Like UCLA, Stanford set up a committee to report on the outbreak of antisemitism on campus since October 7 and another on Islamophobia.* The latter for UCLA was released by faculty involved in its preparation.** Unlike UCLA, Stanford now has its antisemitism report and Islamophobia report whereas UCLA's report on the former topic still seems to be in the early stages of development. That's odd when you consider that UCLA and Columbia were the focus of the nation's attention for particularly bad outcomes and incidents, more so than Stanford. Stanford, in short, has produced and released both. UCLA is still missing one.Nonetheless, UCLA in preparing its missing report can now at least benefit from seeing what such a report looks like. Below we present the Executive Summary to Stanford's antisemitism report and a link to the full text. We also present excerpts from a NY Times item on the two Stanford reports and the Executive Summary and a link to Stanford's Islamophobia report:
“It’s in the Air”: Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias at Stanford, and How to Address It
A REPORT FROM THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON ANTISEMITISM AND ANTI-ISRAELI BIAS OF THE JEWISH ADVISORY COMMITTEE AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY
May 31, 2024 [Published June 20, 2024]
Executive Summary
This Report presents the findings and recommendations of a Subcommittee of twelve members (six Stanford faculty, three staff, two students, and one alumnus) appointed by President Richard Saller in the late fall of 2023 to consider how Stanford could “educate the community and take measures designed to reduce, eliminate, and respond to antisemitism,” while also fostering dialogue with the Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian communities and working “to build a more cohesive community” at Stanford. To respond to President Saller’s charge, we first had to assess the nature and extent of antisemitism on campus, against the backdrop of a national surge in antisemitism following the horrific terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. We also found it necessary, with his approval, to expand the scope of our investigation to assess the closely related form of bias against Israelis as a nationality group.
While our work focused on the specific issues and challenges confronting Jewish and Israeli members of the Stanford community, the concern “to build a more cohesive community” across Stanford was never far from our minds. And we came to conclude that the best way for Stanford to respond to antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias is for it to re-commit to core university principles that should be promoted and defended equally for all groups, irrespective of race, religion, nationality, or other forms of identity.
We rejected the idea that “safety” requires “protecting” students from views that might make them uncomfortable. Universities exist to consider contending perspectives and subject them to rational debate and critical inquiry. Our goal is for community members to be safe from injury or the threat of it. Acts of bigotry—hatred or intolerance based on a person’s ethnicity, religion, or other identity—violate the standards of safety students have a right to expect and universities have an obligation to afford.
To assess the nature and extent of the problem, during the first three months of 2024 we conducted more than 50 different listening sessions for undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, staff, alumni, and parents. More than 300 Stanford-connected people attended these sessions. We also conducted nearly four dozen individual interviews with members of these constituencies and senior and mid-level administrative officials at Stanford (including deans and vice-provosts). All our listening sessions and interviews were conducted on a not-for-attribution basis to enable people to express themselves candidly.
We did not attempt to offer a single definition of antisemitism or its relationship to antiZionism. However, we noted that different definitional efforts agree on a wide range of narratives and behaviors that are characteristic of this form of bias, such as demonizing or dehumanizing Jews through false and malicious tropes and stereotypes about their imagined influence, power, wealth, rituals, or hidden loyalties. Whether one equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism by definition, these two biases are in fact closely intertwined.
What We Found
After many months examining the social climate in the undergraduate and graduate levels and in diverse schools, programs, departments, residences, workplaces, and physical spaces at Stanford University, our Subcommittee reached this unanimous conclusion: antisemitism exists today on the Stanford campus in ways that are widespread and pernicious. Some of this bias is expressed in overt and occasionally shocking ways, but often it is wrapped in layers of subtlety and implication, one or two steps away from blatant hate speech. Antisemitism and bias against Israelis as a nationality group are not uniformly distributed across campus. We found schools, departments, dorms, and programs that seem largely unaffected, where Jewish students, faculty, and staff did not report issues with bias, harassment, intimidation, or ostracism. But a few portions of the campus appear to have very serious problems that have deeply affected Jewish and Israeli students. The most succinct summary of what we found is in our title, “It’s in the air.”
