Stanford’s Faculty Senate delayed voting on whether it should rescind its censure of a top adviser to former President Donald Trump because the timing of the vote could be interpreted as a political move.
Dr. Scott Atlas, the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health policy at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, was punished with a censure by his colleagues in 2020 due to his role in advising Trump on his COVID-19 policy. The Senate determined Thursday it should delay the vote on whether to rescind the censure until Nov. 21, more than two weeks after the 2024 elections.
Stanford Professor Jayanta Bhattacharya has publicly questioned this decision on the basis that “rescinding censure is not a political act,” but one meant to restore the school’s “commitment to the academic freedom of its faculty” after Atlas was censured for sharing alleged “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science.”
Atlas was censured in 2020 after he criticized COVID-19 lockdowns, questioned the efficacy of masks during the pandemic, and espoused a number of views that did not align with his peers. On Sept. 9, 2020, the Stanford School of Medicine published an open letter signed by about 100 faculty criticizing Atlas. The following day, Stanford professor Steven Goodman published an op-ed castigating his “pseudo-expertise” and arguing he was “providing bad epidemiological advice to President Trump” during the pandemic.
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According to the Stanford Report, Goodman argued that the vote to rescind Atlas’s censure should take place after the election, citing concerns that holding it this close to the election could “lead to the action being misinterpreted or used for political purposes.”
“It will be taken as a direct rebuke of our medical school faculty,” Goodman warned. “It’s naive to believe anything else, so if we take exactly the same action in a month, it won’t have any less impact on our internal processes.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Goodman for clarification on how rescinding Atlas’s censure relates to the election.
Bhattacharya posted about the argument to postpone the vote on X.
“Some faculty argued that rescinding the censure will send a political signal in favor of Trump in the upcoming election,” he posted. “This is a tacit admission that the original vote to censure in 2020 was also an act of political interference, against Trump, violating any pretense of Stanford’s commitment to institutional neutrality.”
Update: The @stanford faculty senate, by a single vote, decided to punt the vote to rescind the 2020 censure of Scott Atlas until next month.
The reason? Some faculty argued that rescinding the censure will send a political signal in favor of Trump in the upcoming election.… https://t.co/hNeKFitX4Z
— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) October 25, 2024
He also argued that the 2020 “attack on Scott was very clearly politically motivated,” noting the timing of the Stanford medical school open letter coming before the election.
“Or else why single him out in particular and not me? Both the minutes from the meeting and many, many private conversations I had with faculty made that clear,” Bhattacharya said.
Bhattacharya told the Washington Examiner that a vote to rescind Atlas’s censure “would have no impact whatsoever on the election and would convey no endorsement of any political candidate for the presidency, implicit or otherwise.”
“The purpose of rescinding the censure is to restore Stanford’s commitment to the academic freedom of its faculty,” he added. “I anticipate that the faculty senate will do the right thing next month and make right a dark moment in Stanford’s history.”
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The Stanford Faculty Senate’s censure of Atlas was a symbolic condemnation with no direct penalties. However, given that Atlas was one of his COVID-19 advisers, it can be seen as undermining Trump’s pandemic response.
The Washington Examiner reached out to Atlas and Stanford for comment.