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Tag: Marc Tessier-Lavigne

  • Former Spelman President Addresses Higher Education Crisis at Campus Event

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    “Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times”(above) was made available for purchase before the fireside chat.
    Photo by Noah Washington/The Atlanta Voice

    Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, President emerita of Spelman College, launched her book tour on Wednesday evening. She discussed the challenges rocking higher education and the tough leadership decisions that defined her 13-year tenure at the historically Black women’s college.

    Speaking before a packed audience of students, alumni, faculty, and supporters at Spelman’s Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby Academic Center Auditorium, Tatum presented her latest work, “Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times.” The timing proved apt as moderator & WABE journalist Rose Scott for the fireside chat opened the evening by addressing breaking news about Emory University’s decision to eliminate its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, setting the stage for the conversation to follow.

    Bold Decisions and Health Priorities

    One of Tatum’s most controversial decisions during her tenure as Spelman’s president from 2002 to 2015 was discontinuing Spelman’s NCAA Division III athletics program in 2012. The choice sparked fierce debate but grew from genuine concern about student wellness during a pivotal moment in her presidency.

    The catalyst came during a sparsely attended basketball game as the Great South Athletic Conference dissolved around schools seeking more competitive opportunities. Tatum said, “I was sitting watching the basketball game, five players on the court, and five people, maybe on the bench, and hardly anybody in the stands,” Tatum recalled. “And while I was watching this game, I had an ‘aha’ moment and the little whisper said, ‘flip it.’”

    Tatum had discovered research showing young Black women had the highest rates of physical inactivity among all demographic groups, leading to early onset diseases like diabetes and high blood pressure. By investing in comprehensive wellness programs instead of traditional athletics, she saw transformational potential aligned with Spelman’s mission. By investing in comprehensive wellness programs instead of traditional athletics, she saw an opportunity for transformational impact.

    “We could change not only the trajectory of our students, but our students would change the trajectory of their families, their communities,” she explained.

    Learning from Leadership Challenges and Broader Patterns

    When asked about the correlation between Black women achieving the highest college graduation rates and changing attitudes toward higher education, Tatum offered her perspective on broader social patterns affecting academic leadership.

    “There’s a pattern of devaluing activities when they become feminized,” Tatum observed. “As campus communities have become more diverse, as there has been greater access on the part of people of color to higher education, there is less public support for it.”

    Her analysis of Claudine Gay’s treatment, Harvard’s 30th president, provided a specific example of these dynamics at work. Tatum noted the stark difference in public response when Gay resigned compared to Stanford’s president,  Marc Tessier-Lavigne who had stepped down six months earlier over similar academic integrity concerns.

    “When he stepped down, people didn’t call him a DEI hire,” Tatum pointed out. “People expressed regret that he was leaving, and that’s the difference.”

    Despite these challenges, Tatum emphasized the enduring importance of higher education’s mission, referencing a 1945 Truman Commission that identified three essential purposes: maintaining democracy, fostering international cooperation, and applying creative thinking to complex problems.

    “We need people who have an understanding of history, who recognize history when it’s repeating, who are able to think critically about the social challenges that are part of our democratic process,” she said.

    Photo by Noah Washington/The Atlanta Washington

    Leading Through Crisis

    During Q&A, Tatum shared the personal philosophy that guided her through multiple crises. Asked about courage, she reframed fear: “Fear stands for false evidence appearing real.”

    “It’s not that the fear goes away when you’re taking courageous action, even when you’re afraid. You act even in the presence of fear,” she said.

    This philosophy was tested during what she called “a president’s worst nightmare”, when responding to the killing of Jasmine Lynn,  a student at Spelman in September 2009. Despite staff assurances, she immediately returned to campus from Washington, D.C.

    “In a moment like that, you have to be there,” she said simply.

    The evening concluded with a book signing for attendees. 

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    Noah Washington

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  • Disruption of Speech at Stanford Prompts President to Apologize — and Criticize Staff’s Response

    Disruption of Speech at Stanford Prompts President to Apologize — and Criticize Staff’s Response

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    A student protest that interrupted a controversial speaker at Stanford University last week led its president and law dean to criticize campus staff, including, apparently, the associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion who joined the speaker at the podium and discussed the students’ concerns.

    Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, was invited to give a talk titled “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation With the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter,” by the law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society, a conservative and libertarian legal organization.

    Duncan was met with a room of loud student protesters who said his history of court rulings had caused harm to LGBTQ+ students, and that giving him a platform on campus diminished their safety. (His confirmation to the Fifth Circuit was opposed by groups like the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which cited Duncan’s decisions against rights for same-sex couples and against gender-affirming bathroom access for transgender children.)

    But a free-speech advocate contacted by The Chronicle said the protesters took it too far and prevented Duncan from completing the speech he was invited to give, which she said infringed on his speech rights. The situation at Stanford comes amid a national debate over how to balance free expression and student safety. It is common for conservative student groups to invite provocative speakers to give lectures on campus, which then face backlash from protesters.

    “These students [protesters] are free to engage in counter-speech via peaceful protest, asserting that Judge Duncan’s judicial decisions ‘cause harm,’” wrote Alex Morey, the director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, in an email to The Chronicle. “What happened Thursday was not counter-speech. It was censorship.”

    Stanford leaders appeared to agree. President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Jenny S. Martinez, the dean of Stanford Law School, apologized to Duncan in a joint letter.

