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The Stanford Review, the conservative student newspaper that Peter Thiel and others founded back in the 1980s, managed to persuade Stanford’s new president, economist Jonathan Levin, to sit down for an interview. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but in short the Stanford Review did a great job of putting Levin on the hot seat. Some excerpts, starting with the one that is getting the most attention on social media right now:

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. . .

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: 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.

I love this “the neighborhood made me do it!” explanation. And what made the neighborhood as politically slanted as it is? Palo Alto at one time in its history leaned Republican. But then Stanford went left, and the town followed. Levin ought to look in the mirror. More:

Stanford Review: Speaking of 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.

Judge for yourself whether Levin gives any indication that he’ll do anything about Stanford’s ideological imbalance.

Chaser—also from the Stanford Review:

Stanford’s Ivory Tower Tyranny: Atlas Censure Vote Reveals Academia’s True Colors

Last Thursday, the Stanford University Faculty Senate voted against repealing the 2020 censure of Dr. Scott Atlas, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and former Trump administration advisor on the White House Coronavirus Task Force. . .

It reveals a troubling reality within elite academic institutions: the hollow nature of their proclaimed commitment to free speech. Initially twice postponing the vote to avoid political interpretation, the Faculty Senate has now taken the dramatic step of refusing to rescind the censure, cementing its politically motivated decision.

The Senate’s outright rejection is particularly striking given the subsequent dismissal of several positions for which Atlas was initially censured. When Stanford faculty censured him in 2020 for questioning COVID-19 policies like lockdowns and mask mandates, they did so without even offering him an opportunity to defend his positions. Even as evidence has mounted supporting many of Atlas’s positions, the institution has doubled down on its censure.