Wow, I don't always agree with Cochrane, but I found myself nodding in agreement to everything in this OP. The passage about Stanford asking students to apply two weeks in advance to host parties (WTF?), with an advance list of attendees (WTF?), is shocking to me. The university's response is surreal. Quoting from the WSJ:
> Samuel Santos Jr., associate vice provost of inclusion, community and integrative learning within the Division of Student Affairs, says the school is working to address students’ concerns about Stanford’s social atmosphere. “The party-planning process will be streamlined and more administrators will be hired to help facilitate student social life.” “We want events to be fun, inclusive and safe and those things can happen,” Mr. Santos says. “They just require collaboration and honesty.”
I couldn't agree more with Cochrane that the real problem lies in the fact that Stanford's bureaucracy has gotten so bloated that it now has an apparatchik with the title of "associate vice provost of inclusion, community and integrative learning" (not a provost, not a vice provost, but an associate vice provost... WTF?), who promises that "the party-planning process will be streamlined" (WTF?) and that "more administrators will be hired" to do so (WTF?).
The erosion of campus liberties at elite schools makes them worse places for everyone. And it's been happening at least since I went to school, from 2000-2004. It not only removes all the fun, it also infantilizes the students. College is where modern kids grow up, and growing up requires, for many of us, doing some unwise or at least unwise-looking things. The growth of the nanny-bureaucratic complex at these schools will make them dull, lifeless, and even more expensive, and then after college, people will finally start the growing up process at age 22. As that happens, they'll hire ever more administrators to try to fix it, with predictable results.
>” then after college, people will finally start the growing up process at age 22.”
I used to think like this, but then I realize that a good portion of the students who are used to this kind of institutionalized infantilizing internalize that it is proper and necessary.
Then they go on to agitate for similar structures “in the real world”. Something to be especially mindful of is the fact that these students are going to “elite” schools and are therefore likely to end up in management or decision making positions.
Exactly, they’re saying that SBF and cadre expect to be treated as “kids” with the government/institutions playing nanny. It’s become their worldview coming from elite universities.
> Something to be especially mindful of is the fact that these students are going to “elite” schools and are therefore likely to end up in management or decision making positions.
Well, they only do because people, probably including yourself recruit them preferentially. They don't magically end up in these positions.
Disagree? Make sure you exclude graduates from the top 20 universities in the US in your next recruiting event.
I think you are giving too much credit to Twitter and an ex manager from it. Shaping the civilization? Oh come on, the whole saga is just a part of a billionaire’s clash in the culture war. Could have played out entirely differently had he bought it for cheaper.
Yes, Twitter is a key platform where political ideas are exchanged, particularly for politically active / elite, and Roth was responsible for censoring it on the basis of his own political bias and on behalf of the FBI, CIA, and other federal government agencies
You sarcastically accuse me of not being up to speed on current events, but clearly you haven’t read (or at least haven’t comprehended) the multi part “Twitter Files” releases that indeed show that
1) Twitter censorship often took place at the discretion of employees, including Yoel Roth
2) The FBI was in consistent contact with Roth and co, directing them on which topics and individuals to censor
3) the CIA also had representatives who met with Twitter to help arrange censorship.
Best to catch up on the latest breaking news before wading into these discussions. Im sure you’d agree that mis, dis, and malinformation are extremely dangerous to our democracy!
1. Ultimately people employed by Twitter had to make calls on what content violated their rules, which they did so in a deliberate manner. Is this surprising to you, did you assume machines did this?
2. There was no direction. FBI pointed out content that filed Twitter's rules (NOT its rules), and Twitter sometimes took action and sometimes didn't, at their own discretion. There as no direction, no instruction, no ordering of any kind.
3. Communications yes, "arrange censorship" no. See above.
I get that the "Twitter Files" is a perfectly engineered PR campaign to convince conservatives of the one thing they believed all along "they are censoring us!". Well, you are half right. "They" meaning Twitter did take repeated actions against right wing accounts for breaking its rules against harassment, election/public health misinfo, and general awfulness. That's true. But the US government never demanded or received any action.
If you need a reminder about what free speech actually protects (hint: it's not the consequences of being an awful person online). https://xkcd.com/1357/
The US government does tell Twitter to do things, the same way they tell you to do things, by passing laws saying not to murder people or have CSAM on your website. That is what happened here.
Sometimes individual government employees report posts, the same way you can; this doesn’t have the force of law and you can ignore them.
Of all the "revelations" of the Twitter Files (mostly recapping the interactions that were already publicly known), preventing DoD run accounts from being marked as spam is the closest thing to an actual scandal. But
1. These accounts weren't promoted, they were just protected from being "deranked".
So the entirely of this "scandal" is that Twitter agreed to shield these accounts from being attacked themselves (mass labeled as spam) - which as it turns out wasn't needed because according to their own records, these accounts received 1-2 impressions per post. In other words, no one even saw them.
Then Twitter banned them and pubicaly fingered them.
Should Twitter have done this? No. Is it proof of an engine of Twitter/US Gov cooperation to promote certain things and silence others? No.
could you detail a bit who Yoel Roth is and that example? (I see he is/was some guy at twitter, in the/some Safety group.) what's his woke view that he forced/attempted-to-force on twitter?)
He was head of the government censorship wing of Twitter, carrying out censorship on behalf of his preferred political ideology as well as the FBI, CIA, and other politically aligned federal government agencies
Sounds like you’ve been mislead about both the relevant contents of Hunters’ laptop (“10% for the big guy”) as well as the content that the FBI and CIA were directing Twitter employees to censor. The best way to get better educated on the topic would be to read the Twitter Files releases yourself.
I did. Your problem is you read them without noticing the parts Taibbi was lying about ;)
The part where he mentioned posts being deleted without saying what they were for instance - you can look all those up on archive.org. They’re penises. The part today about the CIA is just nonsense.
Similarly, the laptop story was suppressed by Trump’s FBI because it sounds worse when you post vague insinuations about it then if you saw the real thing, an obvious fake[1]. You can look up the original “reporting” on the archive too - it comes from Guo Wengui, a Chinese billionaire friend of Giuliani, and it’s full of lurid writing about, again, the size of his penis[2] and claims it’s full of child porn. Are you willing to believe that’s real too? Either way, it’s a legal barrier to letting you see it…
It is, but I also feel like it is counterproductive to the message you are trying to communicate. The rest of the post is otherwise articulate and sourced.
Why does everyone blame the administrators as if students play no part? Inclusion, diversity, and psychological safety are strong values with the current generation of college students (gen z) and are building upon ideas from previous generations (millennials).
The parents of millennials (boomers) have been lamenting their creation for years already.
America created and raised these children and now seems to have some remorse about it, and history continues to repeat itself.
Maybe the dominant culture is leaving some folks behind.
Leftist faculty educated students this way. America created these children, but leftist activists raised them, because parents were too busy working through their own self-fulfillment woes.
It's a cultural shift that seems crafted:
Self-fulfillment -> follow your heart -> feelings first -> feelings only.
We have a whole generation of people who excuse bad behavior and failure with "I was having a hard time, I have to have my support peacock on the plane." None of these people heard "No" enough as a child.
There's value in teaching children to ignore name-calling. "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me." This is what we used to teach. People can be mean, don't let it affect you. Show grit, find it in yourself to continue anyway, and you'll succeed.
Now? Achieve power by exploring your victim-hood and collapse in shaking outrage because someone disagreed with you.
We need to start fixing this, and clearing these piles of frivolous administrators from the staff at universities would be a great start.
Isn't that largely because the most marginalized groups started speaking up, and started being heard? Hasn't it progressed from there?
I think it's fair to say LGBTQ, women and brown folks are being hurt in tangible ways by dominant language (words can in fact hurt when they influence generations of behavior), and like most progress there seem to be some who are experiencing downsides now that things are changing.
Who decides who has sour grapes?
Were these bureaucrats just waiting in the wings for an excuse to pounce with regressive policy?
Blaming the staff without examining the broader cultural shift seems as bad as an emotional support peacock.
Were these bureaucrats just waiting in the wings for an excuse to pounce
with regressive policy?
Yes. American culture has always been a tug of war between puritanical norms and libertine norms, and we're seeing the latest mutation of the puritans taking over. It doesn't seem that way, because this iteration of the puritans have co-opted the language of the libertines, but if these university administrators were transported back in time, they'd be enforcing Prohibition laws with equal zeal. Transported further back in time, they'd be organizing the expulsion of Catholics, Quakers and other "heretical" religious sects. There is, and always has been, a large segment of America which looks at the average frat kegger the same way that a Taliban mullah looks at a collection of unveiled women. They hate fun, and, given a chance, they will do their utmost to banish it. And if fun can't be banished, it will be regulated into submission.
Of course, they don't do this for themselves. No, of course not. They do it to improve the moral worth of the people. Their zealotry is driven by the purest of intentions.
Who decides who has sour grapes?
The ones who have placed themselves in a position to define which grapes are or are not sour: the aforementioned bureaucrats.
