Stanford president Jonathan Levin said the university’s top priority is maintaining the partnership with the federal government while safeguarding its operational freedom, as the institution balances financial reliance on Washington and political scrutiny from the Trump administration.
The university has been swept up in US president Donald Trump’s crackdown on the nation’s higher education institutions, which he has repeatedly criticised as “liberal” and “woke” with an “anti-American” or antisemitic bias, using the reduction of federal funding as powerful leverage. This August, Stanford made 363 staff redundant, citing budget reductions.
But at the Top1000funds.com Fiduciary Investors Symposium hosted on the Stanford campus, Levin said some recent criticisms directed at American universities are not new and are, in fact, fair.
“The US is a country that has become more and more politically divided over the last however many years, and university faculty and student populations are, by and large, on one side of that political divide,” said Levin, who is also an economist and Bing Presidential Professor at the university.
“We should learn a lesson from that and make sure that, going forward, universities are not so enmeshed institutionally in politics. The students and the faculty can be involved and that’s their freedom to do that, but the institutions shouldn’t.”
Levin said that at the heart of American universities’ excellence is their ability to operate freely and independently, including in setting curriculum and pursuing research projects. That freedom stems from the post-World War II framework for federal support of science established by Vannevar Bush, an engineer and the head of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development at the time.
The framework established the federal government’s responsibility to fund research and development as industry support would lack appropriate scale, and emphasised a peer-reviewed, merit-based allocation of grants.
“Stanford – probably more than any other university – was a beneficiary of that. Stanford was founded in 1891 and coming out of World War II, we were a regional university of fairly modest calibre,” Levin said.
“We were in financial difficulty at the time too, because the endowment hadn’t been that well managed, and folks leading Stanford at the time saw there would be an opportunity with federal funding for science to build up a research enterprise.”
The university built up its engineering and science departments, and later complemented them with humanities, history and other arts departments. It also lent land to technology companies such as Fairchild and Varian, which cemented Stanford’s leadership in the early development of Silicon Valley.
“That really all came out of the federal-university partnership that led to the US having this extraordinary innovation economy. It’s a great story, and it’s still the best recipe that this country has to be the leader in innovation and to be at the frontiers of knowledge,” Levin said.
“So a big focus for us right now is how do we sustain that great partnership that universities have enjoyed with the federal government, and get back to a place where the American people support us enough to fund us, and give us the freedom that allows our universities to be exceptional, respected and contributing to the country and to the world.”