We learned of instances where antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias reached a level of social injury that deeply affected people’s lives: students moving out of their dorms because of antisemitic acts or speech; students being ostracized, canceled, or intimidated for openly identifying as Jewish, or for simply being Israeli, or expressing support for Israel, or even for refusing to explicitly condemn Israel; students fearing to display Jewish symbols or reveal that they were Jewish for fear of losing friendships or group acceptance.
Some of the examples we heard did not involve singular actions or expressions but a pattern of bias and intimidation that needs to be energetically addressed.. Students also complained of being “tokenized,” viewed as “a representative of the Jewish people all the time.” Graduate students also complained of “a lack of any mechanism to support us,” a fear of retaliation if they reported what they were experiencing, and a lack of confidence that anything would be improved if they did report.
We were struck by the fact that many of the Jewish and Israeli students who were subjected to these patterns of intimidation were well to the left of center in relation to the Israeli political spectrum. They were critical of the current government and many of its policies and actions. The hostility directed toward them appeared to have little or nothing to do with their political views but rather with their Jewish or Israeli identities—or at least with their unwillingness to qualify or reject those identities through abject apology for having any connection, however ancestral, to the State of Israel. The imposition of a unique social burden on Jewish students to openly denounce Israel and renounce any ties to it was, we found, the most common manifestation of antisemitism in student life.
It was not only students who felt unsafe. A few faculty and staff members told us that they had begun to feel physically unsafe for the first time in their many years or decades at Stanford.
More often, Jewish students (and some faculty and staff) felt isolated and abandoned, with no clear expression of support from the University (or from their school or program) for the pain and trauma they were feeling after the October 7 attacks, or for the intimidation and hostility they encountered in their programs or residences.
Beyond the widely reported incident of antisemitism in a freshman COLLEGE class, which we describe at some length in this Report, we learned of other instances of antisemitism or antiIsraeli bias in the classroom, and incidents where teaching assistants abused their positions and class communication networks to proselytize for their personal views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or to urge students to attend protest rallies or demonstrations.
No venue has provided a wider and more uninhibited berth for the expression of hostility toward Jews and Israelis than social media. Jewish and Israeli students frequently reported being denounced or canceled for dissenting from the prevailing orthodoxy of virulent condemnation of Israel. Students (not only Jewish or Israeli) also spoke of pressure to post material that demonstrated agreement with the prevailing anti-Israel political orthodoxy. Most troubling is the social media platform, Fizz, where all posts are strictly anonymous. We were presented with countless examples of Fizz posts that appeared antisemitic in tone and intent, blaming “you guys” for the violence in Gaza, suggesting a Jewish student cabal behind the candidacy of a Jewish student for the ASSU Senate, and urging that a Jewish student who had written a national magazine article about the antisemitic climate on campus be waterboarded with gasoline and lit on fire.
Among the most troubling realms we learned about were the student residences. Some Jewish students reported intimidation or vandalism in their residences that appeared to be directed at them as Jews, including instances of mezuzahs (mezuzot) being ripped from door frames, a swastika being drawn on a Jewish student’s door, and scrawls and graffiti directed at Jewish students in a way that was meant to harass and intimidate them.
Given the importance and influence of the role, we were troubled by reports of Resident Assistants (RAs) failing in their obligation to foster a safe and respectful environment and to lead with integrity, either for their own reasons or due to insufficient training. In some instances, RAs posted antisemitic or threatening content on social media, for example, that Jews don’t need protection because antisemitism isn’t real. In others, they abused their role to advance divisive political agendas that left their Jewish residents feeling that they could not trust or approach them.
