Leaders of the Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) outlined key student priorities, and President Jonathan Levin discussed potential impacts of the new presidential administration for Stanford during the Faculty Senate meeting on Thursday.
In the student government’s annual report to the senate, ASSU President Diego Kagurabadza and Vice President Divya Ganesan highlighted issues important to students such as free speech, AI, academic accommodations, admissions, and social life. The ASSU represents nearly 18,000 undergraduate and graduate students, and conducts polls and surveys to help inform its work.
In recent efforts, the ASSU received a $125,000 grant from the provost’s office for student-led social initiatives and traditions, which Ganesan said has helped bring the Row to life and revived traditions like the Sunday night campus movie event FLiCKS and the Halloween Mausoleum Party.
Students are excited about more opportunities for community-building, Ganesan said, but many remain concerned about potential impacts from the incoming presidential administration, in particular for undocumented students; support for mental health resources; and the cost and access of campus event spaces.
Free speech also remains a key priority for students, and Kagurabadza praised the work by the Committee on University Speech to improve student engagement on free speech as well as the centralization of the university’s free speech policies. But Kagurabadza noted a potential chilling effect of existing policy language, which he said focuses more on what is not permitted rather than what is and lacks clarity on campus disruption penalties.
“We think that by shifting the perspective of these policies, shifting the language of the policies, students will have a better understanding of the scope of their rights,” Kagurabadza said.
The ASSU would like to see more uniformity in syllabus content, particularly for student-athletes and students with disabilities, and more campus-wide discussion around AI, which Ganesan said has prompted a “critical thinking crisis” on campus. “Students know that a tool like AI is out there, and [that] we can and have to probably use it in the workplace. At the same time, that very tool can be really detrimental to our learning processes in the classrooms,” she said.
The ASSU also requested improved and increased use of video recording equipment, particularly for STEM courses. Ganesan acknowledged that video recording may not work for all courses, but said it would help provide flexibility for student-athletes and others.
There have also been dramatic changes in the student body’s demographics following the Supreme Court’s ruling upending a long-standing practice of race-conscious university admissions, including declines in Black and Hispanic student enrollment, Kagurabadza said. “Students care very deeply about the character of our student body and broadly support efforts to rectify some of these changes we’re seeing,” he said, adding that may be through additional recruitment and retention efforts, or reassessment of the weights of some admission factors.
Dan Edelstein, the William H. Bonsall Professor in French in the School of Humanities and Sciences and professor, by courtesy, of history and of political science, asked the ASSU representatives to elaborate more on potential threats to learning posed by AI.
Ganesan said it helps for professors to challenge students to perform better than the generative AI platform. “If you can be shown that you yourself have something to contribute that no generative AI can give, it’s almost empowering,” Ganesan said.
Kagurabadza added that there appears to be more reluctance from the humanities and sciences to acknowledge or use AI compared to the sciences and engineering. “It’d be interesting to have conversations about why that’s the case and how that might be resolved,” he said.
Elaine Treharne, senior associate vice provost for undergraduate education and the Roberta Bowman Denning Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, said there have been some campus events with low student turnout and asked what can be done to address this.
Ganesan said student-led programming appears to work best, and students must be empowered to hold events with lowered barriers like reduced event space costs. “One of the things that happened post-COVID was we lost a lot of institutional knowledge around traditions,” she added. “It actually is really up to the students, hopefully with some help from ASSU, to take the charge.”
Monitoring federal policy shifts
In his remarks to the senate, Levin said the university is closely monitoring the U.S. presidential transition and executive orders, including one from Tuesday ending DEI programs within the federal government and directing agencies to curtail DEI programs in the private sector that may qualify as illegal discrimination. He addressed some “guiding principles” as the university reviews these issues.
“Stanford is a stronger institution because we have people from a broad array of backgrounds and with a broad array of different perspectives; and because we support all members of our community, members of our university, to achieve their potential; because we seek to foster an atmosphere on campus of inquiry and of curiosity and respect; and because we are committed, in pursuit of discovery and learning, to protecting the freedom of our faculty and our students to speak openly about issues they care about and to study topics of their choosing,” Levin said. “Those freedoms are fundamental to the academic mission.”
The executive order does not call those principles into question, Levin said, but “it does mean that the federal government posture toward DEI programs is going to be different than in the prior administration.”
“We’re going to need to review programs on campus that fall under the DEI heading, and it’s likely that some will need to be modified or sunsetted,” Levin said. “We’re going to do that thoughtfully in reviewing them, and not in a reactive way, but with a focus on whether programs contribute meaningfully to our academic purpose and align with the principles, the values, that I just articulated, as well as with the agency interpretation of nondiscrimination.”
Levin emphasized “the importance of protecting the core freedoms of students and faculty to be able to talk about issues they care about, and to speak freely and openly and to engage in classroom discussion and to pursue research on topics that individual members of the university view as important topics for research. And the executive order does, in fact, contain specific language that protects academic freedom and campus speech.”
In response to questions about steps to “freeze” some activities of the National Institutes of Health this week, Levin said that pausing certain activities is common during transitions, and the university has a team monitoring for changes that may affect faculty grants and funding opportunities.
Levin underscored the university’s mission amidst political fluctuations. “The university is not meant to be a small ship tacking wildly because of the changes in the political winds,” he said. “The university has an enduring purpose to foster knowledge and to educate students, and that purpose is not fundamentally political. It’s intended to endure through political changes.”
The president and provost also acknowledged and welcomed new leaders at the university, including Lily Sarafan as the new chair of the Stanford Board of Trustees, Sarah Soule as the new dean of the Graduate School of Business, and Jay Hamilton as the new vice provost for undergraduate education.
In memory
Senators also heard a memorial resolution for Charles Yanofsky, the Dr. Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology, Emeritus, who contributed to the fundamental understanding of genetics over his more than half-century career. He died March 16, 2018, at the age of 92.
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Treharne is professor of English and, by courtesy, of German studies and of comparative literature in the School of Humanities and Sciences.