Stanford remains deeply committed to its research and teaching mission, and an extraordinary place of discovery and innovation, President Jonathan Levin and Provost Jenny Martinez said during town halls with staff over the first week of September.
The president and provost held an in-person town hall in Encina Hall on Tuesday and a virtual town hall on Thursday.
“[We have] an extraordinary set of people who work here and support all the aspects of our research and teaching mission, our clinical care, and the different activities,” Levin said. “We’re very appreciative of that.”
The town halls, which were moderated by University Communications Vice President Farnaz Khadem, touched on a range of topics, including federal policy changes, the university’s financial outlook, public skepticism of higher education, the future of diversity and inclusion efforts, and more.
Weathering change
Levin detailed the long-standing partnership between U.S. universities and the federal government, which has enabled the U.S. to become the leading country in innovation and knowledge creation by funding open science at universities and attracting global talent.
While this partnership has historically enjoyed bipartisan support, “now we’re in a different moment,” Levin said, pointing to the challenges of recent policy changes.
Martinez outlined the budgetary impacts of these changes. Legislation raising the university’s endowment tax from 1.4% to 8% will cost Stanford an estimated $200-300 million annually. Martinez explained that the endowment tax is not a temporary problem, but a long-term change that requires resetting the baseline. Some other federal budget matters won’t be resolved for several more months. For example, proposals to reduce the federal indirect cost recovery rate to 15% would cut over $200 million from Stanford’s annual budget. Uncertainty about the overall federal research budget adds further risk because Stanford faculty win more than $1 billion in research grants each year. Grant cancellations or freezes are also a concern.
Martinez said that the university budget process was extended by several months to address the ongoing financial uncertainties and to allow for careful decision-making. “In March, we didn’t even yet know what the endowment tax would be,” Martinez said. “We held things until we had as much certainty as we were going to have” for the upcoming academic year “not wanting to make cuts earlier than we had to. But once we saw the endowment tax, for example, and where it was headed, we knew we were going to have to make some changes.” The $140 million budget reduction was based on known and likely federal impacts for this fiscal year.
The university staff reductions implemented this summer were “extremely difficult,” Martinez said, noting the human impact of layoffs. She expressed appreciation for the dedication and talent of staff at Stanford and “just how much people care about their jobs and co‑workers.”
As painful as they were, Martinez said, the cuts put the university on solid and stable footing to be resilient in a variety of scenarios this academic year.
Some staff asked about using the endowment to address current challenges. Martinez noted that the university is using the endowment to smooth the financial ups and downs, enabling it to avoid deeper cuts. She explained how the endowment is made up of thousands of different funds, approximately 75% of which can only be used for purposes designated by the donors. While the remaining funds support general university operations, they are designed to support the university over the long term. The endowment tax will make it harder for the endowment payout to keep up with inflation, and removing too much from the funds now would make it difficult to pay expenses that are covered annually by endowment payout down the road.
Levin explained that in recent months, Stanford’s leadership has been deeply engaged in federal policy issues, advocating in Congress, and participating in lawsuits around cuts to federal research funding. He emphasized that Stanford is guided by a set of enduring principles, and stressed the ongoing need to build broad public support to weather future political winds. “Ultimately,” he said, “the recipe for long-term success in universities is that enough people believe in what we do and they respect what we do.”
Connecting across differences
The town hall discussions also addressed the conclusion of Stanford’s IDEAL initiative that grew out of the Long-Range Vision, and the future of diversity and inclusion at Stanford.
“Education is fundamentally about encountering differences: different ideas, different people, and different cultures,” Levin said. He observed that Stanford’s efforts at outreach and to increase financial aid had, over time, enabled the university to attract a much broader array of students, faculty, and staff, which has strengthened its educational and research missions. Levin expressed pride that “the university is much more diverse and much stronger now than when I walked onto campus 35 years ago,” but also noted the challenges of the current moment.
Levin emphasized the importance of creating an environment in which everyone on campus could thrive and the need for a strong pluralistic community. He cited current efforts to promote a culture of inquiry and dialogue, including the ePluribus initiative, as a way to ensure that Stanford is “a place where people talk to each other, where they listen, where they’re open-minded, where they’re curious about different people.” Levin stressed that these values mattered as much in the workplace as they did in pursuing Stanford’s educational mission.
One staff member shared how her participation in Stanford’s IDEAL programs had created a new sense of belonging for her at Stanford. Levin agreed that it was important to recognize the positive work that had gone into IDEAL and the lessons that could be learned. He emphasized the university’s commitment to creating a positive culture for all of its staff members.
There were also questions and concerns about international students. Martinez underscored that the university remains committed to supporting them and encouraged staff to visit the university’s immigration webpage for resources, news, and updates.
“We are encouraged to see, and thanks to the great staff who worked on this, that almost all of our students coming in for the fall have gotten their visas,” Martinez added.
Looking back and ahead
Levin and Martinez also took time to discuss progress made on their priorities last year, which include advancing AI and data-driven discovery, encouraging civil discourse, and simplifying work processes at Stanford.
Stanford has a long history of discovery in technology and AI, and it will continue to shape the future of technology with the supercomputing cluster Marlowe, work at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and the opening of the Computing and Data Science (CoDa) building, Levin said. Stanford is also now poised to be at the forefront of shaping the transformative effect AI will have on education.
Encouraging people to engage with one another with openness and curiosity and to grapple with disagreement is fundamental to education and research, Martinez said. While many universities have turned their attention to these issues in the last year, Stanford has been working on these issues for several years with programs such as the first-year Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) requirement and the Civics Initiative. These efforts intensified this year with the launch of ePluribus and discussion opportunities such as Pizza, Politics, and Polarization.
To make the university work better for its faculty, students, and staff, the president and provost created the Simplify Stanford team, which has made progress on matters such as travel reimbursements, procurement, and research. Martinez asked staff to let their supervisor know if they have ideas for other processes that can be streamlined.
Levin and Martinez said they look forward to continuing work on these priorities and discussed other goals for the coming year, such as plans to continue expanding the undergraduate class and ensure that a Stanford education remains affordable for admitted students.
While the number of faculty and graduate students and even buildings on campus have increased in recent decades, the undergraduate class size at Stanford and its peer institutions has remained flat, Levin said. For decades, the nation’s top universities competed to admit more students, and at some point, that trend stopped and they competed to be exclusive.
“I think that was just an absolute mistake,” Levin said, emphasizing that Stanford would like to offer more students the opportunity to study at the university, an experience that can be highly impactful for students and their families.
“When we admit someone to this university, we open a door that, when they walk through it … it changes their life. It can change their whole family’s life,” Levin said. “We can open more doors, and we can do that, in my view, without diluting the experience of being a Stanford student.”
The president and provost said they also look forward to more opportunities to meet and talk with staff in the coming year.
“Everywhere you go on this campus, there is something that is incredible,” Levin said. “A privilege of being in this role is we get to see so much of that.”
Levin ended by noting that he is optimistic about the future, in part because the university’s academic year provides a natural cycle of renewal.
Universities “have a very important role in the world that’s distinctive from other places, as the home of ideas, of learning, curiosity, and discovery, and we have a responsibility to sustain that over time,” Levin said. “… Every year, we send off people out into the world, and they go off and hopefully do good and make us proud, and then we renew ourselves in the fall. Right now, this is the month of renewal for us when we bring students in.”