Many students—as well as faculty, staff, alumni, and parents—were distressed by the growing signs of antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias in protests, demonstrations, and encampments in the University’s public spaces. We recognize the importance of preserving these spaces as free speech zones where even the most vehement criticism of Israel, as well as strident calls for changes in US or University policy, enjoy a constitutional right to expression. But the encampments and other protests have, at times, gone beyond these lines of argument and advocacy to call, implicitly or even explicitly, for violence, as in “Death 2 Settler Colonial Projects,” “Long Live Palestine, Die Israel,” and occasional expressions of support for terrorist organizations. The White Plaza protests have also featured versions of the infamous antisemitic blood libel that Jews were drinking the blood of non-Jewish children—in this case the baseless and outrageous allegations that Israel was harvesting the organs or skin of Palestinians. The current encampment also hosted a speech by an imam who is nationally known for his antisemitism and calls for violence. We also heard frequent concern about the presence at these various protests of external actors, who bring their own agendas and who are not subject to university discipline.
Some faculty shared incidents or climates of antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias in their departments or schools. More often, however, faculty complained of the general atmosphere of antisemitic and anti-Israeli sentiment on campus and the failure of the university to condemn blatant expressions of it. Faculty felt particularly shocked and appalled (as did many students) by certain signs and statements on campus justifying and celebrating the terrorist violence on October 7.
Many faculty condemned the disruptions of classes, university events, and the academic working environment. Independent of their specific concerns about the proliferation of antisemitic and anti-Israeli tropes and narratives, faculty expressed distress about the climate of extreme polarization and personal invective in expression related to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the paucity of opportunities to cultivate civil discourse and rational, informed debate.
By contrast, we found that faculty in the Graduate School of Business, the School of Engineering, and the Doerr School of Sustainability felt positively about the climates there or at least did not report any issues.
The staff we interviewed echoed many of the same themes we heard from students and faculty. They lamented the polarization, the lack of mutual respect, the ignorance about Jews. They spoke of feeling isolated, “unsafe and unsupported.” This has affected their performance at work and has led them to want to avoid campus and work remotely as much as possible.
We heard many complaints about the University’s programmatic commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. What upset people was not the goals of DEI but the exclusion of Jews and Israelis, who (our study makes clear) confront bias and harassment on campus that should be addressed by campus DEI programs, if they exist at all. The clear and consistent appeal from our listening sessions was for equal recognition and treatment.
Another recurrent theme in our listening sessions and interviews was the failure of the University to respond to complaints of bias adequately, or expeditiously, or at all. Examples include antisemitic vandalism and mezuzah desecrations that were barely investigated in some instances and for which accountability was never established. Some said requests to assess antisemitism on campus and reform policies to reflect it have been basically ignored. We heard many complaints about lack of follow-up after students filed reports through the Protect Identity Harm (PIH) system. And there was widespread skepticism about the capacity of the Office of Community Standards to hold students accountable for violations of rules that contribute to a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students, faculty, and staff.
Nearly 100 alumni and parents participated in our listening sessions. They expressed acute concern for the physical safety of Jewish students and for their emotional wellbeing in the face of numerous threats and forms of antisemitic bias and harassment. Some shared stories we had not otherwise heard. Many parents and alumni were deeply distressed and disheartened that their children and other Jewish Stanford students feel the need to hide their views or their identity, feel unsafe or unwelcome in their dorms or other campus spaces, and confront a degraded climate for discourse on campus, lacking in civility, rationality, and mutual respect. They were also the most vocal of all constituencies in calling for the University to enforce its own rules with respect to protests and encampments.
The core problem, we concluded, is not simply the failure to punish rule violations in a concrete way. It is the broader deterioration of norms that once stigmatized antisemitism. The trend in recent years, but especially since October 7, has been a normalization of antisemitic and antiIsraeli speech on campus, and an “impression of indifference” on the part of the University—or at least many actors within it—to antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias.
What We Conclude and Recommend
To address antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias—or for that matter, other forms of prejudice—we must address the broader campus culture.
Doing this requires Stanford to re-commit to six principles that are foundational to a healthy, thriving university community: safety, free expression, tolerance and pluralism, equality, accountability, and education. Stanford must work comprehensively, energetically, and imaginatively to generate a campus culture where all members of the community are: 1) physically secure; 2) free to express their opinions and beliefs; 3) tolerated and respected for their beliefs, even when such beliefs diverge strongly from those held by others; 4) equally treated and protected; 5) accountable for their speech and behavior; and (6) engaged in a process of education about complex and difficult issues that is characterized by rigorous inquiry based on facts and reason without devolving into personal animus, particularly that which is based on intolerance.
