Abolish Stanford: Alumni Weekend & Stanford’s Budget

This past weekend, alumni returned to Stanford for their annual reunion, ostensibly an occasion for nostalgia and festivities. Underneath this lies, of course, the ever present request for alumni donations. Stanford is quick to advertise itself as an engine for social good — for donations to specific, identifiably laudable causes -- but alumni donations are fundamentally investments in a brand name, in an institution. And what, exactly, does that institution financially stand for?

Despite its claims to the contrary, Stanford has no shortage of funding. In the upcoming fiscal year, the University has allocated $24.6 million for the Department of Public Safety, having already spent $34 million on a new police building — double the estimated cost from 2016.  Though the University’s private police force claims to enforce “Public Safety,” Stanford’s Black students — and the predominantly Black and Latinx population of Stanford’s neighboring East Palo Alto — are deeply aware of the violence SUDPS perpetrates in the name of “keeping students safe.” Black students have repeatedly reported feeling unsafe in the presence of SUDPS officers, and are so disproportionately targeted and racially profiled by SUDPS that “police on Santa Teresa” is a message routinely circulated among Black students.

Rather than listen to the demands of Black students to divest from carceral institutions like SUDPS — to genuinely reimagine our understanding of “public safety” — Stanford has repeatedly refused to engage with organizers in good faith. Its administrators have misrepresented student demands and ignored SUDPS’ long history of violence: rarely, if ever, does the University acknowledge that SUDPS officers were involved in the fatal shooting of Pedro Calderon in 2004 at the base of the Stanford foothills. To the best of our knowledge, the University has never provided reparations to his family.    

The university’s investment in injustice is not limited to policing. Stanford is one of the last of its peer institutions not to divest from fossil fuels. Particularly because of its claims to value “sustainability,” Stanford’s unwillingness to divest feels deeply hypocritical — as the organizers of Fossil Free Stanford have articulated countless times before, Stanford’s continued investment in fossil fuels directly contradicts any narrative that Stanford meaningfully contributes to the fight against climate change.

While Stanford invests in arms of oppression, it simultaneously neglects causes essential to our community. More than a year after organizers of Students for Workers’ Rights (SWR) made their demands for more equitable treatment of service workers, Stanford continues to underpay, undervalue, and exploit its laborers. Not only have workers who were laid off during the pandemic still failed to receive pay continuance, but Stanford has yet to fundamentally change the systems which enabled such exploitation in the first place. Even as the University laid off service workers and refused them pay continuance — even as the University denied its janitorial staff PPE and hazard pay — they released two new job postings for the Department of Public Safety.

Additionally, Stanford’s failure to adequately fund Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) demonstrates an alarming unwillingness to not only respond to student concerns, but also treat all students with care and empathy.  Despite nominal changes to University policy, SUDPS officers are still permitted to respond directly to students experiencing mental health crises. And they have: in February, SUDPS officers responded to a mental health crisis while wielding guns with rubber bullets. Stanford’s investments demonstrate that it sees students experience mental health crises not as people deserving of care and empathy, but as problems to be violently removed from the University community.

Alumni have the power to voice their concerns about the university’s priorities in the only language it understands: money. Donations to Stanford at this point in history are a tacit endorsement of a status quo that is both morally reprehensible in a vacuum and utterly disappointing in comparison to peer institutions. Alumni, challenge your complicity in this institution and withhold your donations until Stanford reevaluates its priorities.