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Stanford Review: Hi President Levin, thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview. Also, happy belated birthday! Your father was the president of Yale. Obviously, you are now the President of Stanford. The last year has been difficult for university presidents. What do you think the role of university presidents is? How has it changed?
President Levin: Well. I’ll just start by saying I'm 100 days into this role. So, of course, I’m still at a point where I”m learning a lot about everything. I came into this role knowing that it has been a very challenging period for universities nationally and the experience I've had so far has been really positive. It's been incredibly exciting to see just the breadth of excellence across the university, the feeling of openness and discussion on the campus this year, which has been particularly gratifying given the last couple of years, and just the overall sense of optimism at Stanford, something I really love and value. And that's what I talked about in my inauguration.
You asked about the differences over time and in university leadership. I think that's a very good question. I think universities like Stanford have for many years played such an important role in the country as the source of ideas and new knowledge and discovery and innovation and the place that is the magnet for talent from all over the world. People have the chance to explore and learn and go off and make significant contributions.The most important part of university leadership is to try to sustain that crucial mission. So that hasn't changed, that's always there and always will be there in another 20 or 100 years.
There are some distinctive challenges about today because of just everything that's going on in the world and on campuses and so that's part of current university leadership. But the part that's exciting about being university president is really all the people on the campus and all the things, ideas they come up with and things they're doing. And I think that is an enduring aspect of nursing leadership.
Stanford Review: Your background is in economics. Have you found that understanding incentives and game theory helps you run a university?
President Levin: Economics is great training for certain aspects of leadership, because you—I taught game theory, as you said, so you learn to think that's a subject where you think strategically, you try to put yourself in other people's shoes, to think about the situation that they're in. And how do you find solutions or outcomes that will work for everyone? It’s good training for the financial and operational parts of the university. There's lots of other parts of leadership that are much more about humans and thinking about what motivates people and economics can also be helpful there. But of course, there's so many other aspects of university that are not economics. They’re about the natural sciences. They're about technology, they're about humanity, they're about the arts. And I think one of the things about this job that I'm enjoying so much is seeing all of that and how many things that are on the campus that are all different and contribute different ways to making this such a special place.
Stanford Review: If you had to summarize, what are your top priorities as president?
President Levin: So Provost Martinez and I said we had three priorities that we were going to focus on this year. One of them was strengthening the culture of inquiry on the campus and doing everything we could to promote civil discourse and constructive dialogue. The second is advances in AI and data science and ensuring that Stanford is at the forefront of all of the exciting opportunities that are going to come for both research and education. And the third was, we wanted to try to make Stanford work better for its faculty and students.
Stanford Review: The first two categories are the buckets of questions that I have. So I'll move on to my first question about Stanford's educational and political climate at the present moment. In one of my classes, I was randomly assigned a partner to work on a presentation together. He told me that he had not read a book, cover to cover since the third grade, let alone at Stanford. In June, he will graduate with a degree from Stanford. How is this possible?
President Levin: Have you read a book at Stanford?
Stanford Review: I actually have. I’ve read fifty. I’ve counted. Probably at sixty now.
President Levin: I can't speak to the particular student you worked with and exactly the way he or she has approached things. I think it's a missed opportunity if you go through Stanford without doing a lot of reading, because at least in many fields, that's the way to learn. Now, some fields, it's true at Stanford, you learn in different ways that aren't necessarily from books, but you know, I certainly would hope that any student who came to Stanford would spend a lot of time reading and thinking and reflecting. So I think it's a missed opportunity if that's not how you choose to spend a good fraction of your time here.
Stanford Review: I agree. Several freshmen I have talked to have bemoaned their mandatory COLLEGE classes that are contract graded, meaning that students will receive an A if their work is turned in on time regardless of quality. One frosh even told me that all of her first quarter classes are contract graded. How does this set students up for success at Stanford and beyond?