Safety
• We recommend that the PIH system be revised to provide more appropriate feedback to those who initiate complaints and more transparency to the university community. We welcome the Provost’s appointment of a committee, chaired by Professor Diego Zambrano, to consider changes in the PIH system.
• The student residences should offer a safe, welcoming, and inclusive second “home” for students. They should refrain from imposing any political orthodoxy or tolerating the projection of any identity bias that leaves any dorm residents feeling marginalized and unsafe.
• Student mental health should be a priority. The Vaden Health Center should ensure that it has adequate staff (in number and training) to respond to the psychological manifestations of injury and stress due to antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias • We urge the University to carefully review its policies and practices concerning the presence of non-Stanford-affiliated individuals at campus protests (and particularly, protracted encampments) and to evaluate whether it has adequate resources for verifying people’s connection to the campus and removing visitors who violate its rules.
Free Expression
• We support freedom of speech and respect the protections for it under the First Amendment and California’s Leonard Law. However, this protection does not extend to hate speech that calls for specific violence against individuals or classes of people, or to speech that disrupts classes, public events, or essential university business. Such speech can and should be sanctioned. Time, place, and manner restrictions banning audible demonstrations and political banners from the Quad and from the vicinity of other academic buildings should be strictly enforced.
• In addition to more clarity around sanctions and when they will be consistently imposed, University leaders should exercise their own free speech rights to call out and condemn antisemitic and anti-Israeli speech on campus.
Tolerance and Pluralism
• We recommend that the University work more energetically and consistently to promote norms of tolerance for different views and identities and respect for social, intellectual, and political pluralism.
• Stanford must work harder to create a culture where disagreement can be expressed without devolving into personal animus, political intolerance, or social exclusion. This requires comprehensive efforts to promote the norms and skills of mutual respect, tolerance, and civility, with a pedagogical emphasis on the method of critical inquiry. We identify several efforts now underway at Stanford to promote critical inquiry, evidence-based debate, and a civil climate for discourse. In addition to the COLLEGE curriculum, these include the Stanford Civics Initiative, the Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Fellowship, and the Spring Quarter course on Democracy and Disagreement.
• We recommend adding a comprehensive program to begin developing in all incoming members of the freshman class the norms and skills of critical, mutually respectful discourse. And we also urge that Stanford continue and enhance messaging to newly admitted undergraduates about the kind of academic culture we seek and uphold.
• Stanford should also address the challenge of toxic social media. It could perform a national service by engaging the leadership of Fizz to strengthen content moderation and the reporting system for violations.
Equality
• In the short term, we recommend that Jews and Israelis be added to the panoply of identities recognized by DEI programs so that the harms they are enduring are treated with the same concern as those of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ members of the community.
• In the longer-term, however, we make a different recommendation. We believe this identity driven approach to belonging and inclusion is anathema to the University’s educational mission, and that it ultimately works to the detriment of the very groups it seeks to aid. We propose moving from DEI programs as presently constituted to a pluralist framework that benefits individuals from all backgrounds, including Jews and Israelis, who are not currently protected, and indeed are disadvantaged, by DEI. We believe the best approach lies in Harvard Professor Danielle Allen’s call for “a framework of confident pluralism—inclusion and belonging, academic freedom, and mutual respect.” The goal should be to produce authentic understanding of differences without uniformity of thought.
Accountability
• Stanford must have the ability to enforce its rules and norms, provided that they do not inappropriately thwart political discourse. Stanford should not rely solely on external law enforcement action or criminal referrals to hold its students accountable for actions that violate its rules. It must be able to rely upon its own system of compliance and enforcement.
• An independent evaluation should be conducted of the Office of Community Standards to assess whether and to what extent it has proved able to impose accountability for student violations regarding the time, place, and manner of speech, and for other rules violations that propagate antisemitism, anti-Israeli bias, Islamophobia, and other forms of bigotry unprotected by the First Amendment.
