inside so they could issue demands.
Then, on the last day of classes, another group of demonstrators defaced Main Quad, assaulted a SUDPS officer, broke into the president’s office, vandalized it and barricaded themselves inside. The perpetrators were ultimately suspended for two quarters. What sort of behavior would have earned an expulsion?
After a summer for the activist class to cool off, Levin inherited their mess in the autumn of 2024. He recognized what any proper university president must recognize: Speech is not harmful to students — violence and disorder are.
Yet the president’s job was, and still is, unfinished. The prior year was a reprieve from hysteria, but ample illiberalism endures among both Stanford’s administrators and students. Sections of both groups would like to commandeer the university and for their own ends: control over discourse, the domination of campus culture. What will Levin do if Stanford begins to slip backward?
We know what will happen if he lets it fall. Another president — the one in Washington — will deploy his own brutish brand of illiberalism against Stanford. He will use his levers of power to break this university to his government’s saddle, as he has already done to others. So, if Levin loses to illiberalism over here, he will also lose to illiberalism over there.
Two pieces of advice for Levin could be useful. First, remember that the purpose of the university is not the advancement of social progress, but the transmission and production of useful knowledge. Second, consider this to be your ratio of success: the number of times Stanford appears in the science and technology sections of national publications divided by the number of times it appears in the news and politics sections.
It is unfortunate that universities may have to do the right thing only because government is doing the wrong thing. But a zone of free expression undergirded by order is the right thing for Stanford nonetheless. Let’s see what President Levin can do.