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C. S. Lewis
> ...we're seeing the latest mutation of the puritans taking over. It doesn't seem that way, because this iteration of the puritans have co-opted the language of the libertines, but if these university administrators were transported back in time, they'd be enforcing Prohibition laws with equal zeal. Transported further back in time, they'd be organizing the expulsion of Catholics, Quakers and other "heretical" religious sects...
This rings true to me, and I find it very insightful. Thank you for writing it.
The staff is using "inclusiveness" as the political cudgel it was intended to be. The people exercising power are doing so on behalf of the so-called marginalized with no evidence that the measures they're taking are beneficial in any way.
Words cannot harm you. Actions harm. Please stop perpetuating that nonsense.
Name-calling or epithet-hurling has not hurt anyone in a tangible way (tangible means "touchable" something physical). Bias, and discrimination based on bias or prejudice does cause economic and sometimes physical harm. It is proper behavior we need to teach, not hypersensitivity to phrasing.
This is it. Dangerous allyship... but I still think you aren't giving words and behaviors they lead to enough credit - the odds of the participants of this thread being in a marginalized group (myself included) are low, no language and set of behaviors systemically oppresses us.
I worry we throw the marginalized baby out with the bath water in discussions like this.
I agree with you that words do have power and meaning, but disagree with the current zeitgeist approach of censorship.
It causes far more harm on average than any minimal help it does in some cases. There’s substantial active harm in the amount of gaslighting and ill conceived redefinition of words going on. It’s exactly the sort of whitewashing of thought that’d lead to the world found in The Giver.
> throw out the marginalized baby
I think that’s just an updated version of the “white mans burden” — the white man has a burden to take care of the poor colored people.
The real way to change such things is over time by hard work and engagement. Dismantling actually oppressive systems in financial systems and laws. Giving opportunities not outcomes. Reducing things like inflation which disproportionately affects poorer people. And a hundred other things, all of which were working over the last decades with improvements in almost every metric for marginalized groups. Still lots of real work left.
The problem is not valuing inclusion, diversity and psychological safety. Those are just the excuses used by bureaucrats to justify removing autonomy. You can promote those values without requiring people to preregister attendees for every party.
I am an old millennial (39), both of my parents are square in the middle of boomer, and had me when they were 23 (they are in their early 60s now, so born at the tail end of the boomers). Still, it's not like they had me at 35, they were 23 and still entirely skipped gen X. They'd could have been born even earlier and had me later in life without much risk.
I get where you're coming from but I think maybe relax a bit there...
> OI. The parents of the millennials are the X-gens mate.
Usually, yes, but not always! I'm 29 (born in 1993), which I think is pretty clearly in the range of millennial (definitions vary, and I've seen cutoffs anywhere between 1994 and 1997, but I don't think anyone would put me in Gen Z by any reasonable stretch of the imagination). My parents were born in late 1958 and early 1959, which is probably not within the most common definition of boomer, but I've met other people my age with parents born a few years before mine. I don't think anyone would consider someone born in, say, 1955, to be Gen X, and having a kid at 39 in 1994 would have been somewhat unusual but not really that crazy (especially if the other parent happened to be a few years younger).
I've also noticed that a lot of the elite and ivy league schools have started pulling themselves from the US News and World Reports ranking system. Which is a great ploy to keep the mystique of these schools alive while they lose most of the educational advantages that they had over other schools.
> while they lose most of the educational advantages that they had over other schools.
The dirty secret is that they haven't really had those supposed educational advantages for a long time, if ever.
I attended undergrad at a large university that was (and still is) around the 75-100 range in US News rankings. I then attended graduate school at a top-10 US News school. My expectation coming in was that compared to my peers in undergrad, the undergrad students I was teaching as grad student would on average be smarter and work harder, and would have better resources available to them. All three were false. They were on average more ambitious and more demanding (in terms of e.g. asking for points back on assignments), but not smarter.
There are very real advantages to attending an elite school, but they are primarily social rather than educational. Having letters of recommendation from top scholars helps you get into grad school. Making friends with other people attending an elite school can provide all sorts of opportunities down the road. Just having the name on your resume will open doors for you. The undergrad education itself, though, probably isn't better.
almost all the undergrad students at elite schools are elite students. That is not at all true of second tier schools. That doesn't mean you can't find and establish a cohort with great students at a lower tier school, and the professors at lower tier schools are often excellent, but it's simply not true that you can move down the bell curve of board scores and not notice; though a friend of mine was fond of saying, "you need to live in a tall building to be able to see everybody else who lives in a tall building."
Why are people so willing to accept that from childhood leagues to professional, in basketball, football, soccer, etc. society scours and finds all the best players, and nobody is out to prove that it's not true, but that somehow we as a society are incapable doing it in intellectual fields? Does that mean that no player who didn't make it as a pro wasn't close, or that every pro player works out? No, but within the stochastic variance, sure.
> almost all the undergrad students at elite schools are elite students.
Based on my own experience at an elite school (as a graduate student, teaching undergrads), this is definitely false.
> Why are people so willing to accept that from childhood leagues to professional, in basketball, football, soccer, etc. society scours and finds all the best players, and nobody is out to prove that it's not true, but that somehow we as a society are incapable doing it in intellectual fields?
Because athletic performance can be objectively and reasonably easily measured along many (not all) dimensions. Intellectual performance is (1) much harder to measure objectively and (2) much less socially acceptable to use such measurements. Good grades can indicate high intellectual performance, or they can indicate grade inflation. A high SAT score can indicate high intellectual ability, or it can indicate that your parents paid $4000 for SAT prep courses and 1-on-1 tutoring. Basing college acceptance on a battery of psychological tests might be somewhat better than current methods at selecting elite students, but (1) those tests would immediately become the subjects of a new test-prep industry and (2) it's not socially acceptable to do that.
At one point there was a huge filtering effect on who got into the best schools, if you start with and concentrate top performers you get good results no matter what; and can set a faster pace in addition.
The proportion of legacy and diversity students (combined with the national push for a reduced emphasis on objective testing) completely eroded this.
Not only are the students of less quality, the pace has to match the bottom, so they don't fail out all the special entries.
This has been my observation as well. When I meet a boomer that went to an elite school I often find them impressive. Anyone that is a millennial that went to an elite school, rarely is more impressive than the folks I’ve met from second tier schools. For Gen-Z it’s a mixed bag.
All those schools have going for them these days is a reputation that’s no longer deserved, social connections, wealth and a sense of entitlement that scores them freebies from time to time.
And then these elites will graduate and run the country’s major unelected institutions, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, consulting firms, expert agencies, non-government organizations, charitable foundations, think tanks, etc.
I went to a school with lots of parties, and I don't believe the presence of parties causes students mature to any extent. Most students acted like kids and were unaware of responsibility until after graduation regardless.
My gut feeling is being responsible for your own well being (rent, food, job) is important for contextualizing other aspects of your life, like studying vs play.
> and more administrators will be hired to help facilitate student social life.
Pre-registration of large (“level 3”) parties has been a thing for a long time. But when I was there, one pre-registered a party, one did so online, and I imagine a single administrator could keep up with the entire workload.
This made sense for a few reasons, including:
Parties can be dangerous affairs, and campus security needs to know where to direct its attention. (There is no need for campus security to be hostile to parties, but a good campus police force should help ensure everyone’s safety.)
Student groups throwing parties generally want good attendance, and pre-registration allows them to coordinate dates.
Pre-registration helps avoid facepalms like throwing a party during finals.
Thank you. I can see how, say, asking students to notify campus police in advance with a simple online form would make sense for large parties. But here we're talking about asking students to submit an application with a known list of attendants two weeks in advance. That doesn't seem right.
Something feels really off when I read that for 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrators.[a]
> Something feels really off when I read that for 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrators.[a]
Are administrators exclusively for administrative work? Or does this also include people like teaching aides, lab assistants, etc. which aren't exactly "faculty" but also aren't doing, well, administrative work?
On the face of it, this number sounds completely bonkers. So bonkers that I suspect that there's some nuance to it and that these "administrators" are doing more than just "administrating". Maybe not, but really needs some more detail than this.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article recently [1] about how Princeton's endowment generates more than enough income to fund the entire school forever- no need for tuition. Yet, they still employ hundreds (thousands? I'm guessing given I know USC employs over a hundred full-time fundraisers, then all the fund managers, etc.) of people as part of their fundraising machine.
These schools really are bureaucratic monsters. They need to make more money so they can hire more fundraisers so they can make more money etc.
"Seems like", sure. But a lot of thing "seem" this or that until you actually look at the details and context. Without that, it's essentially meaningless information.
Sure. How many businesses have more employees than "customers"? It's not a perfect analog but it's not unreasonable to ask "what are we really doing here?" either.
Other than some niche tiny firms catering to the stupidly wealthy (the 0.1% and above) like a dynastic family investment fund, I can’t think of any. Can you elaborate on some examples?
The reason it makes sense is the common view of “administrators are useless” is backwards.
It’s the faculty that are replaceable. Students go to a university because they like the administration. It’s like a resort.
(The faculty may be adding value by being in academia at all, but it doesn’t matter for students which particular ones you meet. It could if you wanted to enter academia yourself, but you definitely don’t want to do that.)
> One bad year for admissions and the administrators will outnumber the students.
