Overview of Freedom of Expression at Stanford

Stanford is committed to freedom of expression, free inquiry, and the open exchange of ideas as fundamental values for the university’s academic mission. This website furnishes interim guidance on the application of freedom of expression principles in different contexts around campus. While the guidance is intended to provide greater clarity about current policies and procedures, some of these policies will continue to be evaluated by university administration as well as the Faculty Senate’s Ad Hoc Committee on University Speech, with input and consultation across our community.

Stanford has long supported academic freedom and freedom of expression, from the 1974 Statement on Academic Freedom through more recent reaffirmations by university leaders of far-reaching support for speech (for example, the President and Provost’s letter to admitted undergraduates and Jenny Martinez’s memo to the Stanford Law School of March 2023). In May of 2024, the Faculty Senate unanimously approved a new Statement on Freedom of Expression drawing on this tradition. 

Statement on Freedom of Expression at Stanford

Stanford is profoundly committed to freedom of expression, free inquiry, and the open exchange of ideas. Freedom of expression is a fundamental value for the university’s knowledge-bearing mission, alongside the inclusion of all viewpoints and the promotion of rigorous and reasoned academic debates. The freedom to explore and present new, unconventional, and even unpopular ideas is essential to the academic mission of the university; therefore, Stanford shall promote the widest possible freedom of expression, consistent with the university’s legal and moral obligations to prevent harassment and discrimination. Accordingly, university policies must not censor individuals’ speech based on the content of what is expressed, except in narrow circumstances.

At the same time, Stanford’s educational role as well as its academic and legal obligations differ across locations and contexts on campus, such as spaces open to all community members, classrooms, and dormitories. Community members also have varying privileges and responsibilities in different contexts. Likewise, legal rights and obligations pertain in different ways to community members depending on whether they are acting as students, teachers, staff, or faculty members. The principles of freedom of speech and expression will be understood in light of these variations across contexts and roles. The campus disruption policy furnishes an example of how some of these distinctions may be drawn.

The interpretations of the policies and procedures collected on this website are meant to maximally protect community members’ rights to free expression, with limits imposed only when allowing such expression would infringe on the rights of others or impede the university’s core academic operations. In particular, they provide that the university generally should not make distinctions about what is allowed based on the viewpoint of speech. The university’s time, place, and manner rules are meant to provide ample outlets for expression of the widest range of views on campus, and also to protect the rights of other students (as well as faculty and staff) to attend classes, study in libraries, work in labs and offices, hear speakers, have spaces to express their own viewpoints, and have places for rest and respite in dormitories and residences. At the same time, prohibitions on harassment protect the equal rights of others to access education consistent with federal civil rights laws such as Title VI and Title IX. In addition, the university prohibits legally unprotected speech such as true threats and incitement to imminent violence.

Speech that is controversial and even deeply offensive to some must be protected as part of our commitment to the open exchange of ideas and avoidance of institutional orthodoxy. As the Faculty Senate resolution recognized, however, not all speech is appropriate at all times and places on campus. Protests are an important part of political speech in a democracy, and multiple spaces on campus are available for protests. However, protest activity should not disrupt the university’s ability to carry out its core educational functions, such as through a disruption to a class, event, or lab work that impedes the rights of students attending the class or event or working in the lab to pursue their goals, or the ability of faculty and staff to complete their work. Likewise, a poster that might offend some members of the community may be placed in various locations around campus but not on the dormitory door of a person being targeted by the speech. Student musicians playing on stage at a planned event at noon on a Saturday may operate at higher volume than the same musicians at 2 a.m. outside a residence or at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday in the area immediately outside a building where classes are being held. These are just a few examples of the different contexts in which campus speech occurs. The pages of this website provide more examples, but the expression of ideas is so central to the university’s mission that it is actually impossible to catalog all the different times and places where it might occur; instead, we have general rules that are meant to be applied consistent with our overall mission of research and education and the commitment to free expression that mission requires.

There are hard questions of both policy and practicality in trying to craft rules that protect the right of everyone on campus to speak and learn in an atmosphere of openness and curiosity; we invite further dialogue with the campus community in the coming year on how further to improve our policies to create an atmosphere of vigorous and constructive discourse at Stanford.