From the Community | President Levin’s first order of business: abandoning academic freedom

This winter will mark the four-year anniversary of the deadliest wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. As an infectious disease researcher with an interest in using science to develop evidence-based policies, I think it is time that we had a frank discussion about why such policies were often not implemented during COVID-19. This sort of discourse has been fleeting: since 2020, I’ve seen junior researchers face intimidation for their stances on COVID-19 and watched as entire research programs were abandoned due to censorship campaigns. So I was glad to see that Stanford was planning to host a pandemic policy summit on Friday about those very topics. Until I read more.

I and others have already exhaustively reviewed issues with this summit participants’ pandemic pronouncements, which are well out of line with both scientific consensus and University policies. To give a few highlights: the organizer, Jay Bhattacharya, has been an expert witness against COVID countermeasures, giving testimony that The American Academy of Pediatrics and multiple judges critiqued for containing numerous errors (including knowingly citing a retracted study). Meanwhile, Sunetra Gupta, Marty Makary and Monica Gandhi have repeatedly issued failed predictions of COVID’s disappearance as early as July 2020. John Ioannidis, Eran Bendavid and Bhattacharya conducted a deeply flawed seroprevalence study positing an infection fatality rate for COVID-19 so low that it would have required the entire population of New York City to be infected by early April of 2020. Most egregiously, Scott Atlas, Bhattacharya and Gupta advocated for a policy of intentional mass infection to achieve herd immunity to the virus prior to the introduction of a vaccine.

I want to be very clear: while I think this summit has minimal academic value, I do wholly support the right of those involved to hold the event. I am, however, shocked and deeply disappointed to see that the new Stanford President Jonathan Levin ’94 is using his platform to convey a sense of legitimacy to this event by providing opening remarks. This is unusual. During my time at Stanford, the president rarely spoke at academic events — much less small, department-specific ones.  The president also steered clear of attending heavily politically slanted, controversial events like Friday’s summit, likely to maintain the appearance of institutional neutrality. My deep concern is that the president’s appearance draws into question his commitment to a central University value: academic freedom.

At the time that his appointment was announced, President Levin promised to “strengthen our commitment to academic excellence and freedom.” Although the summit claims to be aimed at promoting academic freedom and vigorous debate, a careful examination of the speakers’ actions is necessary to understand what they actually mean. Even while many of the speakers at this Friday’s summit have complained that their viewpoints did not receive sufficient attention during the pandemic, several of them were key advisors at the highest levels of government, driving policies implemented by President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis, and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Anders Tegnell, for instance, served as the state epidemiologist of Sweden while Atlas was Trump’s COVID-19 advisor. Several panelists have testified before the U.S. House and Senate multiple times.

Academic freedom is, to be clear, under attack in a substantial way at Stanford. In reality, however, it is those who will be speaking at this very conference that are most responsible for those attacks. By participating on Friday, President Levin appears to be siding not with academic freedom, but in fact its adversaries. Take, for instance, the speakers list for the ironically-named panel titled “Misinformation, Censorship and Academic Freedom,” which features Scott Atlas and Jenin Younes. When a group of close to 100 Stanford biomedical faculty wrote an open letter correcting Atlas’ “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science,” Atlas, then a government official, attempted to silence faculty by threatening to sue the group for defamation if they did not retract the letter. 

Younes, meanwhile, has played a central role in even more extensive legal efforts to silence Stanford disinformation researchers. In the case Murthy v. Missouri, Younes represented a group, including Bhattacharya, who alleged that government officials pressured social media companies to censor their comments about COVID-19. A 6-3 majority of Supreme Court Justices concluded the plaintiffs did not have standing — they had failed to show evidence of their conspiracy theories, while also making several “clearly erroneous” claims.

But the damage had already been done. The initial lawsuit contained false and misleading statements about the Stanford Internet Observatory, a research group at Stanford that conducted state-of-the-art research on topics including online rumors about the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Based on the claims in the lawsuit, a district court in Louisiana barred the Stanford Internet Observatory from communicating their research findings with government actors. 

Stanford’s own lawyers submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court arguing this decision violated the academic freedom and free speech rights of researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory. The brief concluded that the decision “cast a chill across academia as an example of political targeting of disfavored speech by state governments and the federal judiciary.” But the legal assault came from multiple directions. Younes additionally served as senior special counsel on the House Judiciary Committee’s Weaponization of Government Subcommittee, which advanced similar arguments to create a “chilling effect” on misinformation research. Amidst these attacks, the Stanford Internet Observatory was shuttered this summer. Its staff, many of whom lacked the protections of tenure, no longer have the freedom to pursue this line of academic research.

Several people involved with this summit have also targeted specific Stanford researchers, including students, for harassment. Bhattacharya amplified Twitter threads that doxxed student researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Ioannidis personally attacked a graduate student who criticized his work in the appendix of a published paper (although he apologized and removed the statement after substantial criticism). In a Fox News appearance, Atlas baselessly accused Stanford researchers testing pediatric COVID-19 vaccines of violating medical ethics and called an immunology postdoc who enrolled her infant in the trial “brainwashed” and “psychologically damaged.” These incidents are counterproductive to the summit’s purported goal of “sponsoring vigorous discussion and debate.” 

Across the country, scientific researchers on topics ranging from climate change to public health are facing escalating anti-science aggression and require University support. Scientists working in politicized fields, especially junior researchers without tenure, are looking to University leadership for assurance that they will be protected. And yet, less than a month into his term, President Levin is instead standing with the very people who have launched deceitful and damaging attacks that have suppressed research at Stanford.

It is disheartening that President Levin would so readily abet the latest spectacle in a long line of efforts leveraging the affordances of academic institutions to distort scientific consensus and steer resulting policy. When Andrew Wakefield launched the modern anti-vaccine movement with a fraudulent since-retracted study, he was joined by his medical school dean for a press conference at the hospital where he worked. Peter Duesberg, a biologist at UC Berkeley, convinced top academic journal Science to investigate his claims that HIV does not cause AIDS in the name of “balance” (they concluded his theories were wrong). Dark money think tanks helped prop up a cadre of pseudo-experts who worked to cast doubt on the science establishing that greenhouse gasses could change the climate and tobacco could cause health harms (some of the same groups, including the Hoover Institute, have worked closely with summit panelists). These campaigns caused extensive, lasting damage: resurgent outbreaks of measles, 330,000 preventable AIDS deaths in South Africa, extensive smoking-related illness estimated to cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and a climate catastrophe that is only beginning to unfold. 

So, yes, we need to have an honest conversation about how a handful of prominent contrarian academics backed by corporate interests continue to tank evidence-backed policy, including COVID-19 protections. We need to invest in efforts to bolster public understanding of science and to identify and counter harmful lies about scientific topics — the very sort of work that the Stanford Internet Observatory was leading. And we need to stop allowing “academic freedom” to be used by the most powerful people on campus, with the largest platforms, to silence their critics. 

Academic freedom actually does urgently need protection, at Stanford and across the country. Scientific researchers need legal protections, stable employment that is insulated from outside pressure, security against violent threats and assistance with debunking lies about their research. We deserve University leadership that is able to recognize and rebuke these attacks, rather than a president who endorses them.

Mallory Harris is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland. She received her Ph.D. in biology from Stanford University in 2024.

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