Only if a "bad year" is one where the majority of college-age students in the world are precluded from applying to college due to natural disasters or the like. A realistic "bad year" would mean that the same number of students are admitted, but Stanford breaks some informal non-poaching agreements with Harvard / Yale / Princeton, or perhaps admits some students at a lower bar than the administration was hoping.
Big R1 universities do a lot more than organize classes.
From memory (the last time this came up) That number includes staff at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (a National Lab, Stanford University Medical Center (which runs two hospitals and a bunch of clinics), Stanford University Press, and all of the research administration needed to manage the (many) grants Stanford gets.
These are admin-intensive things: federal contracting involves lots of paperwork, healthcare + insurance is a nightmare too. Plus, many of these involve staff that aren’t students (nurses at the hospital, scientists at SLAC, etc), all of whom still need “normal” admin things like parking, HR, and payroll, so the per-student denominator is a bit misleading.
> Something feels really off when I read that for 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrators.[a]
Major universities aren't primarily about educating undergraduates, and of course graduate students (about half of that student population at Stanford) are essentially "employees" from a economic production perspective. So really it's about 8k kids paying to learn near the activities of 10k researchers and academics, and the 16k administrators are just the staff needed to keep those 10k workers productive. Which... sounds about right to me?
You make a good point... but when I read that one of those 16K administrators has the title of "associate vice provost of inclusion, community and integrative learning," I can't help but feel that things have gotten out of hand. And when I see that the "sticker price" of attending elite US colleges has risen faster than pretty much everything else and is now ~$80K/year, I can't help but be shocked.
PS. I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. Even though I disagree with you, I find your comment valuable.
> but when I read that one of those 16K administrators has the title of [...]
That's the same logic you see on Fox Business when guests demand that we defund the entire federal government because something they don't agree with got funded. Whether or not you personally see value isn't really the issue here. You get that, right?
Even granting that the post is likely to ineffective and silly (something I'd agree with, FWIW) lots of people at the school value things like inclusion, community and "integrative learning" and want to see the school prioritize it in its staffing decisions.
Also post-secondary tuition has been beating general inflation, but lagging many other areas. This link says it's been growing at 4.63% for the last decade, which is less than most real estate markets. The idea of tuition being "out of hand" is mostly just a meme.
The only people I personally know who think bureaucratic bloat isn't a big problem at elite universities in the US are themselves members of that bureaucracy. All the college professors I personally know think bureaucratic bloat is a problem. All the college students I personally know (mostly relatives) also think bureaucratic bloat is a problem.
> Even granting that the post is likely to ineffective and silly (something I'd agree with, FWIW) lots of people at the school value things like inclusion, community and "integrative learning" and want to see the school prioritize it in its staffing decisions.
Because the costs are hidden. Ask them if they'd continue to fund that bureaucracy if they knew that cutting it would cut their tuition in half. I think you'll see a very different result.
> The idea of tuition being "out of hand" is mostly just a meme.
You're in a bubble. US tuition is the most expensive in the world.
> lots of people at the school value things like inclusion, community and "integrative learning"
Probably true. Although you might find considerable disagreement as to what, exactly, “community” means.
> and want to see the school prioritize it in its staffing decisions.
Prioritize how?
If you mean that hiring for unrelated positions should be require DEI statements, I think you’ll find this is an unpopular view.
If you mean that one should choose one’s hires inclusively such that one preferentially hires people of specific races, ethnicities, etc, then you may find that this is unpopular, or illegal, or dubiously legal, or maybe even unproductive for the purpose of improving the degree to which one’s staff is a representative sample of the population.
If you mean that a university should hire such that the student community feels like a community, then I bet many people agree but may feel that the universities are not actually succeeding.
Defending something you concededly can’t defend on the merits with the assertion that nobody should agree with Fox News about anything is a bad tic that won’t work out for you in the long run.
It makes it trivially easy to bait mainstream liberals into seeming to embrace wacky ideas. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
Look past that person's specific title more at the general problem; the systemic bureaucracy. That's the problem the Fox News rightwingers have with the Federal Government; they may not be sophisticated enough to voice it like that, but its the root of the problem. Its the biggest problem in modern universities, simultaneously causing them to be more expensive, allow for less formative experiences, and reducing the quality of education. Why are new cars so expensive? Someone has to pay for the system which produced it, and the system wants to be bigger.
There is literally no genuine reason why any of this has to exist at the scale it does. Standford's 16,000 administrative staff are not solving problem core to what a University does; they are solving problems they invented, or they're simply not actually solving problems at all, but will nonetheless defend their paychecks with their life.
Diversity & Inclusion is a totally reasonable thing to want. What impact have they had? In 2021, Stanford's admissions statics were: 28% white, 25% asian, 18% hispanic, 7% black. Compare that to US-wide statistics: 75% white, 19% hispanic, 14% black, 6% asian (its multiple choice). 65% of Stanford's admissions did not come from California, so this is a more fair comparison than just California's population.
What someone with a title in that department would say is: well, we've made progress, but there's clearly still more work to do. Internally; they're likely just as frustrated as anyone; because they'd know better than anyone that the system is wholly rigged against their ability to make equity a priority. The system, in any organization, optimizes only for one thing: Revenue. Any change which could hurt revenue (in Stanford's case: maybe reducing international admissions) will never be given serious consideration.
That's the critical piece: when a Fox News rightwinger says they want to defund the federal government, or a leftwinger says they want to defund the police: Absolutely, they're overreacting with respect to the scope of their specific issue with the system they're criticizing. But our systems have become too big within which to create meaningful change and these systems' reward functions are so perverted to any generally optically good goal that what little people can influence them is always implemented through the lens of that reward function (in nearly every case, the reward function is revenue, but there are cases like the Police where the reward function is more-so something like "keeping officers safe"; ultimately this is the same reward function though, its "keeping the system's insiders happy").
Its worth being abundantly clear about this: these giga-systems like Stanford or the Federal Government are another symptom of the low interest rate environment. Its always macroeconomics. Every good and bad thing that has ever happened has macroeconomic causes. If we end up entering a decade+ period of more expensive money, you'll slowly start wondering if your statement that "the school should staff someone dedicated to inclusion and community" makes sense. The fact that they are capable of hiring people to review the guest lists of parties is a problem of excess; not a symptom of the system approaching an ideal state.
Universities are a tremendously interesting case study on what impacts cheap money has had on our macroeconomic system; because there's literally nowhere else with cheaper money. Students bundle up on loans, which they can't default on, and thus there's zero acceptance criteria for loan eligibility. What isn't paid for in loans comes from donations and investment returns, during the largest bull market in the history of economics. All of this will come crashing down in the next five years, and Universities which let themselves balloon up to solve problems that few of their customers (students) actually care about will have a substantially harder time adjusting than one which, say, never hired twenty people to review the guest lists of parties in the first place.
> Look past that person's specific title more at the general problem; the systemic bureaucracy.
My point was exactly the converse: let's look at evidence for the "general problem of systemic bureaucracy" instead of using ridiculous job titles as a stand-in straw man to beat up.
Laughing at a woke job title is a logical fallacy. If you want to make a broad point that Universities spend more on administration than necessary, I'd want to see numbers comparing them to similar private organizations, etc...
Not so sure. I was in a research lab at a similar school a couple decades ago. There were two staff lab assistants (not sure they'd be considered administrators by any stretch), and the PI shared an executive assistant with three other PIs. That's not a ton of local overhead.
At the department level, there were of course deans, provosts, counselors, admissions people, etc etc etc, but even that departmental overhead wasn't more than maybe a 1:8 ratio compared to the number of grad students.
I'm sure there was similar or even greater proportional administrative staff once you got to the university level, but even if you include every single employee in big departments like Research and Graduate Admissions, it wasn't anywhere close to even half the number of students. I know this because the entirety of the administration fit into a few old buildings in half the campus, while the rest of the buildings on that half and all of the buildings in the newer part of campus were filled with labs and classrooms.
So in the ensuing twenty years, administrators have either gotten massively worse at their jobs and required far more of them to accomplish the same things (running directly counter to the general trends in worker productivity in that time), or they've created an immense amount of new make-work for themselves and their colleagues. Articles like this point pretty strongly at the latter explanation.
>>> So in the ensuing twenty years, administrators have either gotten massively worse at their jobs and required far more of them to accomplish the same things
I feel that since they have no shortage of money, they don't feel the pinch of hiring more admins. Thus the number of admins has increased.
As a professional software engineer, it's common for support staff at elite firms to number 1/10 or 1/100 compared to “productive” staff. Even including folks who “support” the productive part of the business with tooling and infrastructure - you are usually looking at 1/3 at most.
>
As a professional software engineer, it's common for support staff at elite firms to number 1/10 or 1/100 compared to “productive” staff.
Only if you close your eyes and shut your ears and not count any of the facilities, HR, finance, legal, admin, media, procurement, and janitorial staff.
I personally haven't seen a lot of SWEs spending much of their time paying the power bill, laying out offices, cleaning toilets, or sending out W-2s.
I once worked at small org with a dozen people, and one person was "support" role: she was finance, admin, facilities etc.. We did have cleaning services from our landlord and separate legal and tax, but they were nowhere close to full time.
