Thank you, Marcia, for that report, and for your skillful leadership of the senate this year.
Our main focus today is going to be on the extraordinary environment facing higher education. In a few minutes, I’ll be joined by a panel of campus leaders, each of whom is helping us to address the current moment. But first, I’d like to reflect on the academic year on campus and then talk about where we stand in the national landscape.
At my inauguration in September, I observed that universities were under intense scrutiny, and that in the years ahead, we would have to navigate challenges. In doing so, our north star would be our fundamental purpose of discovery and learning.
Today, those challenges are clear and present. Yet I can report that Stanford stands as a pillar of excellence in its mission of research and education, as a home for curiosity and free inquiry, and as a source of ideas and innovation for the country and the world.
I also can report that leading Stanford has many joys, and that most of them involve time spent with faculty, students, staff, alumni, and friends who love and support the university.
Throughout this year, Provost Martinez and I have been deeply appreciative of the faculty’s goodwill and partnership.
I want to acknowledge our outstanding faculty leadership: our deans, department chairs, and institute directors.
And I would like to recognize members of the Faculty Senate. Through many meetings this year, our Senate colleagues have engaged with pressing issues, shared a wide range of perspectives, listened intently, and modeled the vigorous and respectful debate essential to faculty governance.
Priorities for the year
Provost Martinez and I began the year with several priorities:
Strengthen Stanford’s culture of inquiry and curiosity
Advance Stanford’s leadership in AI and data-driven discovery
Make Stanford work better for its faculty, students, and staff
I am pleased to report significant strides on all three goals.
A culture of inquiry and curiosity
Universities are meant to be places of free inquiry and robust, reasoned debate. As we have been reminded in recent years, that requires strong protections for campus speech, and clear rules protecting classrooms, events, and the freedoms of faculty and students.
Thanks to the work of Professor Bernie Meyler and our faculty committee on speech, we began this year by reaffirming Stanford’s speech protections and clarifying our time, manner, and place rules. We have strived to enforce them consistently.
Of course, these protections are boundary conditions. They specify the location of the foul lines. What matters even more at a university is what takes place in the middle of the field, in the everyday interactions in classrooms, seminars, and dorm rooms.
This is where academic culture is defined and permeates the life of the university. It is here that I am most encouraged by what I have seen this year.
The COLLEGE curriculum, now in its third year, has hit its stride as a model for civic education
Pizza, Politics & Polarization events and Civic Salons in student residences have fostered discussions on free speech, immigration, inequality, and other topics
The Stanford Political Union and On-Call Cafe have hosted talks, debates, and discussions. The student leaders of Democracy Day organized more than 40 events leading up to the election, involving faculty and alumni
We introduced ePluribus Stanford to elevate constructive dialogue and civic engagement as a university priority, and I would like to commend the leadership of Jenny Martinez, Debra Satz, Dan Edelstein, and Norm Spaulding
These examples only scratch the surface of the classes, seminars, discussions, and conferences that have tackled U.S. politics, the Middle East, emerging technologies, and so many more challenging issues facing the world today.
I firmly believe that even in an era of division and distrust, Stanford can be a model for how we approach each other with curiosity and an open mind, and how to nurture the type of environment of constructive exchange in which discovery and learning thrive.
Leadership in AI and data-driven discovery
Talking to faculty and students this year, AI has been a recurring theme: excitement about using data and predictive algorithms to advance discovery in fields ranging from neuroscience to molecular biology to the social sciences; and a mix of anxiety, fear, and excitement, about how generative AI would impact learning.
Both are critical issues for the coming decade. Where I heard uniform agreement is that Stanford should lead the way.
To this end, we’ve achieved a number of important milestones:
We opened Marlowe, Stanford’s first high-performance shared GPU cluster for research computing. It reached 90% capacity utilization in six weeks
The Stanford Robotics Center also opened this fall, bringing together multiple departments and showcasing our robotics prowess
The CoDa building opened this winter as a home for computation and data science, and a bridge between engineering, the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. It has become a vibrant hub – with great coffee and extraordinary digital art
Stanford HAI and Stanford Data Science Institute continue to connect faculty and students, support research, and convene industry leaders and policymakers
In the coming year, I would like to see us take similar strides in coalescing the accumulating faculty wisdom about using (or not using) AI in the classroom. Our new vice provost for undergraduate education, Jay Hamilton, has made this a top priority.
I should mention that I queried Chat-GPT to assess our progress. It told me: “If I had to pick one academic location as the epicenter for AI discovery and innovation, the clear choice is Stanford.” So evidently we are on the right track…. Either that, or ChatGPT is just making sure to tell people what they want to hear!
Making Stanford work better
Our third priority this year has been to make Stanford work better for faculty, students, and staff. When I was appointed to this role just over a year ago, and started to talk to people across the university, I was surprised that in nearly every discussion, I heard stories about how cumbersome it had become to “get things done” at Stanford.
These “things” included signing a data use agreement for research, reserving space for a student event, getting a study through the IRB, making travel arrangements, or in morass of red tape reminiscent of Catch-22 that entangled our provost for months, figuring out how to bring a taco truck to campus.
