The Art of Disagreement, Relearned

A university is, among other things, an argument that never ends. Its purpose is not to agree but to disagree productively, testing ideas against evidence and against one another. When that habit weakens, a campus can remain busy and accomplished while losing something essential.

By the measure of national surveys, American campuses have spent much of the past decade losing that habit. Stanford has not been an exception. The question now is whether the university, and more importantly its students, can relearn it.

What the Surveys Say

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan civil liberties group, publishes an annual ranking of campus free speech based on surveys of undergraduates and on schools’ written policies. In its 2026 rankings, Stanford placed 75th of 257 schools, with an overall score of 60.66 and a grade of D-minus. The ranking reflected the responses of 263 Stanford students.

FIRE’s 2027 rankings, released in September, describe a national picture that is mixed. The average overall score rose to 61.36, the highest in the survey’s seven-year history, though still a D-minus. Yet half of students said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was difficult to discuss openly on their campus, and a majority of students opposed allowing each of six hypothetical controversial speakers. Only 31 percent said shouting down a speaker was never acceptable. A firmer 70 percent said using violence to stop a campus speech was never acceptable.

Such surveys have limits. They measure perceptions rather than events, and a few hundred respondents cannot speak for an entire student body. But perceptions matter in themselves. A student who believes candor is risky will often choose silence, and a campus full of silent students is not much of a university.

The Neutrality Bet

Stanford’s leadership has made a deliberate wager about how to respond. In May 2024, the Faculty Senate adopted a policy under which the university would not take institutional positions on political and social controversies unless they bear directly on its mission. President Jonathan Levin, speaking to students in January, described the policy as a commitment that Stanford “would not make institutional statements about social and political issues unless they directly bore on the mission,” The Stanford Daily reported.

The reasoning, articulated decades ago in the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, is that when a university declares an official view, it implicitly tells dissenting students and faculty that they are on the wrong side of their own institution. Neutrality is meant to leave room for the members of the community, rather than its administrators, to do the arguing.

Not everyone is satisfied. At the same January forum, organized by the Stanford Political Union, some students pressed Levin on issues from federal policy to international students. One student told the Daily afterward, “He gave me political answers.” That frustration is understandable, and perhaps inevitable. A president committed to neutrality will often disappoint those who want the university to stand with them.

Speech and Discipline

The more practical test of a speech culture lies in how the university responds when protest and rules collide. Stanford’s Office of Community Standards handles student conduct cases. This month, undergraduate senators Ethan Alfonso and Jan Dwayne Cacnio briefed the Undergraduate Senate on their meeting with OCS interim director Lawrence Marshall, who emphasized, according to the Daily, that protected speech alone cannot be the basis for a conduct case. “Student speech should definitely be protected … and OCS will never file a case in regard to that,” Cacnio told the Senate.

The line between protected expression and disruptive conduct is not always easy to draw, and reasonable people will disagree about where it falls in particular cases. But a clear public commitment that speech alone is not an offense is the necessary starting point.

A Culture, Not a Policy

Policies can only do so much. The deeper work of a speech culture happens in seminar rooms, dining halls and dormitory lounges, in whether students feel free to say “I’m not sure that’s right” to a friend, a classmate or a professor. That culture is built by example: faculty who reward thoughtful dissent, student organizations that invite speakers their members disagree with, and friends who can argue over dinner and remain friends.

The national mood after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in September 2025 made that work feel more urgent. In a FIRE survey of 2,028 undergraduates conducted after the killing, half said they were now less comfortable attending or hosting events featuring controversial speakers. Fear, once it takes root, is self-reinforcing.

The Long View

Stanford has more resources than almost any university in the world to resist that cycle. It has a tradition of intellectual adventurousness, a student body selected for curiosity and a faculty that includes leading scholars across the ideological spectrum. The Political Union, debate societies and dozens of student publications offer forums for argument.

The test is whether those forums become the norm rather than the exception. A generation that learns to disagree well at Stanford will carry that habit into laboratories, companies, courtrooms and legislatures. A generation that learns to keep its head down will carry that, too. The stakes of the art of disagreement extend well beyond the campus.

Photo: Suiren2022 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0