In another place we had maybe 30-40 two person offices, and 3 of them were occupied by HR/finance/admin/facilities etc...
So 1/100 does not sound very realistic (maybe for all-remote orgs?), but 1/10 I can easily believe.
That was including those folks. HR departments are tiny, and increasingly automated. W2 is done by ADP or a similar system, same with billing alongside CFO oversight. My last group had one lawyer per 1000 engineers or so.
> W2 is done by ADP or a similar system, same with billing alongside CFO oversight
Outsourcing the tail doesn't mean it doesn't exist (it might make it slightly more efficient, or it might just be a convenience bevause it gives you someone else that is liable in the event of a mistake.)
The administrators are there as approximately 1:1 hand servants to carry your bags, attend to preparation of meals, and so forth such that you not expend yourself unduly.
Not unless something has changed radically. The administrators are nominally there to do specific things. For example, there might be an administrator whose job is to liase (sorry!) with the students on staff at a group of houses to make sure that they do their jobs and to find out when the university needs to do to help. For example, if there is a plumbing problem, students would tell this administrator and they would get it fixed.
Of course, there seem to be a lot of administrators these days if all the articles are right, so perhaps there are now extra ones doing nothing particularly useful or administrators whose job is to make policy.’
There is no administrator that actually helps students with daily tasks.
The above commentator was almost certainly being facetious. However with so many highly paid administrators - there could be an alternate world where they simply did serve students in daily needs. Considering this alternate world, it really does beg the question what these administrators are doing.
As sad as it may be, Poe's Law[0] really is a thing:
Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture saying that,
without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any
parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers
for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
I've been bitten by that more than once, myself. C'est la vie, eh?
Not unless something has changed radically. The administrators are nominally there to do specific things. For example, there might be an administrator whose job is to liase (sorry!) with the students on staff at a group of houses to make sure that they do their jobs and to find out when the university needs to do to help. For example, if there is a plumbing problem, students would tell this administrator and they would get it fixed.
It's not like having a huge party during a frickin' pandemic is a sensible idea in the first place. Really, I have trouble getting what people are complaining about. Nobody likes shelter-in-place all that much, but sometimes it is the right choice.
Requiring pre-registering parties is dangerous precisely because it is a control lever and a slippery slope.
Students and administration will always disagree.
Ergo, any requirement that can be abused by administration eventually will be abused. Exactly as apparently happened here. The only check is to prevent that lever from ever existing.
Anarchy has many problems, but its foremost strength is standing in direct opposition to outside control.
And that's an unfulfilled and critical need in our modern society, as liberties are bricked up bit by bit.
(And before someone tosses it in, we can have the militia vs police end debate some other time, because "a bunch of college kids getting in trouble" is far short of anything that serious to themselves or the surrounding community)
It’s not just about registering parties, if you click the link you will find that the application will have to pass the Party Review Committee where you have to answer questions such as
> How the student group will prevent members and guests from bringing in their own alcohol and what they will do if they observe someone bringing in their own alcohol.
Also
> The party planning course must be completed prior to registering a party.
> A party may last a maximum of four hours. Moreover, student groups cannot host or co-host back-to-back parties, pre-parties, concurrent parties, or more than one party per day.
College students are adults, why the fuck is the college managing what they do off campus at all? You go to school for education, not for the school to manage your entire life. None of us would be okay with our employer telling us when and how we can have parties at our own homes, why is it fine for a school to do?
That Americans have become increasingly okay with colleges being surrogate parents for literal adults is just bizarre.
> why the fuck is the college managing what they do off campus at all?
It’s not. Stanford’s campus is huge, and almost all undergrads live on it. The parties in question were generally held on campus, often in university-owned and managed buildings and often on the front lawns. The university had insurance (I don’t remember the precise details).
And, to be clear, the university was generally fairly supportive. You could host a party in university space. You could coordinate with student who were not part of the hosting group to throw genuinely interesting parties. You were allowed to serve alcohol on university property under a fairly uniform set of rules, and guests knew what to expect. If the police showed up, the hosts wouldn’t get in trouble if they followed the rules. If an out of control guest set of the fire alarm, the host would generally be treated quite favorably. If a guest was out of control and the host needed to call the police or medical services, they would come and not bust the host. (And hosts were strongly encouraged to send excessively drunk people seek medical care if needed.)
Part of the point of preregistration was to make sure that everyone was prepared. If you’re going to buy wristbands, post flyers, etc, filling out a quick web form is not a great hardship.
Of course there were obnoxious parts of the policies, but overall I think the university did fairly well here.
In what world are adults organized in fraternities with arcane rules everyone has follow? In what adult world are adult women not allowed to host parties with alcohol while having to rely on male friends to host such parties in their dorms? That literally mandate going to parties for members?
The above are all features of greek life at Stanford. You know why sorroties dont allow alcohol parties? Because adults who finished college long time ago run the larger organization and these are rules they impose. This has nothing to do with spontaneous self organization of students.
In what adult world do adult throw temper tamptrum for years because salamander took precedence over sand hill build during drunken party years ago? In what adult world is "social life" equated with fraternities? Like, in adult world, lakes on institution property do get sometimes close for public for whole host of reasons, without that being framed as "war on fun".
Unimportant side not is, if you go to university primary for education and do not want have large part of life mandated by institution, you stay out of greek life (as majority of students do).
Well stated. In 2021, my college cancelled my study abroad semester for winter 2022 due to "covid". (Reminder that this is after 2 doses of the vaccine, and the semester would have almost been at the time of the booster for me.) No way to decide our own risk tolerance to travelling, just a complete ban because the college knows better than it's students.
The PARENTS are paying for the college, so I'm not surprised that the college is taking a parental role...
When the students themselves are coughing up the $80k/year then you will see a permissive atmosphere. Or you'll find them reallocating their resources to $40k colleges and the rest on alcohol?
TulliusCicero says >"College students are adults, why ... is the college managing what they do off campus at all? ... That Americans have become increasingly okay with colleges being surrogate parents for literal adults is just bizarre."<
Well, college students are mostly not adults. They are young, inexperienced and incompletely developed intellectually and emotionally. This is nothing new and colleges know much more about this than HN does.
It was the same way when I was in college and it will remain so as long as we have colleges. Colleges have always had to keep an eye on students and rein in problematic behavior.
> It was the same way when I was in college and it will remain so as long as we have colleges. Colleges have always had to keep an eye on students and rein in problematic behavior.
Except we know this is not true, because plenty of other countries don't expect universities to micromanage their students' personal lives.
Your comment is a great example of, "well this is how it currently works in America, therefore it must be this way universally for all time." Please try to account for other countries existing before issuing sweeping generalizations about human nature. There's more to the world than just the US.
TulliusCicero says >"Your comment is a great example of, 'well this is how it currently works in America..."<"
Yes, this is part of what I was saying. Another part (also implied) is "that is how it was when I went to college (in USA)...". There are many underlying unspoken implications in speech, I haven't the time to tell you all of them for this particular sentence nor do I think that you would be interested.
>"...therefore it must be this way universally for all time.'"*<
No, this is NOT what I was saying. YOU implied this and YOU said this.
You are more eloquent and communication speeds up when you speak for yourself. Do not speak for me.
They are young, inexperienced and incompletely developed intellectually and
emotionally.
College is supposed to be the place where they can gain that experience and develop intellectually and emotionally by doing things, including things that result in negative consequences. Instead, what Stanford is doing is infantilizing its students in a manner that will make them incapable of displaying personal initiative and handling disputes like mature adults. God forbid that a Stanford student actually demonstrate that they've grown, in terms of social skills and emotional maturity, by doing something as adult as inviting a bunch of people over for a party.
College-aged students are called young adults. And they definitely are. Infantalization of young adults is not good for their development in my opinion and experience.
>Pre-registration of large (“level 3”) parties has been a thing for a long time. But when I was there, one pre-registered a party, one did so online, and I imagine a single administrator could keep up with the entire workload.
As far as "level 3" is concerned, are you referring to this scale[0]?
Festivity Level 1: Your guests are chatting amiably with each
other, admiring your Christmas-tree ornaments, singing carols around
the upright piano, sipping at their drinks and nibbling hors d'oeuvres.
Festivity Level 2: Your guests are talking loudly -- sometimes
to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all, rearranging your
Christmas-tree ornaments, singing "i gotta be me" around the upright
piano, gulping their drinks and wolfing down hors d'oeuvres.
Festivity Level 3: Your guests are arguing violently with
inanimate objects, singing "i can't get no satisfaction," gulping down
other peoples' drinks, wolfing down Christmas tree ornaments and
placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when
the little hammers strike.
Festivity Level 4: Your guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over
their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around the burning
Christmas tree. The piano is missing.
You want to keep your party somewhere around level 3, unless
you rent your home and own Firearms, in which case you can go to level
4. The best way to get to level 3 is egg-nog.
Since that directly links to the "Student Alcohol and Other Drugs Policy", that’s also "fun"
> All undergraduate student groups and residences may host only alcohol-free parties or events during Admit Weekend.
