We the undersigned fully embrace and support academic freedom, a vital part of the lifeblood of any healthy university. But academic freedom always needs to be coupled with academic responsibility.

To take one central example, we believe that faculty wishing to pronounce on medical matters should hold themselves to the AMA’s Code of Medical Ethics. This is especially true during a public health crisis, especially true where individuals wish to go against the prevailing scientific consensus, and especially true where individuals are not credentialed experts in the relevant domain.

The American Medical Association calls upon medical experts, when interacting with the media, to ensure that the medical information they provide is both “commensurate with their medical expertise” and “based on valid scientific evidence and insight gained from professional experience.” We believe that faculty in the medical school and elsewhere should hold themselves to these vital standards of responsibility when commenting on matters of public health.

We also call for an Academic Council meeting to discuss the meaning of academic responsibility at Stanford.

Faculty have, of course, the right to make all kinds of statements on all kinds of topics. That freedom does not, however, imply a complete lack of moral responsibility. Nor is that freedom what is meant, strictly speaking, by “academic freedom.”

Academic freedom is not the same as freedom of speech. Robert Post, a prominent scholar of academic freedom, puts it this way: “although the First Amendment may prohibit the state from penalizing the New York Times for misunderstanding the distinction between astronomy and astrology, no astronomy professor can insulate himself or herself from the adverse consequences of such a conflation.” In other words, a department would be within its rights to refuse to appoint an aspiring astronomer who can’t tell the difference between astronomy and astrology; a university would be within its rights to deny that person tenure; the NSF might well decline funding for a grant; a journal might well decline publication.

Similarly, scholars are not entitled to plagiarize the work of others, to fabricate data, or to falsify the results of experiments. (It would make no sense to copy someone else’s article and then claim one is entitled to do that, because academic freedom allows us to write anything we like.) For all these reasons, academic freedom “does not protect the autonomy of professors to pursue their own individual work free from all university restraints.”

There is a good reason for this. One of the main values of the First Amendment is expressive: it allows everyone to speak their mind. But the main value of academic freedom is epistemic: it helps us, as a community, work toward truth. Post puts it this way: “if the First Amendment protects the interests of individual persons to speak as they wish, academic freedom protects the interests of society in having a professoriat that can accomplish its mission.”

But the only way we can collectively work toward truth is if all of us act in good faith, holding ourselves to the intellectual standards of our disciplines. As Post says, “the [AAUP] Declaration conceives of academic freedom not as an individual right to be free from any and all constraint but instead as the freedom to pursue the ‘scholar’s profession’ according to the standards of that profession.”

The university is not Twitter. If there is a value to the existence of research universities, that value lies in part in the expertise they enshrine and foster. So while academic freedom is indispensable, it must always be accompanied by its counterpart, academic responsibility. A healthy university isn’t just a collection of individuals expressing opinions they happen to have on a wide variety of topics; it’s a set of experts delivering the thoughtfully-expressed results of careful research, conducted to high professional standards. That kind of expertise can exercise a salutary check on a chaotic social-media world of truths, half-truths, and untruths. But only if we hold ourselves responsible.


Joshua Landy,
Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French; Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford

David Palumbo-Liu
Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor, Comparative Literature, Stanford

Branislav Jakovljevic
Sarah Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities, Professor, Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford

David Spiegel
Jack, Lulu, and Sam Willson Professor, Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Stanford

Stephen Monismith
Obayashi Professor in the School of Engineering, Stanford

John Hennessy
James F. and Mary Lynn Gibbons Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Philip A Pizzo, MD
David and Susan Heckerman Professor of Pediatrics and of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford

Melissa Bondy
Chair and Professor, Epidemiology and Population Health Stanford Medicine Discovery Professor

Elaine Treharne
Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities, Department of English, Stanford

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

Cecile Alduy
Professor, French; Chair, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Stanford University
 
Jeffrey R Koseff
William Alden and Martha Campbell Professor of Engineering, Stanford University

Paula Moya
Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity

Steven J. Zipperstein
Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, Department of History

Stephen Stedman
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute

Pamela A. Matson
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Environmental Studies, Director, Change Leadership for Sustainability and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute

Thomas Blom Hansen
Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Anthropology

Laura Wittman
Associate Professor of French and Italian

David A. Relman
Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor of Medicine, and Professor of Microbiology & Immunology, Stanford University

Rob Dunbar
Keck Professor of Earth Sciences, Stanford

Pavle Levi
Professor, Film and Media Studies, Art Department, Stanford

Rush Rehm
Professor, Classics and TAPS, Stanford

Craig Criddle
Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University

Julie Parsonnet
Professor of Medicine and of Epidemiology and Population Health, Stanford

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

Ge Wang
Associate Professor, Department of Music, Stanford

Yvonne Maldonado
Taube Professor of Global Health and Infectious Diseases, Stanford
 
Mark Z. Jacobson
Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford

Lesley Park
Senior research scientist, Stanford

Allison Kurian
Professor of Medicine and of Epidemiology and Population Health, Stanford

Steven Goodman
Associate Dean and Professor of Epidemiology and of Medicine, Stanford

Michelle C. Odden
Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health, Stanford

