Why Stanford’s Leaders Tolerate Anti-Semitism Recall how Marc Tessier-Lavigne was ousted as president after bucking leftist orthodoxies.
After Hamas massacred some 1,400 Israelis on Oct. 7, many Stanford students marched in support of the terrorist group, chanting “2, 4, 6, 8, smash the Zionist settler state.” University leaders responded with a statement supporting “academic freedom,” including the “expression of controversial and even offensive views.”
This is the same university where administrators last year undertook an Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, which published a catalog of words and phrases to be removed from the school’s websites. Among the proscribed terms: “American,” “immigrant” and “blind study.”
Stanford’s motto is “let the winds of freedom blow,” but many administrators and faculty want it to blow only from the left. Denouncing anti-Semitic protests wouldn’t chill academic freedom on campus; it would serve as a desperately needed show of moral clarity amid a tempest of false equivalence.
But cowardly university leaders are afraid of provoking leftist professors and staff. Recall what happened to Stanford’s previous president. Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist, announced his resignation in July following a series of reports in the student newspaper, the Stanford Daily, that accused him of research fraud. Much of the reporting turned out to be inaccurate, but that didn’t matter. The die had already been cast against him.
On Nov. 29, 2022, freshman Theo Baker—whose parents, Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, are journalists at the New Yorker and the New York Times—reported that images in some of Mr. Tessier-Lavigne’s papers on Alzheimer’s disease appeared to have been manipulated and that his research was under “investigation for scientific misconduct” by the European Molecular Biology Organization Journal.
Mr. Baker subsequently wrote several stories based on anonymous sources who alleged that Mr. Tessier-Lavigne had tried to conceal fraud in his studies. Mr. Baker focused particularly on a 2009 Alzheimer’s study in the journal Nature that Mr. Tessier-Lavigne led while employed by the drugmaker Genentech.
The paper’s central findings failed to hold up on further study. Mr. Baker’s anonymous sources alleged that in 2011 Genentech investigated Mr. Tessier-Lavigne’s research for fraud and discovered the data had been falsified. The report also said Mr. Tessier-Lavigne had refused to retract the paper. Genentech and Mr. Tessier-Lavigne disputed these claims.
Last December, Stanford’s board of trustees retained a legal team from Kirkland & Ellis to investigate the allegations. The team conducted more than 50 interviews with people connected to Mr. Tessier-Lavigne’s research and enlisted independent scientists to review more than 50,000 documents, including his digital records.
In July, the investigators issued a report that largely exonerated Mr. Tessier-Lavigne and described the Stanford Daily’s allegations about the 2009 Nature paper as “mistaken.” The investigators did find inadvertent errors in some of Mr. Tessier-Lavigne’s papers and also determined that some data had been manipulated by other unnamed scientists in his labs. But they concluded he “was not in a position where a reasonable scientist would be expected to have detected any such misconduct” and that he “did not have actual knowledge of the manipulation of research data that occurred in his lab and was not reckless in failing to identify such manipulation prior to publication.”
Mr. Tessier-Lavigne accepted responsibility for the errors, resigned and requested that the scientific journals post corrections to his papers. The Stanford Daily hasn’t corrected the main inaccuracies in Mr. Baker’s reporting, which earned him a George Polk award for long-form investigative journalism.
The New York Post last week reported that Mr. Baker has signed a book deal to “detail his freshman year and how his reporting for the school paper took down the institution’s head.” His sources for the flawed report appear to include Stanford faculty. Two stories cited an email from an unnamed professor who knew of scientists with “knowledge of the events.”
A March 6 story noted that Ken Schultz, then chairman of the faculty senate, had called Jerry Yang, chairman of Stanford’s Board of Trustees, in the wake of the Nature allegations “to express the concern of several senators about Tessier-Lavigne’s capacity to lead.”
It’s no secret that Mr. Tessier-Lavigne had many enemies on the faculty. He irritated leftist professors by refusing to denounce Hoover Institution scholars, such as Eric Hanushek and Scott Atlas, who argued against lockdowns and school closures.
During a faculty meeting on Oct. 22, 2020, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences asked Mr. Tessier-Lavigne: “Will you, on behalf of the university, publicly disavow Scott Atlas’s irresponsible, unethical, and dangerous actions?” Mr. Tessier-Lavigne responded by reading the university’s statement on academic freedom.
He obliquely criticized the harmful-language initiative (which was ended in the face of public ridicule) in January 2023, telling faculty that “we must exercise great care to ensure that any actions that are taken to foster inclusion do not, wittingly or unwittingly, have the effect of restricting speech.” He also boasted that “no speakers have been disinvited and no conferences have been canceled” under his watch. After a student mob shouted down Judge Kyle Duncan at a March 9 Stanford Law School Federalist Society event, Mr. Tessier-Lavigne issued an apology, noting “staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways.”
Whether or not faculty were behind the take-down of Mr. Tessier-Lavigne, the allegations of fraud became a convenient pretext to give him the heave-ho. The lesson is clear. When leaders at Stanford and other universities refrain from denouncing anti-Semitisim in the name of “free speech,” it’s probably because they’re scared of being driven into exile by radical professors.
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