> Beer, wine and packaged pre-mixed alcoholic beverages (e.g. wine coolers, pre-mixed cocktail or seltzer drinks under 20% alcohol by volume, etc.) are the only alcoholic beverages that can be present at on-campus undergraduate student parties
> Shots of hard alcohol are prohibited at all parties.
> Games and activities that promote high-risk drinking or rapid alcohol consumption are not allowed on campus.
> While California has legalized certain recreational cannabis usage among persons aged 21 years or older, cannabis still remains illegal under federal law. […] For the avoidance of doubt, the possession, use, storage, delivery, cultivation, distribution and sale of cannabis in any form is prohibited on all Stanford University property, including university-owned and leased buildings, housing and parking lots. Cannabis is also not permitted at university events or while conducting university business.
> All undergraduate student groups and residences may host only alcohol-free parties or events during Admit Weekend.
Not sure what point you’re trying to make.
Underage Stanford students getting drunk is one thing (and one can quite reasonably debate the merits of the university trying to prevent it, trying to make it safer when it happens, etc m). Stanford students supplying alcohol that gets high school students drunk is another issue entirely.
When I was an undergrad, we took this extremely seriously. You do not drink with the prospective students. You do not host a party where you might mistake a prospective freshman for a Stanford student.
Even ignoring safety and liability, the purpose of going to a school like Stanford is not to get drunk. The prospective freshman have about 48 hours to learn what Stanford has to offer, and doing so drunk or hung over benefits no one.
Here’s an article about it. This policy apparently dates to 2001:
Dude, I went to a large state school. Why the heck would anyone register a party? Why is it the administration's business what the students do after hours? If the cops show up, be respectful and turn down the music. Don't do stupid things near the front door.
> I imagine a single administrator could keep up with the entire workload.
From the link you shared:
- The Party Review Committee will meet Tuesday each week during the Autumn, Winter and Spring quarters to review party requests submitted via CardinalEngage.
- The Party Review Committee will consist of representation from the following units/departments including, but is not limited to:
- Office of Substance Use Programs, Education & Resources (SUPER)
- Office of Student Engagement (OSE)
- Residential Education (ResEd)
- Fraternity and Sorority Life (FSL)
- Residential & Dining Enterprises: Housing Operations (R&DE)
- Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS)
- Stanford University Fire Marshal’s Office (SUFMO)
As someone who went to a large state school, this post blows my mind. I can’t imagine this level of restraint around parties.
My fraternity and half a dozen other groups would host parties with 2-300 people each weekend. Most groups hosting these large parties had practices in place to ensure everyone was safe (e.g. sober drivers, cutting people off who were too intoxicated, etc.).
Attendance was more valuable when events conflicted because it became a social status symbol. That being said, prominent groups coordinated with each other. I also disagree with characterizing throwing a party during finals as a “facepalm”. My friend group always prioritized studying and grades, and I believe others should as well. I believe to a greater extent that they should be given the freedom to make mistakes, or have fun if they believe themselves able to manage both their studies and their social life.
I doubt that diligent campus security could do a better job than responsible and respectful hosts and friends. Giving students resources to host safe parties would be more effective since they are closer to the source of issues and can stop small issues before they become bigger issues. The same resources could encourage other safe practices like not over-imbibing, traveling with trusted friends, etc., and would keep students safer than any campus security could, while giving students more freedom and responsibility.
I base this assessment in part off of personal experience. At my school one year, a girl went to a frat party with her friend, and got too drunk. The fraternity made sure she and her friend had a ride home. Her friend made sure she got to her dorm room safe. After getting home, she wandered out of her building to the nearby fire department, which neighbors the famous police office. She fell asleep in front of the bay door and was run over and killed by a firefighter responding to a call who did not see her.
This story demonstrates 1) the effort that other students made to ensure safety and 2) the failure of campus security to catch a massive safety issue right under their noses. I feel terrible for the girl and her family. Their experience was tragic and heartbreaking. That tragedy resulted does not negate the fact that all involved did everything they could (shy of not having the party) to ensure safety and campus security could not have done anything more without tucking her in to bed and watching her all night, which I find unreasonable.
As you said, parties can be dangerous. Hosts and attendees being cautious and responsible will go much further than more vigilant campus security.
To be clear, campus security didn’t actually hang out and watch parties. The hosts were supposed to manage their own parties (within boundaries set by the university). And I’m not saying Stanford’s policies were perfect or even close. But I do think they did a decent job of letting students host parties on campus with keeping a degree of awareness of what happened on campus.
Stanford was also known for allowing students to drink with friends in their own rooms, in undergrad dorms, with the doors open. It was quite strongly discouraged to close the doors when drinking. These weren’t “parties” for these purposes. I think this was an excellent policy — it encouraged being social, it helped keep everyone safe, and it steered undergrad drinking in a more mature and safer direction. Sadly, IMO, this is no longer the case:
That sounds like a good policy to me as well. I think the “they will do it anyway” logic is a slippery slope, but underage drinking in college is so mainstream that preventing it is a Sisyphean task. IMO it is best to discourage but encourage a safe atmosphere when students inevitably ignore recommendations.
Judging from the policy, it could also be argued the rules are there to protect the student organizers. A lot of people don't seem to realize that regulations surrounding extend beyond age restrictions. Similarly, a lot of people don't realize that insurance coverage is a factor whenever an organization is involved (and, of course, insurance companies will add additional restrictions). If things aren't done properly, the university and the students will be liable.
(Note: I am not suggesting the university isn't trying to protect their own interests. I am suggesting they are doing more than protecting their own interests.)
as someone not hailing from the US the entire setup sounds bizarre to me and I wonder why students even still participate in this. Over here in Germany on-campus living is uncommon. People just rent flats in the city, go to uni and the limit to how much they can party is usually determined by how much they can piss off their landlord or neighbors, which is how it ought to be given that everyone's an adult.
Why are people over the age of 18 voluntarily putting themselves into an environment where they have to ask if they can have a party? Why is this nonsense not simply dying on its own? The real problem is that people don't simply leave. Easiest way to not be annoyed by some bureaucrat gone mad with power is to separate school life from private life.
Stanford is an edge case because, as a sibling commenter says, it owns a lot of real estate, but also it's in an insanely high cost-of-living area, so students can't necessarily afford to live just anywhere. At most "normal" universities in the US, you can just live off-campus and do what you want (or at least, follow the city and landlord's rules, not the university's).
My understanding is that universities in the U.S. often own much of the real estate around their campuses. (This is particularly true at Stanford; even faculty members who want to live nearby end up renting from Stanford or "buying" land leases.)
University and hospital affiliates are often the biggest slumlords in their area. Having a buffer to make room for future expansion that produces income is a winning strategy.
It seems like this is a symptom of a crazy boatload of money that has come in over many years via having close ties to silicon Valley. The property and wealth of the school is so high that these jobs and bureaucracy are created just to have a reason to spend this money. Like, once all your basic needs of a university are met, the next thing you spend your money on gets more and more disconnected from reality.
I almost doubt Christian universities could be more straight-laced than this. It's just weird. I mean, I don't expect all campuses to be line Oneonta or Santa Cruz, but WOW!
To be honest when I went to Uni., I never really understood the hazing aspect and the overboard frat parties, but some partying as long as you don't have extraordinary excess or condone danger (ala hazing) it's part of growing up. Stanford is overcorrecting.
I was curious because I knew some Oneonta alums and had no idea that it was a party school. Whereas the go-to party school examples that come to mind for me are places like Az state, Colorado, Wisconsin, etc
The more administrators will be hired part reminds me of a poster at my dads work back in the 1970's. It read.
'Adding more engineers to a project that's in trouble is like using gasoline to put out a fire'
Off hand it feels like the issue here is the universities idea is the committees jobs is to ensure the students party responsibly without taking on any actual responsibility themselves.
Governance of private life. There must be a committee to oversee your party planning, and it must be done for you.
That's so far down the planned-economy planned-society political line (control is required) that it's sad they can't see this for a the outright sickness that it is.
A special kind of "adults." I went to college and grad school in two different towns. Each college had its own culture of fun. The kind of "fun" that the colleges condoned occurred in a sheltered atmosphere, and would have been utterly off limits to the adult residents of the surrounding towns.
> The kind of "fun" that the colleges condoned occurred in a sheltered atmosphere, and would have been utterly off limits to the adult residents of the surrounding towns.
... What kind of "fun" is that? The only thing that I can think of that would be off limits to non-students is literally illegal activities that students shouldn't be doing either.
The people behind these efforts exploit the basic agreeableness, tolerance, and good nature of students everywhere. What I see on the other side of the 90's was that behind almost every "transgressive, alternative" culture participant was an authoritian personality expressed as punk resentment. None of them cared about the oppressed, it's just a means to an end where they elevate themselves through criticism using the oppressed as examples and a front for their own more petty grievences.
Things like green hair and other alternative culture tropes used to signal an anti-authoritarian attitude, but now it signals a hyper authoritarian one using rote criticisms to target anything simple enough that others just enjoy, and which others won't match the irrational aggression being used against them to defend their simple enjoyment of it, and in yielding, it just empowers these bullies.
