"Die Luft der Freiheit weht" is Stanford’s unofficial motto and translates as "the wind of freedom blows." The phrase is a quote from Ulrich von Hutten, a 16th-century humanist. Stanford’s first president, David Starr Jordan, embraced the questioning, critical spirit of von Hutten’s words and included them on his presidential seal. Gerhard Casper, president of Stanford from 1992 to 2000, adopted the motto as the basis of his inaugural address and encouraged its widespread use across the campus.
- The Founding of Stanford
In the last several decades, over 2,454 full-time companies were founded by 2,325 members of the Stanford University community.
Companies such as Cisco Systems, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo! saw their technical beginnings here and their commercial prosperity in nearby Silicon Valley. Understanding these successes, codifying that knowledge and disseminating it to future generations of entrepreneurs is an opportunity and an obligation that we must seize.
- Wellspring of Innovation
Why, you started asking yourselves some time ago, is the new President telling us all this - or, rather, since this is informal California, you have probably been asking "Why is Gerhard telling us all this? Just because he was embarrassingly ignorant way back in March?" Well, that is part of it. My ignorance got me to read and what I read impressed on me what a splendid choice Jordan and Stanford made when they invoked the "winds of freedom" as the short expression of principle to guide Stanford University. What does this principle entail? Permit me to make a few brief suggestions.
A university's freedom must be first of all the freedom that we take mostly for granted, though the humanists had to fight for it and others must still do battle for it even today: the pursuit of knowledge free from constraints as to sources and fields. Hutten and his friends rose up when they were told that Hebrew instruction and Hebrew texts should be banned because they were in conflict with the Christian message and mission.
Second, a university must be free to challenge established orthodoxy. Erasmus, Thomas More and Hutten put forward their "new learning" in opposition to the ruling scholasticism that they found wanting. A university is the ally of change, and change is the ally of the university. The main task of the university is to question and to challenge fundamental assumptions and practices - that is, by implication, to favor change if these assumptions and practices prove to be wrong. The university's commitment is to knowledge and research, not to a particular content or program or to specific results. Only in one respect must the university be rigidly conservative: It must protect the openness, the rigor, the seriousness of its work in education and research.
Third, a university's freedom must be the freedom to challenge new orthodoxy. Just as traditions should not be embraced merely because they are traditions, the newest intellectual fashions should not rule just because they are new. While Hutten supported Martin Luther, he hardly wished the latter's teachings to become dogma. Erasmus, for his part, eventually broke with Hutten, whom he considered too radical. And Sir Thomas More has become Saint Thomas because he died a martyr defending the old faith against Henry VIII's new orthodoxy.
Fourth, a university's freedom must be the freedom of its members, faculty and students to think and speak for themselves. A university must not have dominant ways of thinking. Hutten was, in Jordan's words, "intolerant of intolerance." No university can thrive unless each member is accepted as an autonomous individual and can speak and will be listened to without regard to labels and stereotypes.
Fifth, a university's freedom must be the freedom to speak plainly, without concealment and to the point - that is, without endless hedgings and escape clauses. As Jordan wrote, Hutten was a man not of free thought only, but of free speech, and knew no concealment.
Sixth, a university's freedom should include the freedom to take pleasure in the life of the mind. I quote again Hutten's enthusiastic statement from his own student days: "It is a pleasure to live.... Studies blossom and the minds move."
Seventh, the wind of freedom blows across national and cultural boundaries, it does not stop at them. Hutten, like many of his humanist friends, claimed the freedom to engage in fruitful contacts with whomsoever and wheresoever. His world was limited to Europe; ours comprises all continents. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has recently stressed that we are experiencing the formation of a world system of cultures, "a Culture of cultures," whose spaces are characterized by both differentiation and assimilation. I know few universities that are better positioned than Stanford to become a place of learning with a truly inter-national and inter-cultural character. We need to understand, appreciate and value differences, while realizing that without a common thread holding us together we shall be lost.
Eighth, the wind of freedom cannot blow in a closed and stuffy ivory tower. Members of a university community must not shy away from the social and political issues of their time, from shaping the social and political values of society, from engaging in public service. Public service is their freedom, indeed their obligation. It is not, however, necessarily the university's freedom. A university's freedom and obligation are to provide a forum for the most searching and candid discussion of public issues. But, as one of the century's foremost First Amendment scholars, my much missed Chicago colleague, the late Harry Kalven, has said, a university "cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives." This viewpoint arises "not out of a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints."
Finally, teaching, learning and research do not benefit from stagnant air but from fresh winds blowing. There can be no fresh wind without highest quality research. Mediocrity leads to nothing other than more mediocrity. In our pursuit of excellences at Stanford, let us not forget that Stanford, with the rest of the great American research and teaching universities, will become forgettable - and that means, will be doomed - unless the United States and we remain committed to the support of original investigation of the first rank, and the investments in education and training that go with it.
- Gerhard Casper, President of Stanford University, Inaugural Address, on October 2, 1992
