One week before his inauguration, Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) president Jared Hammerstrom ’27 framed his plans for free speech as a “conversation between administrators and students together to achieve the shared goal of student safety and protecting First Amendment rights.” 

I can understand why the ASSU president would strike such an optimistic and cordial tone early on in his tenure. After all, he will frequently be in the rooms where the games of campus politicking are played — meeting with colleagues when the cameras are off and sitting in on Faculty Senate meetings. As understandable as the ASSU president’s soft words are, he and his newly-inaugurated colleagues — undergraduates and graduates alike — could use a reminder on how their constituents’ free speech rights have fared in practice. 

In May 2024, when it issued a sweeping statement on the direction that free expression would take on campus, the University’s Ad Hoc Committee on University Speech lacked student representation. Prior to the appointment of its current interim director, the Office of Community Standards (OCS) — Stanford’s enforcement agent of campus conduct, including free speech claims — was led by a director chosen without serious student input (as I have repeatedly stressed before). The University is even applying burdensome paywalls and nanny state volume controls to student protests in White Plaza. It is as if administrators have anointed themselves the overlords of their underling students’ free speech rights. 

Considering the strong anti-student bent of free speech policies on campus, I cannot help but view the ASSU president’s vision for free speech based on conversation and shared governance as first-degree naiveté. It would appear that OCS and, more broadly, Student Affairs administrators in charge have been given a free pass by the very ASSU executives who pretend there is still an equal-footing conversation to be had. 

The ASSU president and vice president enabling OCS is bad for students’ free speech interests because it grants the office a level of free speech legitimacy it has yet to earn. To protect free speech for students and force administration into making tangible concessions, they should halt any such cooperation with OCS.

The ASSU executives were both members of the most recent session of the Undergraduate Senate (UGS). This past UGS unanimously voted to confirm students to university conduct panels. Those panels, which adjudicate discipline charges against students, must include students confirmed exclusively by the ASSU. The vote to confirm those panelists let the cogs of the anti-student OCS machine turn smoothly.

The executives’ record is letting OCS run as if its work is a banal fact of student life. Their record is a tacit endorsement of the restrictions on speech that Hammerstrom called “absurd.” Stonewalling on the confirmation process would certainly kneecap OCS’s ability to enforce the University’s anti-free speech rules. This presents the executives and ASSU at-large with a golden opportunity to gain tangible concessions from the University.

ASSU policy work on OCS and free speech has yet to achieve more than mere calls for improvement. Hammerstrom and ASSU vice president Celeste Vargas ’27 having voted to confirm 2025-26 student panelists suggests they live in a fantasy land where dialogue and equal student-administration footing prevail. The University has no incentive to comply with any subsequent calls because of their proven fecklessness. Just as I have called on the ASSU to do in the past, I am calling on them today to abandon their toothlessness once and for all by not confirming student panelists for the upcoming academic year.

With no panelists — meaning no enforcement of inherently anti-student rules — the ASSU has a pressure valve that could succeed where its pretend-strong rhetoric has failed. A win on a potentially drawn-out panelist freeze fight would force — not merely call — OCS and Student Affairs at-large to the table. It would introduce actual consequences for failing to eliminate the cost to reserve White Plaza for protests, failing to permit demonstrations beyond weekdays at 12 to 1 p.m. and failing to be transparent on the specifics of OCS training panelists to handle free speech cases against students. The sky is the limit on justice for students’ free speech rights when their elected advocates finally become the advocates that students desperately need.

I am hopeful that freezing panelists would do more than just usher in the broader and bolder free speech landscape that students deserve. With Student Affairs overseeing Residential Education (ResEd) in addition to OCS, this free speech fight would bring the overseers of residential life to the table too.

Residential Assistants (RAs) are unionizing for better pay, working conditions and, ultimately, a better ability to care for their residents. The struggle for free speech would make it harder for the broader Student Affairs bureaucracy to sustain its streak of institutional inaccessibility with ResEd that has plagued RA negotiations for far too long. With the assignment of residences for theme houses proceeding without any voting say from students, housing could be another item under Student Affairs’ purview where free speech advocacy brings the pressure.

Hammerstrom and Vargas leading the way on halting panelist confirmations would be unprecedented, but doing so would meet the moment on free speech, RAs and housing like never before. Hopeful rhetoric is not what we need in the face of a Student Affairs apparatus that has consistently treated students as less than. Only by disrupting normal university business can students be convinced that they, rather than Student Affairs, are who the ASSU was elected to serve in the first place.