Update, noon, October 23: Responding to public outcry, the organizers have decided to livestream the conference. While this is a positive gesture, it should be noted that this came about only because of concerted media and public attention, and that live-streaming does not at all solve the main problem: there is still no mechanism whereby any of the speakers can be challenged in any significant manner. Thus, the basic design of the conference remains intact, and the text below remains essentially on point.

The back-and-forth over this issue also shows, once again, that marginalized voices are always called upon to do extra, unpaid, and exhausting work simply to have themselves heard, in whatever manner.

The Graduate School of Business has announced that on November 4 it will hold a conference on Academic Freedom. [1] 

A conference on Academic Freedom would indeed be a timely and urgent one, given today’s context where we find the passage of laws (e.g. in Florida) banning faculty from teaching about selected issues, the banning of books from public libraries, the banning of even particular forms of language, and the harassment of scholars working in certain fields of study, like Michael Mann working on climate change, or Jo Boaler on working on math curricula. But the organizers of this conference have something else in mind.

They are motivated by their belief that, “[m]any parts of universities have become politicized or have turned into ideological monocultures, excluding people, ideas, or kinds of work that challenge their orthodoxy.” Ironically, this invitation-only conference is closed to Stanford faculty, students, and the general public. When a  reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Education attempted to secure a press pass she was told that the press was not invited either. [2] 

When asked about this exclusionary practice, GSB Dean Jonathan Levin replied, [universities] “strive to be places where we are fostering engagement and discussion and debate about a broad set of issues from a broad range of perspectives. We’re trying to create a collision of ideas that gives rise to research and to learning...” [3] We fail to see how this conference, which itself “exclud[es] people, ideas, or kinds of work that challenge” its “orthodoxy” can be a place where any actual “collision of ideas” might possibly occur.

Of most concern to us is that one of the invited speakers, Professor Amy Wax, has portrayed her repeated anti-Black statements on the intellectual capacities of Blacks (including those of her own Black students at the University of Pennsylvania Law School) as protected exercises in academic freedom.

Wax is famous for statements such as, “Take Penn Law School, or some top 10 law school... Here's a very inconvenient fact . . . I don't think I've ever seen a Black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely in the top half ... I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half in my required first year course.” Wax has also falsely claimed that Penn Law has a racial diversity mandate for its law review.

University of Pennsylvania Law School Dean Theodore Ruger corrected the record, "Black students have graduated in the top of the class at Penn Law, and the Law Review does not have a diversity mandate. Rather, its editors are selected based on a competitive process."  Subsequently thirty-three Penn Law faculty members signed an open letter condemning Wax’s statements, and The Penn Law chapter of the National Lawyers Guild decried her falsehoods.  [4]

Recently Wax has turned to making racist statements against Asians. According to the Jewish Business News [5] Wax said “the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.” The article goes on to note: "Wax is really a racist… Her comments were not about East Asians necessarily, but all Asians including Indians, Arabs and Muslims. Wax has said, 'It’s just harder to assimilate those people [Asians] or to have confidence that our way of life will continue if we bring a lot of people in who are not familiar with it.'"

Let us be crystal clear–Wax has the freedom to utter abhorrent racist statements, but she bears the responsibility to get the facts right.  When her zeal for making a racist point takes precedence over her obligation to get the facts right, or provide any proof whatsoever for her statements, we have a profound problem, one that no bogus appeal to academic freedom can or should cover up.  Academic freedom is meant to guarantee a forum to debate such assertions. The organizers of this event have made that impossible. Indeed, they have purposefully deprived us of our academic freedom to challenge Wax’s assertions, and have set up a protective, exclusionary  cordon around each of the speakers and the conference itself.

But it is not only Wax who has issued deeply problematic statements about the capacities of racial minorities–not only has keynote speaker Peter Thiel done so, he has also included women in his group of supposedly lesser-talented groups. In his co-authored book, The Diversity Myth, co-authored with David Sacks, Thiel parodied Stanford’s attempts to diversify its curriculum and asserted that minority and women authors rarely produced work worth reading.

His beliefs, paralleling those of Wax, have not changed over the years; in 2016 Thiel agreed to address the “Property and Freedom Society,” an ultra-libertarian organization that also invited Jared Taylor, host of the annual white nationalist American Renaissance conference,  traditionally the largest annual white nationalist  gathering in the U.S. [6] Thiel has also met with white nationalist leader Kevin Deanna. [7]

The fact that Thiel has used “free speech” to merely provoke, rather than communicate, is made evident in an incident cited by The Economist, and proudly alluded to in The Diversity Myth. While at Stanford: “[Thiel] defended a fellow [Stanford] law student, Keith Rabois, who decided to test the limits of free speech on campus by standing outside a teacher’s residence and shouting “Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!” [8]

The organizers have purposefully created a situation where Stanford cannot emerge unscathed. If it defunds or even criticizes the conference it will be portrayed by the right wing as bending to “woke” culture. If it does not do so, it will lose yet more credibility in our community.  Stanford has effectively been trolled in precisely the manner employed by Thiel’s homophobic stunt of years past. 