President Levin: So the COLLEGE curriculum, that’s part of the design—and of course, it's a new course. So many aspects of COLLEGE are an experiment. We're learning. The faculty who teach it are learning about the best design for that class, what the syllabus should look like, what's the best way to manage discussion, what's the teaching model, what's the grading model. And that's something that the Faculty Senate discussed maybe 18 months ago or last year, the grading model, and at the time, they presented some evidence suggesting that it seemed to have been a positive experience. Sounds like you may have a view that's different and when that program comes up for review and to be looked at, it'll be interesting to hear that perspective on it as well. The way I think of the COLLEGE curriculum is it's in the best tradition of something at Stanford, which is, you put something out, you try it, you see how it works, you iterate, you improve it, you keep improving it, and hopefully, over time, it's going to become fantastic. And that that may well be one of the aspects of it that should be debated and discussed.
Stanford Review: Speaking and iteration and new initiatives, Stanford has recently celebrated its fourth annual “Democracy Day”—a school holiday where students are encouraged to learn more about democracy and take the time to vote as well. There was not one Republican speaker, other than students in a panel discussion, on the Democracy Day slate. Similarly, in the “Democracy on the ballot” class, the TAs handed out sign-up sheets asking students to volunteer for Kamala Harris’ campaign. You can see how events like these and similar ones across the years could make parts of the student body suspicious of political bias in the Administration. How is Stanford fostering democratic expression, and what steps do you plan on taking to fix these issues?
President Levin: Let me answer in two ways. One, the individual faculty who teach classes and students who organize events, there's no requirement about who they bring in to be guests in those classes or who they invite to speak. They have the freedom to invite who they want, and so, you know, from the perspective of, you know, did they make appropriate choices? They made the choices that they were excited to make. And, and I think that's fine. You now, you are raising a question about, if you look across the sort of spectrum of events. Are they representative of the country? I haven't looked at the full slate of all the speakers who came in around the election. My impression is there have, over the course of the quarter, been quite a lot of events and speakers from across the political spectrum. I haven't looked at the particular Democracy Day one. What I would say is, if it seems like there's a missing element, and we don't have enough representation of political voice, that's an opportunity for students to organize more events, or for faculty to organize more events.
Stanford Review: The Stanford Daily reported that 96% of Stanford affiliated donations went to Democrats this past election cycle. How should we interpret this number?
President Levin: I would interpret it exactly as the data says, which is, if you look in the zip code, the 94305 donor population to politics is not representative of the United States. And by the way, that does suggest a challenge, which is we want students to get an appreciation for—they're gonna live in this country. So it is important that during their time here, they get exposed to viewpoints that span the entire country, even if it's mostly not people who live in 94305 that are giving political donations. And so to your earlier point, that is an indication that as faculty think about inviting speakers to classes, as students think about organizing events, we should be mindful that we don't just want to invite people from our own zip code. We want to invite people who might come with a perspective from outside. They might even challenge the perspectives in the zip code, and that will be a positive thing for the university, I think, for the students, positive thing for the faculty, positive for discourse and debate on the campus.
Stanford Review: You have repeatedly said that you are committed to institutional neutrality. Despite this, a giant banner saying “No Justice No Peace” has a near-permanent fixture on Green Library. Why hasn’t the banner been taken down?
President Levin: Okay, the Provost spoke to that two weeks ago at Faculty Senate, that question was raised. That banner is, which has been there for several years, is an advertisement for an exhibit. The question was raised in the Senate as to whether it was consistent with the new policy on the no statement policy that the faculty voted on in the spring, and the Provost referred that to the Faculty Senate Committee on speech to assess whether that is, whether it goes against the new policy.
Stanford Review: On the topic of speech, a lot of students were aware that the Stanford Internet Observatory has made headlines across the country and that the Observatory has an uncertain future. Though the Stanford Internet Observatory has an uncertain future, it has continued to dominate headlines. The SIO is alleged to have participated in censoring Americans, including Stanford professors like Jay Bhattacharya via pressure on Twitter to suppress and it’s alleged to have shadow banned both posts and people. So, what’s the future of the SIO on campus?