We need to stop believing and listening to histrionic authoritarian personalities. It was a mistake, and they systematically abuse the very tolerance that characterizes western culture with a simple escalating bullying technique of, "oh, so you say you are tolerant, do you tolerate this moral abomination? No? Well then you are intolerant and if you don't denounce your own dispicable intolerance hard enough, then surely you are a collaborator! Pay me off and I won't tell the world what a disgusting person you are!"
Stanford (and other universities) got hustled by the oldest hustle since street corners were invented, and they're both too naive to figure it out, and too conceited to admit they have been taken by less intelligent but galactically more street smart people they thought they could just be nice to and help. Stanford doesn't hate fun, it just has a terminal ideological cancer.
>Things like green hair and other alternative culture tropes used to signal an anti-authoritarian attitude, but now it signals a hyper authoritarian one using rote criticisms to target anything simple enough that others just enjoy, and which others won't match the irrational aggression being used against them to defend their simple enjoyment of it, and in yielding, it just empowers these bullies.
As something parallel, I was talking online to someone about various patches I was considering adding to various "going out" jackets. I was explicitly warned to add at least two (2) different antifa patches, lest I be taken for a Nazi and beaten up. The conversation got weird at that point and I realized that I was being told to have something uniform added and give symbolic compliance or I would be physically abused ... by people who thought they were against fascism.
You witnessed something that is sometimes called the "Havel's greengrocer".
> Havel uses the example of a greengrocer who displays in his shop the sign Workers of the world, unite! Since failure to display the sign could be seen as disloyalty, he displays it and the sign becomes not a symbol of his enthusiasm for the regime, but a symbol of both his submission to it and humiliation by it. Havel returns repeatedly to this motif to show the contradictions between the "intentions of life" and the "intentions of systems", i.e. between the individual and the state, in a totalitarian society.
If you'll ever hear people comparing modern "woke" movements to the communists of the past (especially Mao's Red Guards) , those similarities are precisely why.
> Havel uses the example of a greengrocer who displays in his shop the sign Workers of the world, unite! Since failure to display the sign could be seen as disloyalty
it reminds me of news anchors complaining about a politicians flag pin being on the wrong side (showing disloyalty) or lack of cristmas decorations/saying "happy holidays" as being anti-religion... then you have everyone being hyper worried about completely trivial things....
>
The people behind these efforts exploit the basic agreeableness, tolerance, and good nature of students everywhere.
Have you ever been a student? Because agreeableness with arbitrary, stupid rules isn't ever a trait I'd universally prescribe to them. Pushing back on them seems way more common than quiet agreeableness.
It's a bit ironic that you're infantilizing said students, in order to critique a policy that... Infantilizes them.
> It was a mistake, and they systematically abuse the very tolerance that characterizes western culture with a simple escalating bullying technique of, [...]
This is what has been bothering me about the modern idea of tolerance. "We'll tolerate anything but intolerance" seems to transition to simple bullying far too often.
Not to mention the fact that the paradox of tolerance was in fact a PARADOX. Most people quoting Popper online to promote censorship forgets that part.
It is important to remember that a paradox does not have a straightforward solution. And if the solution exists it is likely about allowing more speech not less.
The administrators described in the article are a symptom, not the cause. I attended a relatively high-ranked college a few years ago and would not have ever considered attending an event named "Exotic Erotic", because:
1. In modern society, everyone is carrying an Internet-connected video camera and nearly every nontrivial social event is filmed.
2. Sexual assault and harassment cases are often litigated in the informal justice system, where there is no statute of limitations, "guilty until proven innocent" standards are often applied, and "I was just a dumb kid trying to navigate a new social environment" is not an excuse.
3. Almost everything I did was expected to be a form of resume-building, even as early as high school.
Will my actions at Exotic Erotic look good to employers? Will they by acceptable to social media users twenty years from now? Can I absolutely guarantee that no one at the event will feel I made them uncomfortable? (Am I willing to bet my future career — the whole reason I am spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend an elite college — on all of the answers being "yes" just to attend one party?)
I mean, several campus advocacy groups were explicitly trying to tell men to stop engaging in those kinds of risky social behaviors!
I don't know that that's a bad thing. I've heard some people, especially women, really did get physically and psychologically injured at these kinds of events. Perhaps cancelling these events is a reasonable price to pay to keep those people safe.
Point 1 is legit. Going to a really raunchy party that doesn’t have a no-phones policy might have been a little much even for college-aged me.
But I disagree with much of the rest. You’re welcome to make those choices for yourself, making your life about resume-building and career from an early age, and certainly society benefits a lot from people like that. But suggesting that everyone should be forced into those choices feels wrong to me. I think having a colorful and joyful life has its own value, but even if we’re sticking to utilitarian arguments, a lot of the people who benefited humanity the most were certainly not resume-driven rule-followers in their youth.
As for false rape accusations… I think this is one of those things that gets talked about so much that it seems more common than it is. I believe it can happen, but every one of my male friends has made it this far in life without being accused of rape. If you only have sex with people who enthusiastically want to have sex with you, I think you can probably put this somewhere between “plane crash” and “lightning strike” in terms of how much you should worry about it.
Fake accusations can happen for lots of crimes, not just rape. All it takes is someone being vindictive or petty and knowing they can get away with the fake accusation to destroy someone. In these cases, the system becomes the weapon. When you eliminate foundational elements of a justice system like innocent until proven guilty or the ability to question your accuser, you’re changing it from a system from justice to injustice as people realize that it’s an even better weapon with which to enact revenge than a gun or a knife because you can destroy someone with little chance for being held accountable.
I don't think everyone in society needs to act this way. But, like, everyone at Stanford is a resume builder because Stanford only admits people with good resumes.
Also, I'm not worried about comes-out-of-nowhere false associations. I am aware that I need to avoid actually doing something wrong because the consequences of that are really high. I implement your "only have sex with people who enthusiastically want to have sex with you" rule by not getting drunk at student-organized "anything-but-clothes" parties!
Fair enough, not getting blackout drunk should definitely reduce your risk of making bad decisions with lifelong consequences. Nothing but respect for that decision.
I still question the premise that the only worthwhile activities are the ones that look good on a resume.
The point of those schools is to go work for McKinsey or whatever. Your folks didn’t take violin at age 3 and pay $50k for lacrosse academy for you to blow it all at some kegger.
No, I went to a reasonably high-quality and cheap public university. There’s plenty of Stanford/Berkeley/MIT folks where I work and they seem happy with their choices as well.
I actually don’t think my parents care all that much whether I work at McKinsey or Google or wherever. They put me in music lessons because they thought it might be interesting, not because it would help me land the perfect corporate job. I doubt my parents even know what McKinsey is.
This reminds me of discussions with some Indian colleagues of mine who were telling me how they were cramming for years in school (with private tutors and studying till late at night) in order to get into very competitive IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology).
> As for false rape accusations… I think this is one of those things that gets talked about so much that it seems more common than it is
Yes, I fully agree. The fraternities have a ton more true rape cases than they have false allegations. Which might also be a reason the the crackdown on fraternity culture.
The fact you dont have the courage to do anything controversial does not mean that all events have to be banned. In a world of cowards, those who will have the balls to do something non standard or show some flair, will probably get an advantage over you, another spreadhsheet filler.
And no, I wouldnt attend "exotic erotic" neither - but it should be allowed for those who want to attend it.
Also it is quite funny that the person who didnt attend an event has the most to write about it. Basically hearsay.
Your whole post looks like some sort of politically correct resume building. Are you trying to get correct social score here as well? Seriously sounds like your whole life is about getting social score.
In a world of apparatchiks like you any kind of fun is forbidden.
Has Stanford ever not been a finishing school for politically correct resume-building spreadsheet fillers?
They could probably get away with having wild parties on the side, before camera phones and social media. But, like, the fact that you must now choose between attending wild parties and being a spreadsheet filler is the real reason why there aren't wild parties at Stanford anymore.
Always worth keeping in mind that Stanford protected John Yoo after authoring the torture memos, and it was MIT that pushed for prosecuting Aaron Schwartz.
University administrators are as much your friend as HR.
There is a lot of discussion covering various points other comments have addressed. I'll tell you what I find most personally surprising, though:
The assumption that partying is something important that needs to be preserved.
Look, I'm not coming at this from a culture war perspective. I'm speaking from my own experience here: if I could go back and talk to my 17 year old self in the first week of school all these decades later, I'd ask about all the parties I was thinking of attending, and say, "Yeah, none of those matter. Feel free to skip, oh.., every one, from now until graduation."
Connections? Didn't make any that mattered. Romances? Zero. Friendships? Basically they were as strong as they needed to be from daily conversations.
What was really valuable and unique were the classes, though I had a hard time seeing that then.
But people here seem to disagree - and I don't think it's because they're all in college either. They really find they have value. Sadly, they did not for me.
For me it's the opposite. I wish I spent less time studying, more time socializing and making connections. I don't think the marginal effort required to go from a B+/A- student to an A student is really worth it (unless maybe you're applying to grad school or something and they consider it a big factor, employers don't really care as long as it's above the cutoff). If one wants to spend that time productively better to invest it in working, doing research, or entrepreneurship.
> If one wants to spend that time productively better to invest it in working, doing research, or entrepreneurship.
