Which offers more academic flexibility for undergraduates, Stanford or Brown?

Brown offers more formal academic freedom for an undergraduate who wants to build an unusually self-directed mix of computer science, humanities, and social science. Its Open Curriculum has no university-wide core or general-education distribution requirements, so students can choose courses primarily around their concentration and interests. Brown also makes it relatively straightforward to take classes across departments and pursue independent or interdisciplinary pathways.

That freedom suits a student who is comfortable designing their own breadth. You would still need to complete the requirements for a concentration, and some fields, especially technical ones, have sequenced prerequisites. But outside those requirements, Brown leaves substantially more room to decide whether a semester includes, for example, programming, political theory, and literature rather than a prescribed set of distribution categories.

Stanford is highly flexible in practice, but it provides more built-in structure. Undergraduates complete Ways of Thinking/Ways of Doing requirements alongside their major, which ensures exposure to multiple modes of inquiry but takes up course space that Brown students can allocate more freely. Stanford also has strong options for interdisciplinary study, including individually designed majors and the ability to combine majors, minors, research, and courses across its schools.

Stanford may fit someone who wants broad exploration with clear curricular guardrails and especially values access to engineering, computing, entrepreneurship, and research ecosystems. Brown is the more natural match for someone who wants the institution to impose as few academic choices as possible and is prepared to create their own coherent plan. For your stated interest in blending CS with humanities and social science, Brown has the edge in raw scheduling and curricular freedom; Stanford offers a similarly rich mix with more required breadth built in.