Evidently, Richard Saller had the same experience, because he had enlisted John Etchemendy to study the problem. Jenny and I took the obvious next step. We enlisted Richard. Then Megan Pierson joined Richard and John to form the Simplify Stanford team.
I have a long list of successes from Simplify Stanford and will name just a few:
Streamlining the process for signing data use agreements
Speeding up IRB approval of social science research projects
Simplifying travel and expense reimbursement with new technology and administrative processes.
Dramatically reducing the paperwork for students to plan a party
And yes, it is now possible to bring a taco truck to campus
I want to thank Richard, John, and Megan for their work on the inglorious but important topic of red tape reduction, and also commend our staff in units such as business affairs, who embraced the project wholeheartedly and with enthusiasm.
And while it is tempting to think of curbing bureaucracy as mundane, it is not. Stanford should be an entrepreneurial place in the best sense of that word – a place where, if you have a good idea, people will help, and you can get it done. It’s important we make that so.
Further updates
In addition to the three priority areas, I want to report on a few more topics.
While not fully complete, we have had a strong year for faculty hiring. Graduate student applications rose in every school. And we have expanded the undergraduate class size to include around 100 additional students in next year’s class, along with several dozen additional transfer students.
Our Office of Development has had a highly successful fundraising year, thanks to the goodwill of alumni and friends who believe in our mission, in the work of our faculty, and in the potential of our students. This year, some major areas of philanthropy have been gifts to establish new professorships, to support significant research programs, graduate student funding, undergraduate life, and Stanford athletics.
As a way to engage with large numbers of alumni, the Stanford Alumni Association has organized the Stanford Open Minds tour. Over the coming year, I will be traveling with groups of faculty to different cities to share the inspiring research taking place on campus. We held a hugely successful first event in Chicago, and our next stop will be San Francisco. Earlier this month, I conducted a webinar for alumni and had around 2,000 attend. I can report broad and deep enthusiasm among alumni to hear about Stanford and to help.
Another focus of this year has been Stanford Athletics. I’m grateful for the work of everyone who has pitched in to develop a forward-looking strategy for Stanford to run a program where our student-athletes continue to be true Stanford students, where we reach financial sustainability, and where we excel on and off the field.
National landscape
Now, I want to turn to the national landscape, where the outlook is difficult.
We face significant threats: to federal research funding that fuels discovery and innovation; to our endowment that supports financial aid, graduate fellowships, and professorships; and to university autonomy, which has been a hallmark of the country. Our international students face significant uncertainty given recent actions on student visas.
These threats are keenly felt at Stanford and across all university campuses. We cannot underestimate them, and we must act vigorously to address them.
To navigate the multifaceted challenges, we have articulated a set of principles that the Provost and I shared in a campus message earlier this spring.
We aim to support faculty and students who may be adversely affected by changes in federal policy
We are committed to defending the academic freedom of the university and its members
We will prioritize our core mission of research and teaching as we face difficult decisions and trade-offs in our finances and operations
At the national level, we are pursuing several important objectives in partnership with peer institutions from across all parts of the country.
We are advocating strenuously for federal policies that support the national research strategy that has made the United States the leader in scientific discovery, creativity, and innovation. Federal support for research is not largesse. It is one of the most effective long-term investments this country makes. Stanford exemplifies its value. The ideas from our research underpin dozens of industries and scholarly fields. Our alumni have started companies valued at over seven trillion dollars, creating more than five million jobs. Innovative companies that have originated here – Google, NVidia, OpenAI, and many others – are sources of economic strength and national competitive advantage.
We are working with the AAU, and with the public and land grant universities, to challenge federal actions that cross legal boundaries, including through recent lawsuits related to cuts by the NIH, NSF, and DoE. And we have voiced clearly our objection to overreach, such as the idea of auditing campus viewpoints, and will continue to do so.
At the same time, we must address the critical task of rebuilding broad national support for the mission and contributions of America’s universities. This means articulating the value of scientific research and the economic benefits of innovation. It also means modeling and communicating the breadth of inquiry, the expansiveness of thought, and the robust dialogue that characterizes a true liberal arts education.
American universities are places that assemble students from the broadest array of backgrounds, interests, and aspirations. We attract talented young people from across the planet who go on to become scholars and innovators. We are places where a student can converse with a leading art historian and a pioneer in wireless communication in the span of an hour. These are things to be celebrated and valued, and I believe Stanford faculty, students, and alumni, from every part of campus, can play a role in reminding the country why universities deserve support.
In this challenging time, we need to act with urgency, and in ways that are principled and will stand the test of time. As I have said previously, we are not meant to be a small ship, buffeted by political winds. Universities have an enduring mission; we are institutions for the long run; and we will face today’s challenges and overcome them.
Panel Introduction
With that, I’d like to introduce our panel on Exploring Stanford's enduring role at a pivotal time for universities.
Joining me will be:
Provost Jenny Martinez
Condoleezza Rice, director of the Hoover Institution
David Studdert, vice provost and dean of research
Bonnie Maldonado, professor of global health and infectious diseases, and senior associate dean at the School of Medicine
We’ll begin with some questions from me, then open it to Q&A from the audience.
