Stanford's ACLU Chapter was founded in Spring of 1996 by Nathan Watson and Nicole Walden, and it was referred to as Stanford Civil Liberties Union (SCLU) back in the day. SCLU was a fully-registered organization of the Associated Students of Stanford University, Stanford's student government, with annual student body funding and over 100 members. The chapter then went on to pursue its biggest campaign in 1997, which was to improve accessibility for disabled students on campus and to get the campus in line with ADA standards. To achieve that, the group labeled all campus buildings, even then-Provost Condoleezza Rice's office, with ratings on their accessibility. They designed customized signs for over 100 Stanford campus buildings and spent one very busy midnight posting them all over the campus. Later SCLU also did work against early efforts at internet censorship via Prop 209.
SCLU was nominated as voting members of the official ADA Compliance Committee for the campus, and Stanford ended up spending millions of dollars to make the campus accessible to all student as a result of the chapter's campaign. Stanford's ACLU work had the university placed in the "Top 10 Most Activist Campuses" in Mother Jones Magazine.
After SCLU's activist years, the chapter experienced a period of low activity and then was revived in January of 2008 by a group of students: Salone Kapur, Victoria Lai, Conner Peretti, Robert Steel, Danny Taing, and Kacey Wulff. Since then, the chapter has been co-sponsoring events with other organizations on campus and collaborating with the ACLU of Northern California to promote issues of importance in the region to students at Stanford. A new feature of Stanford’s ACLU chapter is “Lunch with an Advocate,” where students can converse with an advocate about his or her career experience with civil liberties.
SCLU was nominated as voting members of the official ADA Compliance Committee for the campus, and Stanford ended up spending millions of dollars to make the campus accessible to all student as a result of the chapter's campaign. Stanford's ACLU work had the university placed in the "Top 10 Most Activist Campuses" in Mother Jones Magazine.
After SCLU's activist years, the chapter experienced a period of low activity and then was revived in January of 2008 by a group of students: Salone Kapur, Victoria Lai, Conner Peretti, Robert Steel, Danny Taing, and Kacey Wulff. Since then, the chapter has been co-sponsoring events with other organizations on campus and collaborating with the ACLU of Northern California to promote issues of importance in the region to students at Stanford. A new feature of Stanford’s ACLU chapter is “Lunch with an Advocate,” where students can converse with an advocate about his or her career experience with civil liberties.