President Levin: I don't know the answer to that question, because in my first 100 days, I haven't had the opportunity to learn everything about the Internet Observatory and either its past or its future. I'm sure there's someone who could answer that question in a lot of detail, but, and probably in another 100 days, I will be able to as well, but I'm not there yet.
Stanford Review: More broadly, Americans’ confidence in subject matter experts is near all time lows. In your opinion are Americans misguided, or are there problems with how experts from elite American institutions are producing and communicating knowledge?
President Levin: Say a little more about what you mean about the question, what you’re getting at?
Stanford Review: In some ways, the last election was a referendum on the idea of elitism, that elites are talking down to the working class. Many in the news have cited work and people coming out of elite universities, Stanford obviously being one of them, as an indicator for this trend. And I’m curious what you think about the division between the expert subject matter class, like the professors at Stanford, and the skepticism of this class by the American public.
President Levin: So I might distinguish two things there. So one is how do we at universities, as creators of knowledge, communicate scientific evidence, social scientific evidence, new ideas to the public? And do we do that effectively? Do we do that in ways that both convey information but also convey the uncertainty that's inherent in lots of research, particularly when you get into the realm of translating research into policy recommendations, which some faculty do, often in very thoughtful ways. And that's an area where you can find lots of examples where people who were experts and attempting to communicate with the public sometimes find it frustrating. People in the public sometimes find the experts frustrating. There's lots of opportunities to try to improve scientific communication.
There's a second issue in your question, which is national skepticism toward elite institutions, either because we're perceived as perpetuating privilege, or because we're perceived as perpetuating a particular political ideology. I think on the latter, I think that it's incumbent on us as universities to be able to show that in fact, first of all, we are places that are open to all different kinds of students, both from across this country and globally. And secondly, that we create environments on our campuses where all different kinds of ideas can thrive and bounce off each other and get debated. In fact, we should be better than anywhere else on the planet at making that happen. And I think if we do that, that will help to restore some of the public confidence in what goes on on our campuses, because we'll be perceived as places where ideas are tested and debated, and that's part of the process of being in a great educational institution.
Stanford Review: There's been a lot of scandal in the past few years about the integrity of research in all disciplines, ranging from political science to neurobiology. There's a lot of concern as well, not just accusations of plagiarism or research fabrication but also technological stagnation or research stagnation. I'm curious about how much fraud you think there is in STEM fields, and how much of it is just a paper mill rather than a research mill.
President Levin: I think you're raising two separate and, I think, both important issues. One is about research integrity, and when we read published papers, whatever the field is that are empirical evidence or scientific evidence, lab experiments, social science analyses, can we trust the results? And can we trust them because the data are sound and haven't been manipulated, and can we trust them because the investigators are portraying them in a way that really accurately reflects the findings, as opposed to trying to push them in a particular direction towards statistical significance or a more significant finding.
My belief is that the vast majority of research that takes place at Stanford, and this is something that we look at when we review papers, when we do seminars, is it has a high degree of integrity. As a scientist, every paper you read, you should approach— and as a student—every paper you should approach with a healthy degree of skepticism and try to find all the problems with it. That's part of being a good consumer of research. And you should do that even if you believe that the person who wrote the paper that you're writing has all of the integrity in the world, because you should be poking questions and trying to see where did the argument break down, and what could be wrong with it. Skepticism is an important part of the scientific process.
You raised another question, which is also different, but really important, which is that there have been arguments in recent years that the pace of scientific progress is slowing down. Some of our colleagues here on the faculty, Nick Bloom and Chad Jones, in fact, have a wonderful paper about ‘are ideas getting harder to find?’ And they argue that they are. It's getting harder to come up with new ideas. And of course, that's a concern, because if we slow down the scientific process that feeds into things like eventually, innovations, that get out into the world, and productivity and economic growth and standards of living go out more slowly. And the jury's out on whether that's the case. That's one argument there. There's others.
