"Today, almost no college or university president has spoken out significantly about Bosnia, Haiti, North Korea, health care, welfare reform, the attack on the National Endowment for the Arts or dozens of other issues high on the national agenda."

Reading that statement on The New York Times Ideas and Trends page, I could not help but think, "And. . .?" The "and," according to writer William Honan, was that this was evidence of "presidential timorousness."

Is it a fair charge? When university presidents do not take public and partisan stands on the foreign and domestic political agenda, are they shirking their duty ­ or fulfilling it?

I believe that when I became president of Stanford, I gave up a portion of the freedom I enjoyed as a faculty member. When I speak, many perceive me to be speaking no longer for myself, but for Stanford. When I take a position, that fact immediately becomes a political factor on campus. Indeed, that is precisely why I and my colleagues in other universities are urged daily to take a stand on this or that. Those who ask us to do so want to bring the authority of the presidential position, the weight of the institution, to bear on a issue. They want those faculty, students and alumni who disagree with me to be relegated to the opposition side of the aisle.

However, I have no brief to commit Stanford to my favorite political causes. The University's commitment is to knowledge and research, not to a particular content or specific result. The University must do its best to protect the openness, the rigor and the seriousness of its work in education and research ­ not exactly easy considering the incessant demands made on universities to align themselves with manifold, mostly conflicting, causes. As I stated in my inaugural address:

"A university's freedom must be the freedom if its members, faculty and students to think and speak for themselves. A university must not have dominant ways of thinking. . . . 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."

It is a prime responsibility of a university president to maintain this uninhibited, robust and open exploration and discussion. And that depends, in part, upon the fact that no one believes that the institution ­ even in the person of the president ­ has taken a peremptory position.

One of the century's foremost First Amendment scholars, the late Harry Kalven, chaired a 1967 University of Chicago committee on "The University's Role in Political and Social Action." In its report, he said that 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."

Does this mean university presidents are ­ indeed, should be ­ silent? Of course not. They should speak out on issues that are important to their institutions: undergraduate education; diversity on campus (and, thus, in American society); government regulation and intrusion on academic freedom (and, by extension, on society's freedom). On all of these, I have spoken publicly, repeatedly and controversially: on a three-year degree option and other undergraduate reforms; on my view that culture is a vastly more complex concept than the fashionable definition of it as "social heritage" and that universities have no mandate to impose their vision of society on students; on my opposition to turning accreditation bodies into government regulatory agencies and to smothering universities and basic research in red tape.

However, it is a president's primary responsibility to ensure the uninhibited speech of faculty members and students. To quote Kalven again:

"The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic."