Dear Stanford community,

We want to share a warm welcome as students arrive at Stanford over the coming days and prepare for the beginning of fall classes. We hope you have had an opportunity for some rest and rejuvenation this summer, and we hope you share our excitement about the start of a new academic year.

Our community comes together this September amid a presidential election, continued conflicts around the globe, and impassioned public debate about a wide range of issues. At Stanford, our work of research and education is contributing to deeper knowledge and understanding of many of these issues.

We also seek, in our daily campus life, to support the community’s discussion of important issues in a robust and meaningful way. As the Stanford Faculty Senate’s 2024 Statement on Freedom of Expression explains:

Freedom of expression is a fundamental value for the university’s knowledge-bearing mission, alongside the inclusion of all viewpoints and the promotion of rigorous and reasoned academic debates. The freedom to explore and present new, unconventional, and even unpopular ideas is essential to the academic mission of the university; therefore, Stanford shall promote the widest possible freedom of expression, consistent with the university’s legal and moral obligations to prevent harassment and discrimination. Accordingly, university policies must not censor individuals’ speech based on the content of what is expressed, except in narrow circumstances.

With those principles in mind, we are writing today to share two new websites that have been created, first, to support speech and expression in our community this coming academic year and, second, to provide a new place for the reporting of instances of harassment and discrimination.

The first of these is our new Freedom of Expression website. The site includes a two-page summary of some of the site’s most salient points that can be downloaded for ease of use.

The website does two things.

First, it brings together in one place a range of campus policies and guidelines that previously have been scattered across many different websites.

Second, it provides interim guidance on the application of freedom of expression principles in different contexts around campus. The focus of our policies is on having reasonable, viewpoint-neutral time, place, and manner rules that leave ample channels for expression. We hope this guidance helps convey the many ways you can express your views on campus without running afoul of university policies. While this guidance is intended to provide greater clarity about our current policies and procedures, it is “interim” in that some of these policies will continue to be evaluated over the next year.

Much of the guidance you’ll find on the website is not new, but it is now collected in one place and with more information about what existing policies mean in practice. A “What’s New” page highlights some of the new guidance incorporated in the rest of the website.

Several factors prompted the development of this website. The Faculty Senate’s Ad Hoc Committee on University Speech reviewed these issues extensively last year, producing the new Statement on Freedom of Expression and a new Policy on Institutional Statements adopted by the senate. However, the committee also identified the need for more resources and guidelines to promote awareness of these topics across the university.

More broadly, we know there were instances of confusion in our campus community last year about what university policies were, or where to find them, or how to interpret them. Also, the reports of two committees last spring highlighted the negative experiences of many community members over the last year and made recommendations around campus policies and procedures.

Professor Bernadette Meyler, who chaired the Faculty Senate’s ad hoc committee, took the lead in developing the site with support from university staff, and she will continue to be engaged with the community on these issues in the coming year as we consider further updates to our policies and their implementation.

The second website provides a home for our new Title VI Process. This process replaces the university’s previous Protected Identity Harm Reporting (PIHR) process.

Why a new process? A number of concerns were expressed last year about the previous process, including community confusion about the purpose of the process and concerns about the timeliness of follow-up when reports were submitted. In addition, there had been long-standing concerns about the potential for the PIHR process to chill freedom of expression. A faculty-led committee reviewed the matter and in response to their recommendations, we have adopted the new process we are introducing today.

The new process is structured around Title VI, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in institutions, including universities, that receive federal financial assistance. The tighter focus on possible violations of federal law that the university is required to address, rather than the vague notion of “protected identity harm,” makes the process clearer. To protect First Amendment values, the process includes an early screen to determine if the reported action involves speech protected by federal and/or state law. At the same time, it is designed to better enable the university to determine when action needs to be taken under Title VI. The new process also includes a structure for providing timely updates to complaining parties and reporting out to the community on a dashboard. More details are available on the website.

We hope these new resources help support the robust exchange of ideas in our community this coming year, in a way that respects the rights of all members of the community. We send you our best wishes for a productive and fulfilling year at Stanford.

Sincerely,

Jenny Martinez
Provost

Michele Rasmussen
Vice Provost for Student Affairs