    “What happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech, and we are very sorry about the experience you had while visiting our campus,” the letter read. “We are very clear with our students that, given our commitment to free expression, if there are speakers they disagree with, they are welcome to exercise their right to protest but not to disrupt the proceedings.”

    The letter stated that under Stanford’s disruption policy, students are not allowed to “prevent the effective carrying out” of a public event by “heckling or other forms of interruption.”

    The letter also criticized Stanford staff for their response to the protesters.

    “Staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech,” the letter from Stanford leadership read.

    Neither Tessier-Lavigne nor Martinez were made available for comment, but their letter appeared to reference the actions of Tirien Angela Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion. As captured in a video of the event, she joined Duncan at the podium after he apparently requested that an administrator assist in quieting the student protesters. At first, Duncan appeared confused when Steinbach identified herself as an administrator.

    Then, Steinbach proceeded to address the crowd for roughly six minutes, as she shared her support for the student protesters but encouraged them to allow Duncan to speak.

    “I’m uncomfortable because this event is tearing at the fabric of this community that I care about and that I’m here to support,” Steinbach said to the crowd. She continued to explain that for many people in the crowd, Duncan’s work had “caused harm.”

    “My job is to create a space of belonging for all people in this institution, and that is hard and messy and not easy and the answers are not black or white or right or wrong,” Steinbach said. “This is actually part of the creation of belonging.”

    Still, she questioned the decision to invite Duncan to speak.

    Steinbach asked Duncan, “Is it worth the pain that this causes and the division that this causes? Do you have something so incredibly important to say about Twitter and guns and Covid that that is worth this impact on the division of these people, who have sat next to each other for years, who are going through what is the battle of law school together?”

    Steinbach said that she believes the right to free speech must be upheld, because if Duncan’s speech were censored it wouldn’t be long before the protesters’ speech was censored as well.

    But she said she understood that some students might want to change Stanford’s policies to prioritize safety and inclusion.

    “I understand why people feel like harm is so great that we might need to reconsider these policies,” Steinbach said. “Luckily they are in a school where they can learn the advocacy skills to advocate for those changes.”

    The Chronicle emailed Steinbach for reaction to the letter from Stanford’s president and law school dean, but received no answer.

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    Julian Roberts-Grmela

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  • Stanford Is Investigating Its Own President Over Research-Misconduct Allegations

    Stanford Is Investigating Its Own President Over Research-Misconduct Allegations

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    Stanford University’s Board of Trustees is overseeing an investigation into the university’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, over allegations that neurobiology papers that he co-authored contain multiple manipulated images, a university spokeswoman told The Chronicle on Tuesday night.

    The announcement of the inquiry followed a report earlier Tuesday in The Stanford Daily about concerns relating to images in at least four papers of Tessier-Lavigne’s — two of which listed him as senior author — that date back to at least 2001. Concerns about these papers, along with others, have been publicly raised for years by, among others, Elisabeth Bik, an independent scientific-misconduct investigator, on PubPeer, a website where people point out anomalies about research, and the Daily reported that it had corroborated her suspicions with two other misconduct experts.

    The Daily confirmed that at least one journal, The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Journal, was reviewing a 2008 study that lists Tessier-Lavigne, a decorated neuroscientist, as one of its 11 authors. Three other papers of his that contain “serious problems,” Bik told the student newspaper, were published in Science and Nature. A Stanford spokeswoman, Dee Mostofi, acknowledged to the Daily that there were “issues” in the papers, but said that Tessier-Lavigne “was not involved in any way in the generation or presentation of the panels that have been queried” in two of the papers, including the one being reviewed by EMBO. The issues in the other two “do not affect the data, results, or interpretation of the papers,” Mostofi told the Daily.

    But on Tuesday night, the university said it would undertake its own inquiry. It will “assess the allegations presented in The Stanford Daily, consistent with its normal rigorous approach by which allegations of research misconduct are reviewed and investigated,” Mostofi said in an email to The Chronicle, citing the university handbook’s guidance.

    “In the case of the papers in question that list President Tessier-Lavigne as an author, the process will be overseen by the Board of Trustees,” Mostofi added.

    The situation is highly unusual, given that Tessier-Lavigne, who was named Stanford’s president in 2016, is a member of the board now charged with investigating him. Mostofi said that Tessier-Lavigne “will not be involved in the Board of Trustees’ oversight of the review.”

    In a statement provided by Stanford, Tessier-Lavigne said, “Scientific integrity is of the utmost importance both to the university and to me personally. I support this process and will fully cooperate with it, and I appreciate the oversight by the Board of Trustees.”

    Mostofi did not answer questions about how long the investigation was expected to take or if Stanford was coordinating or cooperating with EMBO’s investigation.

    The university had told the Daily that in 2015, Tessier-Lavigne had submitted corrections for two papers to Science that were not published, but did not explain at the time why that was the case. On Wednesday morning, Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of Science, confirmed to The Chronicle that Tessier-Lavigne had prepared corrections for both papers but “due to an error on our part,” Science never posted them.

    “We regret this error, apologize to the scientific community, and will be sharing our next steps as they relate to these two papers as soon as possible,” Thorp said by email.

    Bik, one of the watchdogs who raised concerns about the papers, told The Chronicle that she was encouraged to learn that both Tessier-Lavigne and Stanford appeared to be taking the situation seriously.

    “Somebody needs to investigate who was making these figures or making these errors,” she said. “It might not be him, but his name is on the papers.”

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    Stephanie M. Lee

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