This brings us to our central point–while we respect the rights of free speech and academic freedom, both are meant to encourage debate and discussion that can test those assertions. The organizers have in fact gone out of their way to create a hermetically-sealed event, safe from any and all meaningful debate, filled with self-affirmation and self-congratulation, an event where racism is given shelter and immunity.

While we respect the organizers’ right to hold this conference, we also respect the use of the English language, and the intelligence of our community.  The organizers cannot at once decry exclusion and then employ it against an entire university community, the public, and the press without explaining how this is not a contradiction. One cannot evoke academic freedom in order to deprive others of it. This deeply cynical instrumentalization of “academic freedom” to protect racist lies and other mistruths is an offense to the very concept that forms the bedrock of the University.

If Stanford is to hold true to its motto (“The Winds of Freedom Blow”), it should emphatically dissociate itself from an event that has done everything possible to stifle those winds when it comes to academic freedom. It is an embarrassment to our university and a particularly sharp insult to all the communities who will see bigotry against them used to make bigots appear heroic defenders of free speech and academic freedom.

Notes:

[1] https://cli.stanford.edu/events/conference-symposium/academic-freedom-conference

[2] https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/the-review/2022-10-24

[3] https://news.stanford.edu/report/2022/10/21/faculty-senate-hears-efforts-challenges-addressing-student-mental-health-wellbeing/

[4]

https://almanac.upenn.edu/articles/statement-from-dean-ted-ruger-regarding-professor-amy-wax

[5] https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/news/14369-a-statement-from-dean-ruger-in-response-to-recent

[6] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/06/09/paypal-co-founder-peter-thiel-address-white-nationalist-friendly-%E2%80%9Cproperty-and-freedom

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/inside-a-white-nationalist-conference-energized-by-trumps-ri

[7] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/03/18/white-nationalist-who-met-peter-thiel-admired-terroristic-literature

[8] https://www.economist.com/business/2016/06/02/the-evolution-of-mr-thiel?utm_source=pocket_mylist

(Signatures updated periodically)

Signed,

Stephen Monismith, Obayashi Prof. in the School of Engineering and Professor, Stanford Oceans

Stephen Stedman, Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute

Paula Moya, Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English and, by Courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures

Ramon Saldivar, Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Usha Iyer, Faculty, Art and Art History

David Palumbo-Liu, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature

Marci Kwon, Assistant Professor, Art & Art History

Sharika Thiranagama, Associate Professor of Anthropology

Branislav Jakovljevic, Professor, TAPS

Jonathan Rosa, Associate Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature

Rush Rehm, Professor, Theater and Classics; Artistic Director, Stanford Repertory Theater

Elaine Treharne, Professor of English

Andrea Nightingale, Professor of Classics

Elizabeth A Hadly, Professor Biology, Professor Earth System Science

Anthony Barnosky, Professor Emeritus, Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley & past Professor of Biology, Stanford

Cécile Alduy, Professor, French and Italian Department

Jeffrey Koseff, William Alden and Martha Campbell Professor of Engineering

Peggy Phelan, The Ann O'Day Maples Chair in the Arts, Professor of English and TAPS

Mikael Wolfe, Associate Professor of History

Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies Emeritus

Robert Dunbar, W.M. Keck Professor of Earth Science

Richard G. Luthy, Silas H. Palmer Professor of Environmental Engineering

Joshua Landy, Andrew B. Hammond Professor, French

Gabrielle Hecht, Professor of History

Robert Tibshirani, Professor, Departments of Statistics and DBDS

Michaela Bronstein, Assistant Professor, English

Ramón Antonio Martínez, Associate Professor of Education

Teresa LaFromboise, Professor of Education

Morgan O'Neill, Assistant Professor, Earth System Science

Monika Greenleaf, Associate Professor, Slavic and Comparative Literature

Steven Roberts, Associate Professor, Psychology

Amado Padilla, Professor of Education & Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs

Nancy S. Kollmann, William H. Bonsall Professor in History

Haiyan Lee, Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature

Trevor Hastie, John A. Overdeck Professor, Professor of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science

Craig Criddle, Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Elliott White Jr., Assistant Professor of Earth System Science

Marshall Burke, Associate Professor, Doerr School of Sustainability