Strawser | Dear ASSU: Be the leaders the Trump era calls for

I believe that the Undergraduate Senate (UGS) is capable of doing great things. It funded On Call Café, advocated for student athletes and held necessary conversations on alcohol policy reform. I’ve long trusted our senators to take student advocacy seriously.

However, on the issue of immigration, the Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) has abdicated the responsibility of centering student needs, and my trust had regressed into disdain. The UGS unanimously removed a resolution that would’ve declared Stanford a sanctuary campus from its docket. This came after the UGS tabled the resolution, which would’ve opposed Stanford’s cooperation with non-court mandated immigration efforts. The purported reasons for backpedaling their opposition to an immigration agenda that puts their undocumented and international constituents at risk? Institutional neutrality and Graduate Student Council (GSC) concerns that the issue would become “highly publicized.”

The Faculty Senate passed the institutional neutrality policy based on the work of the 2023-24 AdHoc Committee on University Speech, which had zero student voters for the entirety of its work. As for the 2024-25 Committee, the votes of faculty outnumbered the votes of students six-to-one. The irony should not be lost on us that students’ elected representatives are bending the knee (on matters putting student safety at risk, no less) to the very university leaders that relegate the student body to second-class status on university governance. We must realize that the UGS is defending a fundamentally anti-student process.

As for concerns that, in their capacity as students’ elected representatives, pressuring the University would make things “highly publicized,” I would argue that making noise and grabbing attention is exactly what President Donald Trump’s era calls for. 

The president has said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and has investigated members of congress for merely providing Know Your Rights trainings. These things should prompt the UGS and GSC into being a thorn in the side of Stanford’s leadership until leadership signals — in words and in meaningful action — that negative press and political ire are a small price to pay for students’ safe, joyous experience on campus. 

The ASSU has tacitly handed their fellow students — constituents, classmates, roommates and friends — over to an administration repeatedly signaling Nazi-adjacence. Trump’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) exemplifies the dangers of the ASSU’s institutional surrender. 

Trump’s Department of Education has threatened to strip schools like Stanford of their federal funds over their use of DEI in not just admissions but administrative support, housing “and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.”

Alongside the horror of his administration’s immigration agenda, Trump’s anti-DEI crusade has allowed DEI bans formerly reserved for red states to go national. This, for instance, gives a greater platform to the Florida ban which forced the University of North Florida to close its Intercultural Center, Interfaith Center, LGBTQ Center, Women’s Center and Office of Diversity and Inclusion. Without question, this leaves indispensable Stanford institutions like ethnic theme houses, community centers and Stanford’s antisemitism and Islamophobia committees vulnerable to complete erasure. Were Stanford to adhere to these threats, students would lose access to crucial resources and opportunities, therefore surrendering the University’s educational excellence and communal vibrancy. 

The ASSU must realize that, while AdHoc Committee member and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Eugene Volokh attempts to distance the University’s actions from President Trump, the threats to students’ rights and existence are indisputable. We face an administration that writes transgender people out of existence and abandons civil rights litigation, demanding that we purify our campuses of any acknowledgement of marginalized peoples’ pleas for joy and justice. The time is now for the ASSU to abandon its de facto acceptance of the Trump agenda.

ASSU, you can provide all the funding you want to groups like L’chaim Club, Hermanas and the Cambodian Student Association. But with Stanford’s Trump-aligned neutrality amounting to complicity in an anti-immigrant, anti-free speech and anti-DEI massacre, you must put defending our diverse student body ahead of self-imposed restraints. 

You have your tools, such as bringing the confirmation of students to campus conduct panels to a screeching halt, using the Faculty Senate as a venue to highlight Stanford’s institutional spinelessness amidst attacks on its educational mission and threatening a vote of no confidence in University president Jonathan Levin ’94, Provost Jenny Martinez and the Faculty Senate. Use them. 

California, as one of the UGS co-chairs noted to excuse the retraction of the sanctuary university resolution, is already a sanctuary state. However, that is no excuse when confronted with the reality of both the Trump administration and Stanford being a clear and present danger to the cherished rights and values at issue. To stop this resurgence of hatred and authoritarianism dead in its tracks, the ASSU should send a strong message by, without delay, passing its sanctuary university resolution and demanding equal AdHoc Committee representation. 

History reminds us of the horrors that arise when we fail to stop hate dead in its tracks. Justice demands that the ASSU lead by example, showing other schools across the nation how to put students first. Students elected leaders, and it’s time those leaders lived up to their title.

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