None of those are “socializing and making connections” though. Sure it happens during these events, but this article seems to say it’s “innovators” of our tech world—who dare to dream. Except the people who actually did that work weren’t out partying. They we’re studying physics, chemistry, math and programming while having a curiosity to tinker and experiment with this knowledge.
It also took some silver tongued entrepreneurs with rich families like Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, etc. to use these geeks (being rich nerds themselves) to create profitable organizations now synonymous with Silicon Valley itself
I guarantee you, innovation isn’t suffering because a bunch of Stanford frat students can’t fill houses up with sand anymore.
Keep in mind, this is me reporting back decades later on the results. But I acted very social at the time and as if I really believed in the value of drinking w friends, going to parties etc. I’m just telling you now that the data is in, it was a waste.
For example, I made connections, including to lawyers and one to a friend who was an MIT prof for a while; the problem is, they didn’t amount to anything practically useful (I’m not a lawyer or in that profs field). And a connection is defined by its practical utility.
As for the friendships, truthfully I could’ve substituted any one of those friendships for another one in my 20s or 30s and I don’t see it changing much. Or I could’ve basically been as strong friends w them post college, even w less face time in college.
In other words all this partying and close time w your buddies in college is, in my experience, vastly overrated. I could’ve skipped out on most of it and not been worse off.
Different strokes for different folks. I learned pretty much all of my adult social skills at parties. Computer science classes were useful but everything useful I learned in college was from the traditional college experience of partying and meeting as many people as possible.
I had a similar question in my head while I read this article. What proves that “value” to the university or to the students in an average sense was lost? A “value” which is important to school or students? How the different values (or indicators) compare to each other? The author jumps over this like it’s evident. Nothing is evident without proof. It’s just states that it’s more important that the level of equality which they want to achieve (btw which we don’t know from this article, there is no proof in it, what they really want to achieve, and especially why), than the perceived fun of parties. The whole article seems to me a simple rage bait about “everything was better in my time”. The problem is that probably there are really some issues, but this article is not detailed enough to address those at all.
It's pretty clear the Stanford elite think of the people who go to public schools as either lazy or stupid, perhaps both (maybe add in a dash of "NPC"? That's the new mold of thinking it seems). They'll whine and complain but they won't change their preferences because the point of Stanford is to get away from the types of people that go to UNC.
I actually got looks of pity from people at an Ivy League party when I told them I went to a state school (the top public school in my state, no less)!
I really believe that places like Stanford (and even top Greek orgs at “lower tier” schools) are elitist in a way that’s harmful to society. They are pay-to-play for the vast majority of attendees (not saying you don’t have to be smart to get in - but the number of smart applicants is far greater than the number of slots and they consistently favor applicants who can pay $100k/year in tuition[1]). They’re also a straight shot to the institutions that control the world - my friends who went to Ivy Leagues now work in government and media, while my state school friends work in tech (not FAANG but startups and medium sized firms), public health, and non-profits.
Perhaps most disturbingly, these elite schools do in fact seem to be the ones least open to independent thought. At that Ivy League party, when people talked about something serious (not gossip or TV or whatever), it was inevitably their career trajectories, real and imagined. The parties at my state school had discussions ranging from local politics to heterodox economic theories.
The place where I disagree with the article is the idea that these elite schools were once unique bastions of free thought. Research your local public university and you’ll find that they were a hub for, as an example, anti-war protests. Kent State was Kent State, not Harvard or Yale.
I think (and this is my guess, not anything I have research to back) the “anti-fun” shift is some strange combination of healthy respect for the people (mostly underpaid janitors, groundskeepers, etc.) who have to clean up after the shenanigans of rich children and a collective fear of having an image of yourself doing something stupid preserved forever on social media.
This reminds me of an interview with Noam Chomsky, intellectual and professor at MIT, where he said that he can't prove it but he suspects students at the elite universities are no smarter than the ones at public universities. They're simply more obedient. There's plenty of bright folks that refuse to jump through the hoops necessary to get accepted at the elite schools.
I dunno about Stanford, but my interactions with MITers gives me the same impression. If you didn't attend to MIT or one of the other big schools you're lesser.
Maybe that's what these schools should focus on when they teach compassion, diversity and inclusion.
This is true. When I interviewed at a large investment bank for a position as a developer on a low-latency market making desk after completing my PhD in EE at the University of Washington, the managing director, who had a Master's from Stanford, wondered "why UW" and asked "why didn't you go to Stanford?"
Virtually all the traders were from elite schools. Devs and quants had diverse backgrounds.
Its interesting how here in the Czech Republic all the good & famous universities (Charles University, Masaryk University, Mendel University, Czech Technical University, etc.) are all public schools while private ones are hardly even on the radar.
Sure, same for Oxbridge, the Canadian schools (Toronto, UBC, Waterloo, McGill), the Japanese schools, the ETHZ, EPFL...
Stanford is also significantly more selective than all of those institutions. But unlike the IITs or Tsinghua, which are as or more selective, it's not based on grades and scores, but also additional class signals.
Someone ignored me completely when I mentioned the school I went to (ranked like 110th in USA) and I felt pretty bad.
I know elite college people are smart but I feel like they can also be really mean/petty. Granted, I’ve only met a handful people from such institutions and only one person didn’t act weird about it.
When I was at UVA they did shut down a fraternity. But it was because of the flaming arrow they shot into the neighboring frat house. The victims needed a new house after theirs burned down, so the administration went with the obvious solution.
I have the same problem in the office where I work. Mostly I’m relatively stoic about it. Sometimes it makes me sad.
I built my career in the post tech boom 2000s in a culture where engineering and product were hands-down the most important people in the business.
If I wanted to bolt a cool second hand espresso grinder to the mini kitchen wall — one bought with my own massively over egged salary — then no one could stop me. Paint a mural paying homage to a map(parseInt) type bug that took down the site? Sure! Here’s a sculpture made of empty beer cans from Friday night drinks in the office. All very silly, hit/miss sometimes on taste, but all part of the flavour. Everyone did things like this: hosted silly parties, brought in weird food, etc etc. The sense of eccentric character was strong. Hackers were hackers in everything, not just their codebase.
Now I get admonished by HR anytime I do anything which they perceive as being equivalent to daubing crayon in the walls. Merry Christmas HN. Keep the spirit of hacker-past alive!
I think the way Greek life operate at Berkeley provides a study in contrasts.
I distinctly remember attending a party at a Stanford frat during the "crackdown" timeframe. As I was walking up to the house, I noticed a small scrum of people gathered on the front lawn. It seemed that a cop was in a discussion with several of the brothers. He had his Maglite out and appeared to be writing them ticket. But as I got closer, I realized the brothers were grilling hot dogs and the cop was using his flashlight to illuminate the grill. A marked contrast from our house's interactions with Berkeley's police.
All Berkeley frats/sororities have houses on private property, meaning they are subject to the City of Berkeley laws and regulations which are enforced by Berkeley police (as opposed to the UCPD which only operates on campus). As you can imagine, the City of Berkeley (often egged on by NIMBYs living next to the fraternity houses) were less than enthused about Greek life and tried to pass several laws/restrictions to effectively outlaw them.
The university administration tried to assert some control by officially "recognizing" fraternities that complied with university policies. But at the end of the day, to the average student, it would be impossible to separate the sanctioned frats from the unsanctioned ones: they all held parties, conducted rush, held formals, etc. Having frats located on university property does have some serious advantages. One big one is forcing someone to leave entirely. Berkeley frats had to deal with people showing up from all over the Bay trying to sneak into our parties. They were never happy about not being let into the party, but there was nothing we could do to stop them from standing out on the sidewalk and causing issues.
As they say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Berkeley has an extreme housing shortage. The university realized that having several thousands students willing to cram as many as people as possible into a single house was actually hugely beneficial. Ultimately, the administration stood with the fraternities against Berkeley city council because they realized that they had nowhere else to put all these students.
So if I had to chose, which system is better? Having everything controlled by the university? Or ultimately being subject to the whims of cantankerous old people with too much time on their hands?
> instead of giving special privileges to Greek organizations. Let them be just like all other orgs, with no special rules just for them.
You have things a bit mistaken. Rules that apply to greek organizations are often much more strict and onerous.
Many greek orgs would love to be treated under the same rules as the soccer club, or whatever. The soccer club doesn't have to deal with the administration breathing down their back every time they host a party or similar.
Instead of that, at most of these elite schools we see a hostile administration, constantly looking for every opportunity to shutdown these orgs.
No, this is not true. The greeks are fairly often the only ones allowed to organize parties for non-members or promote then through whole campus or who can get guaranteed housing together.
They don't really exists outside of setup where they are officially supported. But yes, negative sentiment toward them from students in general and administration that have to deal with them exists.
Just a bit different in the 70s. My first day as a freshman, the cool guy next door kindly approached me and muttered "Hey kid, you want a hit of hash?"
The one inviolable rule for university housing was "no growing of pot plants in a dorm room facing the street". Otherwise, cheerful anarchism prevailed, mixed with some anti-war near mayhem. Good times, indeed.
This is embarrassing and antithetical to what a university should be.
The whole purpose of an undergraduate education should be to build young people into having the knowledge and skills to really be free in society. A literally “liberal” education in the original sense of the word.
