As the White House escalated its pressure campaign on Harvard and other Ivy League universities this past academic year, many of us at Stanford braced ourselves for similar scrutiny, wondering when our school would draw the Trump administration’s ire.
So far, those anxieties have mostly gone unrealized. Stanford has remained outside the national spotlight, avoiding the direct funding cuts and freezes that Harvard, Columbia, Brown, and other universities have faced.
That’s not to say the school has been entirely spared. Trump’s endowment tax hike on wealthy private universities has triggered deep budget cuts, a hiring freeze, and hundreds of layoffs. The extensive withdrawal of research funding has been a tough blow to scientific labs. All the while, international students face constant uncertainty from abrupt changes to visa programs from the State Department.
Still, compared to the storm of cuts, investigations, and threats engulfing East Coast institutions, Stanford has largely maintained its blue-sky reputation.
This divergence in treatment is especially puzzling given the Trump administration’s purported reason for targeting Harvard—antisemitism. Setting aside definitional debates over antisemitism, Harvard and Stanford saw fairly similar unrest on their campuses in response to the events of Oct. 7, 2023. At Stanford, pro-Palestinian students staged a 120-day encampment, unfurled a banner over Green Library, disrupted events, and even occupied the President’s office, spraying militant graffiti across the Main Quad.
If the White House’s actions toward Harvard are sincerely motivated by what it considers “an unprecedented wave of vile anti-Semitic discrimination, vandalism, and violence,” then Stanford would seem another natural target. So why hasn’t it been?
The school’s relative freedom from unwanted attention is not by chance, but by design.
Geography offers a partial explanation. Far from the nation’s capital, Stanford is simply less visible to policymakers than Ivy League schools clustered on the East Coast.
Stanford’s culture is as distinct as its location. Characterized by an emphasis on science and technology, and deep alumni ties to business and tech, Stanford benefits from a less politicized image. It may seem paradoxical that many White House officials graduated from the very schools they are now hobbling. Nonetheless, Ivy League graduates’ outsized representation in the federal government might actually motivate such attacks, rather than deter them, as political appointees prioritize reshaping their alma maters over other universities.
Geography and academic focus are not the sole factors at play. If they were, the University of California, Los Angeles—another West Coast school with little reputation for campus politics—wouldn’t be a target of the Trump administration.
Stanford’s relative immunity arises instead from its institutional positioning.
On the occasion that Stanford enters the political fray, its overall posture tends to be more centrist—sometimes even conservative—making the institution less susceptible to caricatures of rampant leftism than elite counterparts.
The Hoover Institution at Stanford, a right-leaning think tank founded nearly 70 years ago, is home to fellows such as Niall Ferguson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and John Cochrane, all of whom signed onto the Manhattan Institute’s July statement denouncing left-wing influence in higher education.
It comes as no surprise that Harvard is reportedly considering launching a center for conservative scholarship, inspired by Hoover. Harvard hopes the establishment of such a center would satisfy the Trump administration’s demand for “viewpoint diversity.”
With deep connections in Washington and the Republican Party, Stanford professors such as former Secretary of State and Director of the Hoover Institution Condoleezza Rice have also been valuable advocates for the University.
At a meeting of Stanford’s Academic Council in May, it was Rice who joined University President Jonathan Levin for remarks on the state of higher education. “The United States of America will be shooting itself in the head if it does not continue the bargain between the government and research universities,” she said at the meeting.
That argument likely carries weight in Washington, where Stanford’s research and teaching have contributed to U.S. defense and technology policy, producing advances in artificial intelligence and military technology. Even though Harvard’s research contributes to vital scientific and medical innovation, Stanford is better positioned to claim its federal funding will help the government maintain a competitive edge over China.
Companies like Palantir, a software firm founded by Stanford alum and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, exemplify this relationship. The firm disproportionately recruits Stanford graduates and acquires startups founded by students. Palantir is also heavily contracted by the Trump administration, which appears to understand, at some level, that Stanford provides critical labor and technology to power its agenda.
Stanford’s administration has been careful to uphold this positioning with the White House by proactively following government prescriptions for higher education. For example, by February of this year, content on Stanford’s DEI websites had been quietly scrubbed, drawing opposition from students and faculty. This month, the DEI office was shut down altogether.
Unlike some leaders at peer schools like Princeton, President Levin and Provost Jenny Martinez have avoided issuing public criticism of the Trump administration. An exception came in April, when Levin and Martinez defended Harvard president Alan Garber, writing that Harvard’s resistance to government demands were “rooted in the American tradition of liberty.”
Despite this action, Levin and Martinez refused to sign a subsequent statement by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, in which the presidents of more than 180 colleges expressed opposition to “the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” Facing questions over this decision, Levin told Stanford’s Faculty Senate he simply dislikes open letters, preferring private lobbying and collective lawsuits.
Both Levin and Martinez also established their support for institutional neutrality well before Trump returned to office. As dean of Stanford Law School, Martinez issued a lengthy memo in 2023 defending a conservative federal judge’s right to speak after law students shouted him down. And in his inaugural address last October, Levin declared that “the University’s purpose is not political action or social justice. It is to create an environment in which learning thrives.”
In Stanford historian Jennifer Burns’ view, those commitments proved fortuitous in the political climate that followed Trump’s re-election. “They had articulated a discomfort about what was happening in higher education ahead of what was happening,” she observed in an interview for this article.
Taken together, geographic distance, conservative footholds, ties to national security, and leadership style not only help explain Stanford’s relative immunity, but reflect a broader symbolic distinction between Stanford and Harvard.
As the nation’s oldest university and best-known example of elite higher education, Harvard has become the Trump administration’s primary target because of what it represents. Despite the government’s claims, targeted actions have less to do with Harvard’s handling of antisemitism and more to do with the symbolic importance of bringing the country’s most prominent university to heel.
Right-wing criticism of Harvard goes back decades. Subduing the institution’s resistance would be a major conservative victory years in the making, signaling that even the most powerful institution can be brought down.
Stanford tells a different story. In the American imagination, it stands less for elite political influence than frontier innovation, the tech economy, and defense initiatives.
The relative peace Stanford has enjoyed reflects the University’s willingness to reinforce that image while accommodating Washington, D.C. That strategy has kept Stanford afloat so far, but it risks setting a dangerous precedent in which universities sustain themselves by deferring to power, rather than questioning it.
George Porteous (gport@stanford.edu) is a junior at Stanford University studying history, where he is a Staff Writer and former News Managing Editor for the Stanford Daily.