At the Library, Stanford Disdains The Humanities Once Again

THE STUDENT who sets out to explore West Campus will quickly stumble upon the shiny new buildings with ceiling windows and delicious cafes — the centers for research in such glamorous subjects as neuroscience, biology, and bioengineering. Stanford can’t get enough of those: in fact, more and more Stanford Medicine buildings are bound to be “renewed” in the next few years.

Move a bit away from the sciences, though, and the picture looks quite different. Back in 2019, Provost Drell announced that Stanford would stop subsidizing its University Press — a move that failed only thanks to professors’ activism. The King Institute, which publishes MLK’s papers, is housed in a makeshift building and has had to make do with a tight budget. And this year, Stanford Libraries — the backbone of all humanities research in the university — appears to be the new target of the Stanford administration’s disdain for the humanities.