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On March 11th, following the arrest of alleged Hamas-supporting, anti-Zionist activist and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, Stanford students protested his detention and looming deportation in a public rally at White Plaza. Anticipating this, Stanford’s associate dean of graduate and undergraduate Studies, Susan Weersing, sent out an email to various chairs and directors of academic departments and student services staff informing them of the protest.
While pro-Palestine protests have been muted in the current academic year at Stanford, a wave of new unrest has emerged during the first two months of the Trump administration. While not endorsing nor condoning the protests, the administration’s message implicitly provides some level of support for these student protestors by publicizing their cause and providing a pretense for excusing absences from class. It is difficult to imagine, say, a pro-life protest being featured by the administration in this manner, and providing some level of justification or explanation for students walking out of class may very well violate the spirit of Stanford’s new institutional neutrality guidelines.
Instructions for the email to be “share[d] with instructors of afternoon classes, if helpful,” further calls into question the administration’s objectivity, hinting that the email was meant to be shared with professors sympathetic to student-activists.
As established by the Leonard Law, students of all universities in California are afforded First Amendment rights to free speech, and this pro-Palestine protest should have absolutely been permitted by the Stanford administration. This email, however, is indicative of a problematic trend among modern leftists, that their activism should be embraced and facilitated by the status quo.
Student-activists have no positive rights to force the university’s administration to enable their actions. In the past year, Stanford has permitted university-owned property to be used as bases for student-activists to espouse radical views and anti-Semitism and accommodated tent settlements of pro-Palestine protestors to occupy White Plaza in clear violation of campus policy for months. Leftists’ rightful entitlement to free speech does not afford them the right to institutional support of their activities.
This expectation is not unique to Stanford: When New York City Public Schools permitted students to have excused absences for attending climate strikes in September of 2019. Similarly, left-wing groups such as the ACLU balked at laws which banned state-sponsored DEI initiatives, conflating the espousal of their ideology by government with their right to free expression. The value of activism lies in the consequences one embraces for protesting authority, and it is not the role of institutions such as Stanford to aid and abet student protestors in evading accountability for their actions.
