In a 2016 report on “threats to the independence of student media,” the American Association of University Professors compiled a list of recent cases in which a faculty adviser for a student publication had been fired or otherwise disciplined. For instance, “at Fairmont State University, a public institution in West Virginia, journalism adviser Michael Kelley was removed in 2015, after just nine months on the job, following his students’ publication of a two-part series about unhealthy levels of mold in a campus dorm. The president and provost of the university explicitly told student editors that they wanted a less controversial newspaper with more positive stories.” The report lists seven such incidents, which “may just be the tip of a much larger iceberg.”
More recently, Inside Higher Ed’s Greta Anderson reported on the case of Fernando Gallo, the faculty adviser for the student newspaper at Diablo Valley College, in California. Gallo was an untenured instructor, and the college failed to rehire him after the student newspaper criticized the administration’s handling of racist graffiti and other incidents of alleged racism on campus.
Retaliation against advisers is common enough that, as Anderson notes, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression lists it as a warning sign of student-newspaper censorship. Other warning signs include “investigations” and “defunding and derecognition.” (For a startling instance of the last, read about Pennsylvania State University’s defunding of The Daily Collegian — something we’ll hopefully learn more about soon.)
Legal threats by administrators against student journalists are not listed, perhaps because they’re not very common. But when Theo Baker, a freshman at Stanford University, wrote to Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who was at the time president of Stanford, to ask about allegations of academic misconduct against Tessier-Lavigne’s lab, legal threats are what he got. (Tessier-Lavigne has since resigned as president, in response to a formal investigation resulting from Baker’s allegations.) As Baker told the Los Angeles Times, “Stephen Neal, the chair emeritus of Cooley, one of the biggest law firms in the Silicon Valley area, represented Marc Tessier-Lavigne and sent a number of aggressive letters requesting retractions or seeking to block the publication of articles that detailed Tessier-Lavigne’s involvement in alleged incidents of fraud. Neal is also a former attorney for Elizabeth Holmes,” the erstwhile chief executive of Theranos who is now in federal prison for fraud.
“Your errors,” Neal wrote to Baker in a letter dated February 9, 2023, “are many, fundamental, and egregious.” He goes on: “Given that the falsehoods in your letter concern activities at Genentech and the conduct of Genentech personnel” — Tessier-Lavigne worked at Genentech when some of the disputed research was performed — “we felt compelled to notify Genentech of your allegations. To follow up on that notification, I am sending a copy of this letter to Genentech’s General Counsel.”
A few days later, and in response to another letter to Tessier-Lavigne from Baker, Neal became more aggressive. He accused Baker of “flagrant and seemingly deliberate distortions.” At no point did Tessier-Lavigne himself respond personally to Baker’s inquiries. The president communicated first through a university spokesperson, and then through legal counsel. It might have been thought that a university president has a unique duty to model open conversation about intellectual matters. What if Tessier-Lavigne had decided to exemplify science’s openness to critique and revision by participating in Baker’s investigation? It would hardly have gone any worse for him than it did. Instead, he left budding scientists at Stanford with a different lesson: When challenged, stonewall, deflect, and litigate.