Dan Edelstein
Professor, DLCL, Stanford
 
Lisa Goldman Rosas
Assistant Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Population Health and Department of Medicine (Primary Care and Population Health), Stanford

Esther M. John
Professor of Epidemiology & Population Health and of Medicine, Stanford

Abby King
Professor of Epidemiology & Population Health and of Medicine (Stanford Prevention Research Center), Stanford

Terry Berlier
Associate Professor, Department of Art & Art History, Art Practice, Stanford

Matthew Smith
Chair and Professor, TAPS and German

Brent Sockness
Associate Professor of Religious Studies and, by courtesy, German Studies

Mark McGurl
Albert Guérard Professor of Literature, Stanford

Shane Denson
Associate Professor, Film & Media Studies, Department of Art & Art History, Stanford

Thomas Sheehan
Professor of Religious Studies, Stanford

Margaret Cohen
Andrew B. Hammond Professor, English, Stanford

Mikael Wolfe
Associate Professor of History, Stanford

Michele Elam
William Coe Professor in the Humanities
 
John Witte
Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health, Biomedical Data Science, and Genetics (by courtesy)

Lynn Hildemann
Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Stanford

Haiyan Lee
Walter A. Haas Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, Stanford

Russ Altman
Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, Genetics, Medicine

Upi Singh
Professor, Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine

Stan Deresinski
Clinical Professor

Amy Chang
Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Infectious Diseases & Geographic Medicine\

Lorene Nelson
Associate Professor, Epidemiology & Population Health
 
Tom Mullaney
Professor of History

Robert Shafer, MD
Professor of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases

Jerome Yesavage
Jared Tinklenberg Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

Alan F. Schatzberg
Kenneth T. Norris, Jr., Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University

Robert Malenka
Pritzker Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

Sepideh Bajestan
Associate Clinical Professor

Debra Kaysen
Professor, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Stanford

Karen Parker
Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford

Jason Andrews
Associate Professor, Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine

Paul G Fisher
Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics

Kari Nadeau
Naddisy Foundation Endowed Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics

Victor G. Carrion, M.D.
John A. Turner, M.D. Professor and Vice-Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

John A. Turner, M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford

Catherine Blish
Professor, Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine

Stephen J. Galli
Mary Hewitt Loveless, MD Professor, Professor of Pathology and of Microbiology and Immunology

Michele Barry
Shenson Professor of Medicine and Tropical Diseases

Mitchell Lunn
Assistant Professor of Medicine and of Epidemiology and Population Health (by courtesy)

Thomas Charles Merigan MD
George E. and Lucy Becker Professor of Medicine, Emeritus

Peter Sarnow
Professor of Microbiology & Immunology

Kathryn Starkey
Professor, German Studies, Stanford

Jake Scott
Clinical Assistant Professor, Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine

Lucy S Tompkins
Lucy Becker Professor of Medicine; Professor of Microbiology and Immunology

Holden Maecker
Professor (Research), Microbiology & Immunology

Helen Blau
Professor, Microbiology & Immunology, Stanford

Tanya Marie Luhrmann
Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology (and Psychology, by courtesy)
Stanford University

Sylvia Yanagisako
Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies, Professor of Anthropology

Glenn M Chertow
Professor of Medicine (Nephrology) and (by courtesy) Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health

Gary Shaw
Professor and Associate Chair Clinical Research, Pediatrics

David K. Stevenson, MD
Harold K. Faber Professor of Pediatrics

Lianne Kurina
Associate Professor, Primary Care and Population Health

Grant Parker
Associate Professor, Department of Classics

Harry Greenberg
Professor of Medicine and Microbiology and Immunology

Greer Murphy
Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emeritus

David Lobell
Professor of Earth System Science

Ari Y Kelman
Jim Joseph Professor of Education and Jewish Studies, GSE

Yoshiko Matsumoto
Yamato Ichihashi Professor in Japanese History and Civilization, Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Alice Whittemore
Prof of Epidemiology & Population Health (Emerita)

Ramon Saldivar
Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities & Sciences

Keith Baker
J.E. Wallace Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History

Clea Sarnquist
Clinical Associate Professor

Manu Prakash
Associate Professor, Department of Bioengineering

Shelley Correll
Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Women’s Leadership

Fiorenza Micheli
David and Lucile Packard Professor of Marine Science, Senior Fellow at Woods Institute for the Environment, Co-director of Hopkins Marine Station and Center for Ocean Solutions

Jonathan Berger
The Denning Family Provostial Professor

James Holland Jones
Associate Professor of Earth System Science

Benoit Monin
Professor, Graduate School of Business & Psychology Department

Gordon H. Chang
Professor, Department of History

Morgan O'Neill
Assistant Professor of Earth System Science

Rodolfo Dirzo
Professor, Biology and Woods Institute

Catherine Gorle
Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Robert Tibshirani
Professor- DBDS & Statistics

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

Lochlann Jain
Professor of Anthropology

Jaroslaw Kapuscinski
Associate Professor, Department of Music

Elizabeth Bernhardt
Professor, German Studies

Michelle Mello
Professor of Law, Stanford Law School; Professor of Health Policy, Stanford University School of Medicine

Stephen Luby
Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases)

Ravi Vakil
Professor of Mathematics

Erin Mordecai
Associate Professor, Department of Biology

Robert David Siegel
Professor (Teaching)