For the past two days, more than 150 professors, scholars, and a few hangers-on, including yours truly, gathered at Stanford to talk about the state of academic freedom. If you read this newsletter and listen to our podcast, you know well that the need for such a conference—to say nothing of new universities—is urgent.
This one was organized and attended by many whose names will be familiar to you from their bylines in Common Sense and on Honestly: economist John Cochrane; geophysicist Dorian Abbott; mathematician Sergiu Klainerman; economist Tyler Cowen; historian Niall Ferguson; psychologist Jonathan Haidt; lawyer Nadine Strossen; and courageous young scholars like Solveig Gold, among many others.
The most important of the panels, to my mind, were those focused on hard sciences and the way that this authoritarian ideology has impacted even fields like chemistry and biology. Below is an edited version of what Luana Maroja, a biology professor at Williams College, shared.