• The University should also ensure that it can be held accountable for its success or failure in honoring its commitments. Beyond periodic and comprehensive release of data on all incidents of antisemitic and anti-Israeli bias, Stanford should establish baselines and measure progress for addressing antisemitism and other forms of non-race-based hate and bias that are not now measured. It should commit to annual reporting and review of this progress.
• We also recommend identifying a senior administrator who is empowered to pursue this work across the university, is accountable to the President or Provost, and makes public reports on their progress at regular and predictable intervals both to the President or Provost and to the Board of Trustees.
Education
• The University should incorporate into its existing educational programs for faculty and staff (including resident fellows and residence deans), and for students in positions of authority, such as teaching assistants and residence staff, instruction about the history and diverse forms and manifestations of antisemitism—the negative tropes, stereotypes, and misinformation.
• More broadly, the University should promote education about the culture, religion, history, and ethnic diversity of the Jewish people, and sensitivity to the consequences for Jewish community members’ sense of safety, belonging, and inclusion that follow from characteristic forms of speech and action.
• Instructors and teaching assistants should avoid using the classroom (and communications and meetings related to instruction) as a vehicle for propagating their personal political views and involvements.
• Stanford should also offer pedagogical training in the methods of teaching critical inquiry and cultivating civil discourse. This should be a required part of training for graduate and postdoctoral teaching staff (especially in the COLLEGE program) and encouraged of faculty as well.
Improving and Supporting Jewish Life at Stanford
The University responded forthrightly to some of the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Jewish Admissions in its September 2022 Report. But action is still needed on other issues, including more training of staff, more education about Jews and antisemitism, more provision for the religious and cultural needs of religiously observant Jewish students, and a comprehensive study of Jewish life at Stanford.
• We recommend the University appoint a standing advisory committee to advise on all these issues and monitor implementation.
• Given the importance of Hillel at Stanford in serving the social, cultural, and spiritual needs of Jewish students and the broader needs of Stanford community members interested in Jewish life, we encourage the University to recognize Hillel more explicitly as its key partner supporting Jewish life on campus, for example, by memorializing it in a Memorandum of
Understanding.
• We also recommend that Stanford consider joining Hillel International’s Campus Climate Initiative, to give form and structure to our commitment to address antisemitism and antiIsraeli bias.
Conclusion
What is needed now is the institutional will to reassert, defend, and promote our core values as a university, and to do the hard work of instruction, engagement, and dialogue so that these values become not simply lofty ideals, but norms deeply embedded in the lived culture of the University. To achieve a university that is free of identity bias may seem an unrealistic goal. In striving toward that end, we will not reach perfection. But we will become a stronger, healthier university, better poised to realize our limitless possibilities for advancing knowledge while fulfilling our founding purpose: “to promote the public welfare by exercising an influence in behalf of humanity and civilization [and] teaching the blessings of liberty regulated by law.”
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The full report is at https://ia600402.us.archive.org/9/items/2-final-hjaa-report.-the-soil-beneath-the-encampments/Stanford%20Antisemitism%20report%205-31-2024.pdf.
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From the NY Times:
Stanford released on Thursday dueling reports — one on antisemitism and the other on anti-Muslim bias — that revealed mirroring images of campus life in recent months that may be impossible to reconcile. One report found that antisemitism has been pervasive at the university in both overt and subtle ways, while the other stated that the school had stifled free speech among pro-Palestinian students and faculty. They were emblematic of the rift between Jewish and Muslim groups on campus, and showed that any kind of accord between the two groups and the university were distant...
The report on antisemitism — by a university subcommittee on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias, consisting of faculty, students and an alumnus — found that acts of antisemitism have ranged from an anonymous threat on social media against a student journalist who had written about antisemitism to what students said was intimidation in the classroom and residence halls. “Antisemitism exists today on the Stanford campus in ways that are widespread and pernicious,” the group wrote in the report. “We learned of instances where antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias reached a level of social injury that deeply affected people’s lives.” ...