I do think it's possible that, with all of the changes, one reason I'm excited about the advances in computation and AI and data driven discoveries: it's entirely possible this will set off a new wave of advance in science across many fields, and this will be, in fact, a period of really rapid advance and excitement. In 10 years, we won't be asking the question anymore: are we slowing down? We'll be asking, wow, look how much we accelerated in the pace of discovery.
Stanford Review: Many AI experts forecast that AI will exceed human experts, as a source of knowledge, in many or all fields within a few years' time. At this point, what exactly is the value of a faculty member at Stanford?
President Levin: Well, let me start by saying, I think it's really exciting the advances that are going on in machine learning and what that's going to unlock in scientific discovery and also in education. And I think it's true across fields from astrophysics to social sciences to climate science to materials, biomedical discovery, all those fields, there's opportunities to use data and computation to synthesize lots of information to formulate new hypotheses to test them, and we could unlock a whole wave of an exciting innovation. And I think we will. I think at Stanford, we will be at the forefront of doing that. I find that incredibly exciting.
I also think education is going to change, because already the first generation models can write papers, can read books, can synthesize them, can ask questions, can give answers. So many of the things that we're trying to teach. Not at an A plus level, but at a pretty competent level already. And this is the first generation of these models. So just imagine what the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth generations will potentially look like.
I don't think faculty and students are going away anytime soon, because I think there's aspects of learning, posing new ideas. These models are good at interpolating between data. They aren't yet good at necessarily coming up with new ideas or new ways of framing things, or new ways of thinking about things. And a lot of the experience still of being a student or faculty member at Stanford is about human interaction, and we're still a long way away from computers being able to replace that part of humanity. By the way, that's one important reason why, at Stanford, when we think about a field like artificial intelligence, it's important to not only focus on the technical parts, but to think about the human aspects, and how these models and algorithms either do or don't substitute for the human part of being human.
Stanford Review: So you've spoken a few times in this interview about the desire to make Stanford into an AI superpower. In a May interview, Stanford CS Professor Fei Fei Li expressed concern that academia is “falling off a cliff pretty fast” with respect to AI research compared to the tech industry. She cited that the Stanford Natural Language lab only has 64 GPUs. Sherlock, Stanford faculty’s shared computing cluster, only has 800. By contrast, earlier this year, Meta said they are aiming to have 350,000 NVIDIA GPUs by December 31st of this year. How are we going to compete?
President Levin: Here's another way to put that statistic: This quarter, we're opening our first GPU shared computing facility, Marlowe, which is about to open at Stanford. It has 248 of the top line NVIDIA chips. Like you just said, a company like Meta has a thousand times as many chips. So what does that tell us? So one thing it tells us is that over the coming years, we will need to significantly invest to ensure that faculty and students have access to the computing researchers to do some of the exciting research that's possible here.
The other thing it tells us is we are very unlikely to be ahead of a Google or a Meta or an NVIDIA, when it comes to the number of chips that we have. They're way ahead, and they have business models that allow them to buy tens or hundreds or thousands of chips. The advantage of universities relative to companies is the people and the freedom that we give to people. I believe great scientists, great researchers, even in the field of AI, will still want to come to universities, because they get the freedom to think about the things they want to think about, and they get to interact with people from across many, many different disciplines in a way that universities are unique at doing. If we're going to compete or win in a in the world of data-driven discovery, we're going to win with a human capital strategy, not a computer chip strategy,
Stanford Review: Fei Fei Li herself is “on leave” to start her own company. She is joined by Percy Liang and Chris Re among others in the computer science department. Though they have not technically abdicated their positions, they are working on starting their own companies outside of Stanford. They're not teaching and only pursuing minimal research responsibilities at Stanford. Why are these professors starting their doing their research within Stanford rather than starting their own companies?
