Well the Daily is the independent student newspaper and has little to do with official University policy. I don't know what FSI is, perhaps some department that Bhattarcharya is part of. I agree, if it was being pushed by official Stanford news sources (a search for Bhattarcharya on https://news.stanford.edu/ reveals nothing, although plenty of other COVID-related research), that that might be problematic. I agree it's not a good look for Stanford, but but if people conflate researchers from a university with a university, then that's on them.

That “conflation” is the exact same thing as the University’s reputation. If they don’t value their reputation, fine, but these bad researchers are only getting press because they are attaching the univerity’s name to their ideas. That’s not something to blame readers for. And if there are researchers at these universities that oppose them, it’s up to the university and other researchers at Stanford to stop their name being use if they disagree with its use.

Well I might be too knee-deep in academia to be a fair judge, but every university is a bunch of independent researchers of variable quality with wide latitude to pursue whatever and it seems silly to judge a university's reputation based on some individual researcher (or alumni, or whatever). I think any conflation is more the fault of media articles about the research than anything else. Yes, you write your affiliation on papers, but that does not really construe any sort of endorsement. I'm sure one can find many Stanford faculty expressing contrary viewpoints, but those are not (for whatever reason) being amplified by the media.

I can put a crazy paper on the arXiV tomorrow with my affiliation and if some media report says "The University of Chicago is claiming a perpetual motion machine" or whatever, that's the media's fault for misrepresenting the situation.