The other report — by Stanford’s Muslim, Arab and Palestinian communities committee — described what it called “a rupture of trust” between students, staff and faculty. “These communities have felt afraid for their safety, unseen and unheard by university leadership,” it said. According to this report, Stanford recorded more than 50 instances of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab bias between October 2023 and May 2024, including assault, battery and theft...
The report also discussed what it called “the Palestine exception” in the university’s commitment to free speech, saying that the university had limited protests and speech by pro-Palestinian students when it came to hanging flags and signs or organizing screenings of news events...
Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/20/us/stanford-antisemitism-muslims-report.html.
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RUPTURE AND REPAIR: A report by the Stanford Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Communities Committee
May 2024 [Published June 20, 2024]
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Executive Summary
This report details a substantial rupture of trust between students, staff, and faculty in the Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian (MAP) communities and Stanford in academic year 2023-24. These communities have felt afraid for their safety, unseen and unheard by university leadership, and silenced through a variety of formal and informal means when they assert the rights and humanity of Palestinians. This rupture has been compounded by a longer history of Islamophobia, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian sentiment that stretches through and beyond Stanford.
In spring 2024, the question of Palestine remains one of the most pressing political issues of the day, both in our university and on the global stage. A core mission of Stanford is to “educate tomorrow’s global citizens” by enabling students to “engage with big ideas, to cross conceptual and disciplinary boundaries, and to become global citizens who embrace diversity of thought and experience.” This past year, numerous Stanford staff, faculty, and administrators have devoted significant time and effort to honoring these values despite extraordinary scrutiny from Congress, national media, alumni, and others.
Yet the findings of this committee indicate that Stanford has not lived up to this mission. The university has undermined speech, teaching, and research on Palestine. For Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian community members, Stanford’s decisions have diminished their sense of equality, inclusion, and belonging on campus. These decisions have also sent a message to the whole university that Palestine is an exception to Stanford’s stated mission: a topic that one cannot study, discuss, or teach without potentially damaging one’s future.
In this report, we detail, based on hundreds of hours of listening sessions with students, staff, faculty, and alumni, the challenges of being a member of Muslim, Arab, and/or Palestinian communities at Stanford. In many cases, these challenges extend to students, staff, and faculty of any identity who align themselves with or engage the rights of Palestinians. We show how these challenges are linked to persistent suppression of speech on Palestine; underrepresentation of community members in conversations that matter; a scarcity of scholarly expertise in Palestinian and Arab studies; and institutional discomfort with the diversity of opinion and expertise that does exist on campus.
The report makes the following core findings:
• Students from MAP communities experienced dozens of incidents that undermined their sense of safety and belonging, including physical assaults, threats, and harassment. Although Stanford responded appropriately to some of these incidents and provided security in response to student requests, on many occasions students felt that the institutional response was insufficient given the severity and persistence of incidents.
• Speech suppression occurred through a variety of formal and informal means. In some cases, administrators explicitly targeted speech supportive of Palestine on the basis of its viewpoint in violation of the university’s obligations to protect freedom of speech and principles of academic freedom. Administrators leveraged existing time, place, and manner restrictions on speech—and created new ones—to limit discourse around Palestine.
• Staff felt especially vulnerable, with little clarity regarding the scope of academic freedom and speech protections available to them and inconsistencies in the application of norms and policies.
• Stanford has not called in riot police or invited mass arrests to forcibly clear student encampments; in that respect, it is doing better than many other universities that created spectacles of punishment to placate external pressure. University leaders permitted the Sit-In to Stop Genocide to remain in White Plaza for nearly four months, enabling students to learn and teach one another in what became the longest sit-in in Stanford history. However, Stanford criminalized peaceful student protests when it facilitated the arrest of 18 students who disrupted an event during Family Weekend and who were then charged with misdemeanors.
• Students, staff, and faculty who engaged in Palestine activism feared the administration’s own surveillance and its implementation of disciplinary measures, which exacerbated their sense of insecurity.
