University leaders, including University president Jonathan Levin ’94 and Provost Jenny Martinez, discussed free speech, research funding and the role of the federal government in higher education at the annual Academic Council meeting Thursday. 

Just outside the meeting, a group of pro-Palestine protesters held signs and took up chants criticizing the University’s stance on divestment from Israel, a demonstration that came amid an ongoing hunger strike by students and faculty.

Levin began the meeting with a statement asserting that the University has made progress in three of its beginning-of-year goals: improving leadership in AI and data-based research, strengthening a culture of inquiry and bettering student, faculty and staff affairs. 

In terms of advancing Stanford’s technology research, Levin listed achievements such as Marlowe, the university’s first high-performance GPU computing cluster, the Stanford Robotics Center and the new Computing and Data Science (CoDa) building. Levin also said that collecting faculty feedback on the use of AI in the classroom will be a “top priority” for Jay Hamilton, the new Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.

Discussing a better working environment for faculty and staff, Levin also announced a new team, led by former President Richard Saller and former provost John Etchemendy, to reduce bureaucratic red tape across the university. Levin says that the team has made processes for travel reimbursement, institutional research board (IRB) approval and student event approvals more efficient. 

The panel focused on the effects of the national political climate on Stanford, particularly regarding freedom of expression on campus and the continuation of Stanford’s federally-funded research. Levin, Martinez and Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice articulated a sentiment that national support for universities has fallen among the American public. 

Levin stated that Stanford must impart the “breadth of inquiry, the expansiveness of thought and the robust dialogue that characterizes a true liberal arts education” and questioned how American universities should “turn the tide in public sentiment so that we have a broader base of support in this country and are in a better position politically.” 

Rice said that the public “doesn’t really understand” the role of research universities, which she lauded as sites of crucial scientific discoveries. Rice added that “the United States of America will be shooting itself in the head if it does not continue the bargain between the government and research universities.” 

In a discussion about grant funding, Dean of Research David Studdert said that the current political climate represents “a very unsettling moment and the last four months have been tough.” Studdert shared that Stanford researchers have received 58 funding termination notices, mostly from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and that the university gets “new directives from Washington most weeks.” 

According to Studdert, Stanford has been assisting researchers in filing appeals with federal agencies where possible, but federal research budgets will remain uncertain until Congress passes a budget resolution for the 2026 fiscal year. He noted that most of Stanford’s 2,500 federal grants are still operational and faculty are still able to submit new proposals.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) presents a notable exception, Studdert said, as “notices of new awards have essentially ground to a halt.” School of Medicine Senior Associate Dean Bonnie Maldonado M.D. ’81 said that “many of the grants that have been pulled back are focused on very specific areas… and we are working now at the School of Medicine to try to understand how we can support those faculty.”

Rice and Levin pushed back against the portrayal of universities as elitist. Rice said that the University aims to “train leaders… but not just from the pool of people who would make it anyway.” Rice also said that the University “may be a little bit guilty” of being a place where “people felt a chill on the ability to say controversial things.” 

During the Q&A portion of the panel, history professor Jessica Riskin argued that the narrative of disenchantment with universities is “not grassroots, but [comes] from people with degrees from Yale like J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel.” Riskin also pushed back on the idea that speech is chilled within the university, saying that “even within my own department, there is a range of opinion…I don’t see that Stanford overall has been subject to a kind of strangling orthodoxy.” 

Riskin warned against taking opponents’ claims about higher education to heart, stating, “if we take on board these spurious accusations, we’ve sort of conceded half the battle.” 

Psychiatry professor David Spiegel said during the Q&A that “we’re not going to solve the problem by making our excellent free speech paradigm even better” when there is “crushing damage happening to universities for using certain words that we are now told cannot be in a university research grant,” referring new guidance by federal agencies. 

Spiegel said that the real problem was not Stanford’s freedom of speech regulations, but how the government is “threatening [the University’s] existence, financially and otherwise, for problems that we don’t have.”

Pro-Palestine protesters waited outside the council meeting holding signs and chanting phrases like “Stanford’s investments funds Israeli genocide.” One protestor, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation, said that faculty members “just want to sit in their offices and act like nothing is going on in the world.”

Law school student Allison Lira J.D. ’26 told The Daily, “I don’t appreciate there being so many cops at the school all the time,” referring to the presence of police officers at the event. “I want to know how much money it costs to get these cops in here for no reason.” 

The protestors expressed additional discontent that the meeting had been converted from a public event at CoDa to an invite-only meeting without notice of the new location. One event organizer thanked the protestors for “taking turns and being so respectful.”