President’s comments at Faculty Senate meeting of March 9, 2017

I have two brief updates. The first is on the long-range planning process, which we discussed four weeks ago here at the Senate. We continue to make progress on a number of fronts.

We have made good progress in establishing the membership of the four area steering groups, which you will recall will be directing activity in the four areas of education, research, our community and engagement beyond the university. We also will be launching the long-range planning website later this month, and at the beginning of the spring quarter, we will be issuing a call for ideas and proposals from everyone in the campus community who is interested in submitting one.

We look forward to your participation and to hearing your ideas.

Second, I want to give you a brief update on the new travel ban executive order from the federal administration, which as you know came out on Monday this week. It is a scaled-back version of the order that was issued in late January and then placed on hold by the federal courts.

At Stanford, we are continuing to provide services and support to the members of our community who are most directly affected by these developments. There has been additional outreach this week, including special meetings with members of our community who are from the six designated countries, to help answer their questions and address their concerns.

As you may have read in Stanford Report on Tuesday, we also have a campus working group that is continuing to meet to identify additional help the campus can provide to its international and immigrant communities. We have a wide range of support available, including advising sessions, legal assistance, counseling, financial assistance and travel guidance.

Our sense of the new executive order is that it likely will cause less immediate disruption to our community than the first executive order, which has now been rescinded. But the order may well affect family members of our students and scholars, and of course, students and scholars who wish to come to the United States in the future from the six designated countries.

We also continue to be very concerned about the overall message of “unwelcome” that is conveyed by these orders, given how much we value our diverse international community, and how important the international exchange of people and ideas is to the university.

To sum up: We will continue to work to support all members of our community, including our immigrant and undocumented members; we will continue to make very clear that the international exchange of people and ideas is central to the academic mission of the university; and we will continue to advocate at the federal level for policies that reflect the shared values of the academic community in this country.

We will continue to monitor these issues and to keep the members of our community informed and supported.