President Levin: Well, I certainly hope they'll come back after they've taken their leaves. Stanford does have a model, which has been a model for a long time, where faculty are allowed to take leaves to go off and do things in the world. And that's a good model because it gives whatever the faculty members do—sometimes it's a company, sometimes it's to work in government, sometimes it's to volunteer or to pursue some other passion—that's a way for faculty to go off and explore and learn some things. And the hope is that when faculty do that, they also remember all the great things about being on the Stanford campus, and they're delighted to come back at the end of their leave period. So I hope that'll be true of all the faculty you just mentioned. They'll have a great experience. They'll be very successful out on their leaves, and then they'll come back here and be even more successful back at Stanford.
Stanford Review: On a different note. how does Stanford plan to respond to its endowment being taxed as Trump has threatened to do?
President Levin: Well our endowment is currently taxed under the 2017 Tax Act. There's been a lot of discussion about whether that particular part of the 2017 Tax Act will get reopened and and looked at again and and it's potentially very consequential for us, so we'll be keeping a close eye on the discussion in Washington.
Stanford Review: Donors I've talked to have expressed concern that the value of the Stanford degree has declined dramatically, both in terms of market value and intellectual quality. Are you concerned about this possibility, and if so, what are you trying to do to fix it?
President Levin: Do you think that’s true?
Stanford Review: I think a computer science degree from Stanford is no longer a guarantee of a FAANG job or a comparable job. And if you compare syllabi and humanities classes from ten years ago to now, which you're able to do on the syllabus function online, the expectations are a lot lighter.
President Levin: I think it's hard to make comparisons of the university over time. If you look at today compared to the time when I was an undergraduate, 30 odd years ago, I just had my 30th reunion.
Stanford Review: Congratulations.
President Levin: Thank you. It is so much harder to get in here as a student. Students, by the time they've arrived at Stanford, have accomplished so many things that would have been unimaginable to most of the students in my generation, in terms of the number of activities they pursued, the level of national excellence in which they've often pursued them, and then they continue to do that at Stanford. So, you know, in many ways, I would say the students have gotten more ambitious and more driven and more motivated over time.
Now other things have also changed. There are more opportunities available to students, apart from classes and hanging out with your friends. Because of technology, you can engage with the world in different ways. You can go write for outside publications. You can do so many different things, and so it probably is also true that the relative to the alumni you mentioned the experience of being a student, how students allocate their time, has also changed.
But I wouldn't view it as—I don't know that. I don't know that you can view those kinds of changes as all for the good or all for the bad. It's a different experience. And I think that the value students get from being a student here, from what they learn and from the degree, is exceptionally valuable, and that most employers would be fortunate to hire anyone on the Stanford campus right now.
Stanford Review: To end, I have a very, very brief lightning round.
President Levin: Go for it.
Stanford Review: What is the worst Stanford dorm and the best Stanford dorm?
President Levin: [Laughing] All of the dorms are great in their own way.
Stanford Review: What is the most important problem in the world right now?
President Levin: There's no answer to that question. There are too many important problems to give you a single answer.
Stanford Review: That is an application question that we have to answer to apply here.
President Levin: Here's a non-answer to your question. One of my colleagues and collaborators who's a famous economist, a Nobel Laureate in economics, one thing I learned from him that helped him, that made him one of the most successful scholars that I know is that for him, the most important problem, was always the problem he was working on right then. That helps him get a lot done. So in some ways it's good to think about whatever it is—whatever the challenges that you're working on right now, treat that as the most important problem. It'll help you get it done.
Stanford Review: What was your favorite class at Stanford as an undergraduate?
President Levin: I had so many classes that I loved. I had exceptional faculty in many of my literature classes, in my math classes. One of the classes that was the most influential for me was the one economics class that I took here, which, even though I didn't go on to take any more economics classes here, helped to spark an interest in economics, which was then where I went off to go to grad school. And I was taught by a professor named Don Brown in the economics department.
Stanford Review: If you have one prediction about Stanford in the next 50 years, 100 years, what would that prediction be?
President Levin: Can I give it as an aspiration as opposed to as a prediction? I hope it's going to be the same locus of excellence and openness and optimism that it is today.
Stanford Review: Alright that's all the questions I have. Thank you so much.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity, length, and grammar.
