Save Stanford: Appoint Scott Atlas or Jay Bhattacharya as President By Stella Paul
Stanford University’s reputation is in freefall as this once-revered university makes headlines for all the wrong reasons. Recently, a mob of law school students shut down a conservative judge’s speech, screeching insults at him to the approval of a Diversity Dean and the disgust of the country. Then there’s the FTX fiasco, in which a Stanford-linked cryptocurrency company collapsed amidst lurid charges of fraud and money laundering. Victor’s Davis Hanson’s lament “What Happened to Stanford?” adds other disasters to the list, including the arrest of a Chinese agent and the disclosure of $64 million in Chinese donations.
I’ve been studying Stanford’s decline for a while, and I think I have a partial explanation: the fish rots from the head. Stanford’s president is a renowned neuroscientist currently under investigation for scientific fraud. Dr. Tessier-Lavigne made his reputation studying Alzheimer’s, but evidence has emerged that has critics alleging that he may have manipulated images in multiple influential papers published in Science and Nature.
Americans are losing faith in their institutions, and the story of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne exemplifies why. His first problematic study dates back to 2001, but that didn’t stop his meteoric rise through biotech pioneer Genentech to the presidency of Rockefeller University and then Stanford in 2016. Now that his alleged frauds have come to light, Stanford’s Board of Trustees has opened an investigation, but it’s being conducted by Board members, instead of outside experts. To many observers, it appears that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne may be getting the privileged treatment awarded those with favored credentials and opinions.
Whatever the outcome of the investigation, it’s clear that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne has diminished moral authority to reverse the decay of Stanford. Dr. Tessier-Lavigne should resign, or the Board should fire him and begin the search for a new president who can restore the public’s trust and convince students that it’s still worth paying almost $90,000 a year for a Stanford education.
Fortunately, two public heroes at Stanford could immediately invigorate the school’s reputation by taking the helm: Dr. Scott Atlas or Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Both men displayed rare courage in academia by opposing the Covid diktats of lockdown and forced medical interventions, standing strong against furious retaliation. Dr. Atlas became known to the public as a special advisor to President Trump on his Coronavirus Task Force, using his data expertise to analyze the effectiveness of enforced masking and social distancing. And Dr. Bhattacharya co-authored the seminal Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter in 2020 signed by thousands of doctors and public health scientists calling for “Focused Protection” of the high-risk population and normal living for everyone else.
As Victor Davis Hanson notes, “Both were pilloried mercilessly by some of the Stanford faculty and administration for daring to doubt the efficacy of what has proved to be disastrous government-enforced COVID quarantines and school shutdowns.
“Yet the arguments of Atlas and Bhattacharya—the science does not support the mandatory use of masks to halt the pandemic, natural immunity was as efficacious as or superior to vaccine-induced immunity, the vaccinations would not offer lasting protection against either being infected or infecting someone else, and the quarantine lockdowns would cause more damage and death (familial abuse, suicides, substance abuse, mental depression, uneducated children, economic catastrophe, millions of missed surgeries, screenings, tests, and doctor’s appointments) than the virus itself—were all eventually substantiated.”
Drs. Atlas and Bhattacharya were right, and the Stanford enforcement brigade were wrong. The university suppressed critical academic discussion at a crucial time, lending its enormous prestige to policies that destroyed lives around the world and caused great suffering to its students. Personally, I find it chilling that all Stanford students were mandated to receive experimental vaccine injections, under orders from a president accused of scientific fraud.
The Board of Trustees should offer the presidency to either Dr. Atlas or Dr. Bhattacharya and begin the process of restoring Stanford’s reputation. The task is enormous, but the doctors could start with bold measures to assure the public that the scientists are trustworthy in an age when we’re asked to “trust the science.” A first step might be to abolish Stanford’s new Certificate in “Critical Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive Praxis,” which is designed to educate STEM graduate students in “critical theory and Black feminism.” Returning STEM studies to actual STEM studies would be a big win.
Next, they might want to probe why not a single white man anywhere in the world was considered worthy of admittance to Stanford’s 2023 surgical residency intern team. Is Stanford openly discriminating against white men? If so, announce Stanford’s official resumption of evaluations based on merit, not quotas. For good measure, they may want to axe Stanford’s new snitch software system, which offers financial incentives to report people on campus who use unapproved words.
By appointing Dr. Atlas or Dr. Bhattacharya as president, Stanford could do much more than revive its own standards of excellence. Stanford could set an example for the whole world of how to restore faith in our institutions and emerge from the darkness engulfing Western civilization.
Stella can be reached through Twitter @StellaPaulNY
Photo credit: Jawed Karim CC BY-SA 3.0 license
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