Last evening, the Stand Columbia Society published The Sunlight Report: A Reappraisal of the Sundial Report—a comprehensive, evidence-based evaluation written by members of the Columbia community. Offered as a service to the community, the report responds to the Sundial Report, which was prepared anonymously and issued by the Chair of the Executive Committee of the University Senate on April 1, 2025, without the review or knowledge of many Senators.

A detailed review of the Sundial Report—which contains 1,273 claims as measured by number of footnote citations—found over 400 instances of error, omission, and biased framing. This is only a partial list due to the limited time and resources available to review the Sundial Report. The Sunlight Report documents these issues and examines the procedural and methodological shortcomings that raise serious questions about the Sundial Report’s standing as a comprehensive institutional account.

Reflecting contributions from members of the Columbia community committed to academic rigor, transparency, and shared governance—including senior and tenured faculty members of eight out of Columbia’s twelve independent faculties—the Sunlight Report calls for Columbia University to reaffirm its best traditions of intellectual honesty and institutional responsibility.

Drawing on Columbia’s own history of principled inquiry—most notably the 1968 Cox Commission—the Sunlight Report highlights significant concerns in the production of the Sundial Report, including:

• Lack of formal Senate authorization and ratification
• Anonymous authorship and opaque editorial processes
• Heavy reliance on limited sources without critical triangulation
• Evidentiary errors, material omissions, and patterns of bias

Columbia has a proud tradition of meeting moments of institutional challenge with seriousness, transparency, and care. The Sunlight Report is offered in that spirit. It is not an attempt to replace one narrative with another, but a call to reaffirm the standards that make Columbia strong.

The Sunlight Report respectfully offers six recommendations to restore confidence in Columbia’s institutional reporting processes, including the formal withdrawal of the Sundial Report’s, greater transparency about its authorship and sources, and the commissioning of a new independent review modeled on the Cox Commission.

Above all, the Sunlight Report seeks not only to safeguard Columbia’s history memory, but to preserve the values of openness, fairness, and intellectual rigor that define the University at its best. At a time when truth is often strained, this report is offered in the belief that Columbia’s light must not dim, and that it falls to this generation to keep it burning for those who follow.

Both the Sundial Report and the Sunlight Report are available in full below: