I was pleased to read Professor Larry Diamond’s recent opinion piece, “The Crisis of Free Expression in the United States.” This is an urgent issue, for free expression underpins both our educational mission and democracy itself. Diamond asserts that both those on the left and the right are responsible for the crisis he describes, but then he adds an important note: “In one crucial respect, there is no symmetry of threat.” He goes on to cite the Trump administration’s use of the federal government to censor anyone and anything that displeases the President. This is authoritarianism at its worse.
The point of my letter is much more local, specific and practical. It regards this portion of Diamond’s essay:
“We need to promote intellectual diversity and political pluralism, and, our report insisted, we must strive ‘to create a culture where disagreement can be expressed without devolving into personal animus, political intolerance or social exclusion.’ Creating this culture, and thus student capacities for robust but civil discourse, is now the work of several initiatives at Stanford, including the first-year COLLEGE program, ePluribus and the Stanford Civics Initiative.”
That is an impressive list of programs. But note that missing are any initiatives that explicitly name diversity. The absence is not a matter of exclusion, it is a matter of evisceration. Following Trump’s attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Stanford rolled back its diversity efforts. At the same time, some researchers felt the pressure to give up their free speech and academic freedom. In the Daily’s coverage of this roll back, it cited “Earth Systems Science professor Elliott White Jr., [who] studies saltwater intrusion and its impacts on ecosystems and humans alike … He recently rebuffed requests from a federal employee — with whom he’d been collaborating on the project long before Trump returned to office — to retitle ‘The Gulf of Mexico’ to ‘The Gulf of America’ in a paper he’s working on, resolving to find an entirely different way to refer to the body of water.” It also notes that “Mentors at Stanford have also seen students turn away from research due to the federal government’s actions. Suki Hoagland, the internship director for the Earth Systems Program, said that students have started pivoting from DEI topics.” While these events regarding research may seem separate from the issue of free expression, I argue that Trump’s actions bridge research and teaching, university programming and admissions, academic freedom and free expression. They purposefully create a climate in which no expression is “free.”
As much as Diamond acknowledges the lack of symmetry in the threat the Trump administration poses to free expression, he does not seem to understand why and how his recommendation cannot be easily taken up by certain members of our community. No matter how “critical” they might want to be, COLLEGE, et al. now have the incentive to stay within the parameters of “free” speech set by the Trump administration. The lopping off of diversity programs, the firing of employees and the removal of certain language can only serve as warnings. Trump’s defunding of universities, and Stanford’s subsequent cuts, create a chilling effect across the board.
Consider the most recent example of Trump’s attack on education — his attempt to blackmail universities into signing its “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” in order to receive federal grants. This “compact” requires colleges to admit students solely on the basis of SAT scores, demands that race, gender, class and other identities not be taken into account, and that schools provide an account of each admitted classes’ scores, races and genders. This, coupled with the already-existing decimation of affirmative action and Stanford’s alacrity in erasing DEI efforts, creates exactly the conditions under which the encouragement to “speak your mind” will be met with at least some reservation by those whose very presence is being questioned. Their reticence is not due to lack of capacity or courage, it is due to a logical and astute reading of the real consequences of asymmetry.
Along with Trump’s outlawing of DEI and Critical Race Theory, the Compact states: “Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” “Belittle” covers a lot of ground, including “criticize,” and “conservative ideas” may well include the very admissions criteria universities are being pressured to follow.
Long before the “Compact” was floated, in July 2024 the ACLU warned: “A second Trump administration would supercharge efforts to censor discussion of any concepts deemed ‘divisive’ from the nation’s classrooms, by which it means classroom discussions about race, gender, and systemic oppression with which it disagrees.”
Simply put — certain exercises of free expression, when performed by some populations, may well have consequences that they do not hold for others. It is time for college presidents, administrators, tenured professors — all largely white and with secure employment and citizenship — to stop urging the most vulnerable to “speak up” and take risks they themselves will never have to take. For example, there is no impermeable wall between Stanford and ICE, which the US Supreme Court has now decided may use racial profiling to perform mass sweeps of people and detain them and render them to other countries. And we already have seen the effects Trump’s actions have had on international students and scholars. In the authoritarian world we live in, there is little reason why anyone without assured employment, a healthy bank account, and citizenship papers to imagine they are “free” from real danger.
I frankly do not think the situation will change in terms of this blindness to these realities and lack of understanding of the consequences they have for many in our community, but I can say that in these days of rampant authoritarianism, it is an extremely dangerous position to maintain, for ultimately no one and nothing is immune. And acting as if this were not the case simply allows authoritarianism to grow as people act as if nothing has really changed, that we can all equally set out to speak freely.
At Stanford, the best way to offset the asymmetry of which Diamond speaks to is to grow alternate opportunities. We should not accept the notion that value comes only through institutional forms or approval or recognition, especially at a time when more and more are falling in line with the Trump administration. Last year, the People’s University organized guest speakers, lectures from professors and student-led discussions on a range of topics either absent from Stanford’s curriculum or via perspectives that are sorely underrepresented. This year there are plans for public art projects, lectures, reading groups and workshops that are again student-led and organized with faculty and staff support that offer alternative perspectives and are open to all.
Such actions follow in the footsteps of progressive and radical students during the McCarthy era and Civil Rights era, during the Vietnam War and anti-apartheid movement. These kinds of informal educational projects are in fact common outside the United States as well, and in countries with authoritarian leaders — the list is long, but to mention only the most recent: in Turkey (Gezi Park), Ukraine (Euromaidan), Iran (Woman, Life Freedom), Serbia, Bangladesh, Brazil and Sudan. We can and should exercise free expression by multiplying the spaces to speak.
David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University.