The Provisional Generation: Notes on the Spirit of the Times at Stanford

Every generation at a great university believes its moment is singular. Most are wrong; the arguments of one decade usually turn out to be rehearsals of another’s. But some years do mark a turn, and it is worth asking, while the leaves are still coming down on Palm Drive, whether this is one of them.

The Chronicle’s new Zeitgeist section is devoted to that kind of question: not the news of the week, but the mood beneath it. We begin with an attempt to name the spirit of the times on campus. If one word captures it, it may be provisional. Much of what students and faculty once took as settled, about the university’s place in national life, about how to disagree, about which paths lead somewhere secure, now feels open to revision.

A Compact Rewritten

Start with the institution itself. For roughly seven decades, American research universities and the federal government operated under an implicit bargain: Washington funded science, and universities produced knowledge, talent and much of the country’s technological advantage. “That contract changed dramatically in the last year, and it now needs to be knitted back together,” President Jonathan Levin told students at a “State of Stanford” event in January, The Stanford Daily reported.

The changes were not abstract. Citing reduced federal research support and a higher tax on endowments, Stanford cut $140 million from its general-funds budget for 2025-26, and more than 360 staff members were laid off. Levin said the new endowment tax would cost the university $200 million to $300 million a year. Students arriving this fall entered a university that is still extraordinarily rich and still extraordinarily ambitious, but that has learned, for the first time in a long while, what it feels like to retrench.

The Quieter Campus

The second change is in the texture of conversation. In May 2024, Stanford’s Faculty Senate adopted a policy directing university leaders not to issue statements on political and social controversies unless those issues directly affect the university’s mission. The idea, often called institutional neutrality, is that the university should host arguments rather than settle them.

The national climate those arguments occur in has grown harder. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which surveys tens of thousands of undergraduates each year, reported in September that half of students nationally find the Israeli-Palestinian conflict difficult to discuss openly on campus, and that 46 percent say the same of Donald Trump and 44 percent of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist assassinated at a Utah university in September 2025. FIRE also found reasons for cautious optimism: its average campus score was the highest in the survey’s seven-year history, though still a D-minus on its own scale. A campus can be calmer without being freer, and the difference is one Stanford students will define for themselves.

The Machine in the Room

The third force is artificial intelligence, which arrived on campus faster than any institution could write rules for it. It now shapes how students study, how faculty assign work and what kinds of careers seem worth preparing for. It has also tested trust. In September, the university acknowledged that its Residential and Dining Enterprises had used generative AI to alter a promotional photograph of students, changing one student’s race and gender, in violation of Stanford’s own policy. That a university so central to the invention of these tools should stumble over their use is less an indictment than a parable: no one, anywhere, has yet worked out the norms.

The End of the Escalator

The fourth change concerns ambition itself. For a generation, the Stanford undergraduate path seemed to offer clear on-ramps. Computer science led to the technology industry; the industry led to wealth and influence. That certainty has frayed. Stanford awarded about 14 percent fewer computer science bachelor’s degrees in 2026 than the year before, Palo Alto Online reported, as the entry-level software job market tightened and AI took on more routine coding. Computer science chair Mehran Sahami has noted that the department has weathered such cycles before. Meanwhile, humanities degrees at Stanford have fallen 56 percent since 2003-04, according to The Stanford Daily.

Jeff Schwegman, a Stanford administrator, described to the Daily the “escalator” that carries high-achieving students through admission and then leaves them searching for the next clear path. The escalator, it seems, is stalling at both ends. Students who might once have followed the obvious route are being asked to choose with less certainty about where any route leads.

What Endures

It is tempting to read all this as decline. That would be a mistake, and an unhistorical one. Stanford was founded in grief and rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake. It has weathered the Depression, the upheavals of the late 1960s and more than one collapse of the technology industry it helped create. Each time, the university’s essential work, the patient accumulation of knowledge and the formation of young people, continued beneath the noise.

What is distinctive about this moment is not the presence of difficulty but its simultaneity: institutional, cultural, technological and economic uncertainty arriving all at once, to a generation that already came of age during a pandemic. The result is a student body that is serious, cautious and, in conversation, often more thoughtful about the future than the headlines suggest.

A provisional age is uncomfortable. It is also, for a university, an opportunity. When old certainties loosen, the questions that the humanities, the sciences and civic life have always asked become urgent again: what is worth knowing, how should we disagree, what do we owe one another, and what kind of world are we building with the tools we invent? The Zeitgeist section will pursue those questions in the weeks ahead. Today, we begin with four essays on how the Farm argues, what it reads, what it inherits and how it lives online.

Photo: King of Hearts / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0