The woke faculty have it in for these fellows. But it’s not going so well for them.
The woke faculty have it in for these fellows. But it’s not going so well for them.
I t gnaws away at Stanford University’s woke faculty: Harbored in their midst is that nominally conservative outfit, the Hoover Institution, which more than a few professors hold as an infestation of the liberal citadel. It is, after all, named after a Republican president — never mind being home to the likes of Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson and H. R. McMaster (and yes, plenty of establishment GOP types, and even a lefty or two). And there’s this: The campus is visually dominated by the striking eleven-story Hoover Tower, which scrapes the Palo Alto sky like some right-hand middle finger. Housing vast and important archives (much of the contents are about the evils of Marxist-Leninism), the tower is crowned by a 48-bell carillon that no doubt triggers faculty and students with the occasional auditory reminder of Hoover’s confounding and unwelcome presence.
Who will rid us of this troublesome think tank and its more Trumpy fellows?
There is no paucity of willing hitmen amongst Stanford’s more fevered and Hoover-obsessed faculty, who of late have mounted a campaign to diminish Hoover’s standing and to bully the institution’s more important and controversial (meaning, from their perspective, notorious) fellows. Of particular focus are the aforementioned Professor Hanson, known well in NR’s precincts and the author of The Case for Trump (word is he also has a weekly podcast); Scott Atlas, a prominent member of former President Trump’s COVID task force (his nondoctrinaire, wrong-partisan stands prompted a hundred-plus of his former colleagues to publish an open letter last September that berated him as a threat to public health); and historian Niall Ferguson, who was accused (projection warning) of suppressing the free-speech rights of students in 2018.
Under the cover of COVID, not wanting to let this crisis go to waste, the plotters plotted. Led by the uber-leftist comparative-lit professor and Twitter junkie, David Palumbo-Liu, over 100 Stanford faculty corralled in late September 2020 to sign an open letter (does anyone at Stanford write closed letters?) attacking the Hoover-Stanford relationship and insisting the Faculty Senate take very public steps:
A closely connected concern which needs to be addressed by the Senate is our relation to an Institute that has a narrow focus and a pre-determined point of view which it is committed to retain and reinforce in all its research. This is not conjecture, it is manifested in the Hoover’s mission statement. . . . This commitment to producing knowledge that constantly validates a specific belief makes the Hoover distinct and is troubling when we find Stanford linked to this kind of guided research. It is antithetical to the open scientific inquiry that drives all research universities.
Action was demanded: “The relationship between the Hoover Institution’s way of promoting their policy preferences and the academic mission of Stanford University requires more careful renegotiation.”
Who can blame Team Palumbo? Imagine what could be bankrolled should they get their mitts on a carefully renegotiated part of Hoover’s $577 million endowment?
Plotting done, they struck: A Stanford Faculty Senate meeting scheduled for February 11 was the scene of an hours-long effort to skunk Hoover and the targeted fellows. Palumbo-Liu and his entourage — fellow comparative-lit teacher Joshua Landy, engineering professor Stephen Monismith, and psychiatry professor David Spiegel (quite the generous donor to various leftist Democratic candidates) — prepared a massive “Report on the Hoover Institution and Stanford University” that catalogued a plethora of contrived accusations and scratched a fierce audio-visual itch: The diatribe was accompanied by more slides than Ricky Henderson or Lou Brock ever made in their careers.
Its introduction contained gratuitous kumbaya throw-offs, but language of the accusation was direct:
Too much of what we have seen coming out of the Hoover has made a travesty of honest intellectual debate, because an excess of partisanship has led some Hoover fellows out of the realm of fact, science, and good faith argumentation.
For hours, the lefty scholars took turns prosecuting, leveling niceties such as “Hoover as a Feeder of Alt-Right Propaganda,” “Hoover Against Diversity, Gender, Sustainability,” and “COVID Misinformation from Other Fellows,” strewn amongst attempts to link VDH to the Capitol riot (“excuse me, ‘insurrection’”), drub Atlas as the pathogen’s BFF, and cast Ferguson as a free-speech foe.
The marathon concluded with a demand: “What we are asking is simply for an impartial committee to be appointed by the Committee on Committees to delve deeper into the relationship between the Hoover and Stanford.”
’Twas not to be. Put in the form of a resolution, the demand was essentially defeated: What prevailed was a watered-down, amended version that stated that Hoover director Condoleezza Rice (who was offered a few minutes to rebut the quartet’s onslaught) and Stanford provost Persis Drell would present a report later this year on “increasing interaction” between the two bodies.
It was, a wound-licking Palumbo-Liu wrote in a Stanford Daily op-ed, “a tragic day.” We are unsure as to whether he typed his column’s concluding paragraph from a fainting couch:
In my opinion, and mine alone, the Senate’s failure to take on the task of independent research, their ready acquiescence to power, their timidity before peer pressure and, worst of all, their deployment of the most illogical, unfactual and bad faith arguments, is a stain on the Faculty Senate and an abrogation of duty.
(There was, of course, ample Palumbo-Liu in-defeat tweeting about the “Stan-Hoov” conspiracy and other gems lecturing that “the Hoover/Stanford relationship is largely about $$. Hoover directly and indirectly brings in big donors. All universities are ultimately not about ideology, but about cash. Ideology is barely secondary.” Uh huh.)
Cue curtain?
Not so fast. This affair is not over. Not by a long shot.
What of the Hoover fellows — Hanson, Ferguson, and Atlas — slammed and sullied ad nauseam at the senate circus, a venue in which they were not allowed to appear to counter the tendered lunacies?
This week, the trio took to the Stanford Review, the school’s independent, conservative alternative publication, to respond and defend their honor. The rebuttal, “On Free Speech at Stanford,” is well worth the read in its entirety, as it takes to task the accusers (and their own hypocrisies), in part declaring that their statement’s central aim “is to object to a group of professors’ deliberate misuse of the Faculty Senate and the student newspaper to act as purveyors of their defamation.”
If cowering was expected, if dodged-a-bullet gratitude was considered, well, it wasn’t to be. The trio’s counterpunching ends with this:
Regardless of the outcome of current and future deliberations about the relationship between Stanford and Hoover, as individuals we now seek meaningful reassurances that these unwarranted attacks on our reputations will no longer be legitimized by some in the Faculty Senate and disseminated by the student newspaper. If Hoover fellows continue to be targets for character assassination, it will be clear to us what the true nature of free speech at Stanford has become — and not only to us.
Last year, Stanford sadly placed 35th out of 55 in the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s College Free Speech rankings. In this regard, we note the relevant warning of the prior Provost, Professor John Etchemendy, “Over the years, I have watched a steady and frightening evolution of the University — my University — into an intellectually, increasingly homogeneous place.”
We agree, and ask the greater Stanford community of which we are indeed full members to ask themselves: Does the wind of freedom still blow at Stanford? Or is it the stale breath of ideological conformism and intimidation that we detect?
From all the way over here on the East Coast, you can smell the answer: It’s stale.