• Calls for “civil discourse” on university campuses often reflect a suspicion of student activism, a distrust of speech outside the boundaries of institutional orthodoxy, and opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Stanford needs a paradigm of vibrant discourse, not civil discourse. Our proposed framework fosters skills-building for disagreement, expands and enriches university conversations, and honors students’ own discourse and activism.
Stanford lacks scholarly depth in Palestinian and Arab studies. While it has made substantial progress in hiring faculty in recent years who study Islam, there are exceedingly few tenured or tenure-track faculty who focus on the Arab world. This gap not only puts Stanford behind its peer institutions in producing research and knowledge, but also leaves the university with few tenured—and therefore protected—faculty who can lead difficult conversations on Palestine.
• While Stanford has diversified its student population significantly, members of Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian communities remain scarce among faculty, staff, and institutional leadership. This lack of representation often leads to “unforced errors” in decisions that have implications for these communities.
• Stanford has done well in establishing some institutional structures—such as the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Markaz Resource Center—that support MAP communities. Without these units, students, staff, and faculty would have had an even more challenging year. However, these units remain understaffed and overextended, highlighting the need for permanent and reliable financial investment.
• MAP community members consistently noted that Stanford’s official communications since October 2023 were asymmetric with respect to Palestine despite the university’s stated commitment to institutional neutrality and restraint. Moreover, these communications often presented lopsided coverage of this historical moment and sometimes conflated or collapsed MAP identities, such as assuming that all Palestinians are Muslim.
Stanford took an important step forward in creating this committee and was, to the best of our knowledge, the first university to do so after October 2023. In accordance with our charge, this report aims to uplift, honor, and learn from the lived experiences and words of community members. It also highlights that, even as they feel that Stanford does not always treat them as integral to the work of the university, they see themselves as part of Stanford and are invested in the institution. With that in mind, we recommend substantial reciprocal investment from Stanford to move toward repair: in policies and decisions to protect and expand speech; in faculty to teach and research; and in structures to support and empower.
But most importantly we use this report to recommend that Stanford live up to its stated values. In theory, the university has committed to the principle that its “central functions of teaching, learning, research, and scholarship depend upon an atmosphere in which freedom of inquiry, thought, expression, publication and peaceable assembly are given the fullest protection.
Expression of the widest range of viewpoints should be encouraged, free from institutional orthodoxy and from internal or external coercion.”
But when challenged by some of the most difficult moments for universities in North America, and buffeted by national political pressures, Stanford chose what one senior leader we spoke to described as a new “McCarthyism.”
The Palestine exception illuminates the gap between Stanford’s stated values and its actual practices. This is a moment for the university to take a hard look at who makes the policies, what values the policies are conveying to its students, faculty, and staff, where these policies are being levied inconsistently, why these policies are harming certain members of the university, and how these policies can be reimagined. We believe this will make the university better not just for MAP communities but for people across all corners of Stanford.
This report provides detailed recommendations on safety, freedom of speech, vibrant discourse, scholarship and knowledge production, representation and structural support, and communications. We provide one-year, five-year, and ten-year goals to guide the university as it implements these five core tasks:
1. Eliminate the Palestine exception to free speech and expression throughout the university.
2. Broaden opportunities for speech and engagement by revising time, place, and manner restrictions curtailing student speech and by expanding freedom of speech and academic freedom for all community members, not just tenured faculty.
3. Cultivate vibrant discourse even on controversial topics by recruiting a diversity of representation, experience, and knowledge among students, staff, and faculty. Continue to invest in structures that support this diversity.
4. Invest in new tenured faculty and units engaging Palestine and Arab Studies for the long term, and in the short term leverage existing expertise and create exchange programs to bring greater scholarship to Stanford.
5. Listen to and honor in-house expertise and community leaders when working on decisions and communications that affect the campus and its diverse communities, particularly during moments of crisis.
Full report is at https://news.stanford.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0031/156586/MAP-final-report-2024.pdf.
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*We use "antisemitism" and "Islamophobia" as shorthand for the various topics covered in the two reports since those labels have been applied in general discourse.
**https://iric.org/ucla-report-of-task-force-on-anti-palestinian-anti-muslim-and-anti-arab-racism/.
