Stanford’s Moral Blindness

As an alumnus, I received the pro forma invitation to weigh in on the selection of a new university president, following in the footsteps of Ray Lyman Wilbur and Donald Tressider. Here's how I responded:

I had not intended to respond to this survey request. I changed my mind this morning, but then saw that the survey did not capture my current feelings. Hence this message.

In short order I read the message to the Stanford Community from President Saller and Provost Martinez, the message to students from Vice Provost Susie Brubaker-Cole and Dean Tiffany Steinwert, the San Francisco Chronicle, and University of Florida President Ben Sasse’s letter to “Jewish Gator Alums.” Saller and Martinez offer the obligatory condemnation of hatred and attacks, but they can’t help but refer to Hamas terrorism as “[t]he events in Israel and Gaza this week.” Somehow, I don’t believe that Presidents Wilbur or Tressider would have thought to refer to “events at certain camps in Germany and Poland” during World War II. Similarly, Brubaker-Cole and Steinwert refer to the “crisis in Israel and Palestine.” I don’t believe President Wilbur would have written about the “crisis in the Hawaiian Islands” in December 1941. What does the Chronicle have to do with this? I read Saller’s and Martinez’s convoluted description of an instructor who “called out individual students based on their backgrounds and identities.” That struck me immediately as code for an attack by a member of a favored demographic group against a member of a disfavored demographic group, like the way the media typically tries to conceal the ethnicity of perpetrators and victims of interracial crimes. But mirabile dictu! the Chronicle in a moment of moral clarity describes a facially anti-Semitic instructor calling out Jewish students. Was that just too painful for Saller and Martinez? And Ben Sasse? For an example of what a university president, or other high-ranking university official, might have said if they possessed any moral clarity, read his letter. Now, as for the survey and its questions about the future President of Stanford? Get us a Sasse, not a Saller, Martinez, Brubaker-Cole or Steinwert. Sincerely, Emmett C. Stanton, ‘75