Instead adults have to ask permission to have guests.
That’s how you manufacture consent for a police state, making people live in an environment where the authorities have to approve of everything until their mid twenties.
This is also how you waste student money, state money, research money funneling it away into entirely unnecessary jobs.
University of California students just got done with a strike, maybe Stanford students should strike until the administration stops wasting their money.
They should have simply have gone to their state school. That they didn't indicates quite a bit, imho (they think the rest of us who can't get in are subhuman, and in the Stanford case, are probably eugenicists explicitly).
Uh, no. This is ridiculous. I’m met plenty of perfectly nice Stanford folks. A bit of an elitist trend in a few, but the “subhuman” and “eugenicist” comments are really unnecessary.
It's the natural conclusion of their beliefs in themselves as ubermensch - that the rest of us are untermensch. I'm sure many are nice on the surface, but they fundamentally don't think of us as equals - there's a good reason why they didn't go to their state schools after all.
You can see it in people like Dan Gross who named his venture fund after the eugenics research fund Pioneer Fund and called other people "NPCs" in a lecture that got big on HN a few years ago.
I can't think of any other reason somebody might name an innovation focused business "Pioneer". Must be a nod to eugenics.
There are certainly narcissists at Stanford (and any other prestigious institution) but this desperate need to write off thousands of intelligent people based on some kind of imagined persecution is pretty weird to me.
1) It's real persecution 2) I think the last thing they need is even more constant adoration for their intelligence, which they definitely believe is genetically derived 3) I think he literally should have googled "Pioneer Fund" before naming it that because it's literally a disambiguation on Wikipedia [1]
I don't think I'm going to be able to change your mind, but chatting to some more Stanford grads might. Not everybody is the stereotype. I'm sorry you've had such a bad experience.
Just for the record, I studied at a very unprestigious journalism school in Australia. But I work with many Stanford grads and in a company with it's fair share of assholes, they have all been lovely.
Former commissioner and champion of the Stanford IM Beirut (that's beer pong for the uneducated) here. The university repeatedly threatened to shut us down, but since we weren't an official group that was tough. They did ban drinking games in dorm rooms, which thankfully wasn't enforceable, but things were headed in this direction back in the late aughts.
Back then, this stuff was theoretically in the name of safety, though that was totally misguided. When I got to my freshman dorm, the RAs told us to leave the door open if we were drinking, so they'd know if anything was wrong. In return, there would be no trouble. They held up their end of the bargain, and everyone was drunk but safe and free of administrative trouble. Even the Stanford sheriffs were well known for not giving you trouble unless you were flagrantly drinking in public or causing a real problem. Forcing people to hide their drinking didn't make anybody safer.
It's really a shame that the administration has chosen this direction. I genuinely don't know what the point is.
This sounds obvious. Of course the school isn’t going to sanction illegal drinking on campus. And of course random RAs are going to possibly give more flexibility.
This is like asking the police department to sanction drunken driving — versus individual cops making a judgment call.
You're misunderstanding - it wasn't random RAs; it was university policy for RAs. Same thing in every dorm. They were taught in RA training to focus on safety and not to call the police or report to administrators if underage students were drinking but otherwise fine.
Parties were a separate thing - this was just about students drinking in their dorms (or coming home drunk, etc.). If they weren't causing problems or in danger, RAs just left them alone.
Since Stanford has not said anything about why they're doing this that makes any sense, I am going to throw an idea out there:
I think this all dates back to the end of Halloween in the Castro[1]. This was back in 2006. S.F used to throw a huge awesome LGBTQ themed party and then some gang members decided to attend. Gang members being gang members, one threw a bottle at another and 9 people got shot. They shut the whole thing down that 10s of thousands enjoyed hugely because of that one incident.
I'm thinking that the extreme overreaction was because if this incident had started a rift between any group that was not a white supremacist or Christian group and LGBTQ+ this would have been catastrophic for intersectionalism. So they had to shut it all down. The suspects were never arrested or described any more in news articles than being associated with at least one gang.
Thus, I think the end of fun is to prevent any incident between the great mass of intersectionalist factions that don't like each other, or have irreconcilable differences in real life and must exist in carefully managed online spaces and social interactions in structured environments in order to present as part of a unified woke coalition. The contradictions are so great between all these groups that more and more rules must be added on top of rules to keep all the conflict from escaping out and piercing the image of a bland unified morally righteous whole.
It would be much easier to communicate if we removed words like “intersectional” and “woke” from our vocabulary.
SF doesn’t want to enforce laws and fun things are less possible when violent idiots attend.
There’s a demographic skew when it comes to violent idiots and people with more virtue signaling than sense are trying to turn “violent idiot” into a protected class and strangely start celebrating many of them.
So we can’t have nice things that attract people who tend to hurt others.
The new problem is "hurt others" has been expanded to include microaggressions and other trivial differences of opinion between groups. In order to hold all these groups together in a unified whole, they have to eliminate all uncontrolled "fun" situations where differences could break out into the open in an uncontrolled fashion and cause a huge PR disaster, or worse a rift between groups that have very little in common with each other and are only held together by the thinnest of intersectionalist bonds.
BTW, for all you downvoters. How is closing down the Stanford outdoor hiking club not proof of this kind of thing? You have hikers and they are accused of violating some sort of diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice protocol. It's because there's some other group that has some sort of grievance with people hiking and in order to prevent conflict they have to layer on more rules and bureaucracy to keep all the grievance energy from crating a big dust up, scandal, someone suing the school, etc. They have created all these mobs of enraged activists marching around everywhere looking for someone to enrage them so they can feel validated. The school, to defend themselves creates more rules, more bureaucracy, less controversial fun, etc. Banning Halloween in the Castro was just the kickoff event to the long downhill slide since then.
It’s getting to the point where we need to intentionally design people’s young lives to include some actual strife to reset their suffering metric so that someone being slightly unkind stops being treated like battery.
In other words the whole “right of passage” where you’d dump a young teenager in the woods with a knife and a fishing pole and tell them “good luck” needs a modern equivalent.
Human beings seem to have a sort of suffering constant where it doesn’t matter how awful or easy your life is, you find about the same amount to suffer from regardless if you’re a billionaire or an orphan foraging in a garbage dump. People with really comfortable lives are finding troubling things to suffer from and it needs to be addressed and soon.
I’ve been saying that we need some sort of walkabout for while now. Turning 18 is a terrible proxy for adulthood, especially in a world where we continue to infantilize and arrest the development of young folks by further sheltering them.
We need a better proxy for maturity to do things like vote than just how many years you’ve existed.
Might as well throw ((( ))) around "they" because it's clearly gone far beyond any actual group in society, but instead some sort of masterful controller of things and social movements... the administrators of stanford don't control "wokeness"
James Lindsay goes into the history and mechanics of woke starting with Herbert Markusa and the start of the new left in the 60s. It's a long long back story. If you want to get deep in the weeds as he goes line by line through all the founding works of the new left you can listen to his excellent "New Discourses" podcast. Thousands upon thousands of professional activists have been trained in these teachings, done PHD theses on these subjects and infiltrated vast networks of charitable foundations and higher education in their so-called "long march through the institutions" to spread the woke ideology and create generations of ready-made grievance entrepreneurs.
Well "key phrases" isn't a phrase in the culture war, so I can't take your response here seriously. It seems childish, trite, and a bit "I know you are but what am I?!?!?" To put it another way, I don't see a coherent argument. I also didn't say anything to bloviate, perhaps you would appreciate reviewing the definition for that word too? You are the one here writing about how "wokeism" started in 1960 and expect people to take you seriously? You sound like you might as well be a fox news host. Give me a break, I'm looking for people who don't have an axe to grind.
San Fransisco isn’t a person and therefore can’t have an opinion about whether to inforce laws. What you have are people fighting for control of San Franscisco (and other jurisdictions), some of which want control and don’t want to enforce laws and those that do want control and want to enforce laws.
In pretty much all jurisdictions, the latter group is more forceful, more aggressive and more determined to take control to impose their own flavor of authoritarianism, left, right or otherwise. The only group consistently failing to take control are those that would take control and actually make a point of leaving you alone.
I was involved in the Associated Students of Stanford University, the "student government." It's an independent non-profit, but also recognized by the University, and constantly on the edge of being consumed by the admin bureaucracy. I made an explicit effort to spend funds in a way that was specifically targeted at "fun" programming, but in retrospect I should probably have been more radical.
Also interesting to see the traction Eva (the author of the Palladium article) has gotten. She has a complicated reputation, but I'm glad to see a major constructive contribution.
Any Alumni in the Bay who want to help support student self-administration, I encourage you to reach out to the ASSU. It's an institution perpetually lacking wisdom (like any student group).
It's unfair to put 100% of the blame for this on Stanford. A lot of the things they're doing are responses to the current political climate in the world today. Any discrimination, or even perception of discrimination, is likely to have non-zero consequences for Stanford. Furthermore, people are actively looking for discrimination, because "$27 billion university has discrimination among its fraternities and sororities" is a juicy news headline, if you can make it stick. Is creating an "associate vice provost of inclusion, community and integrative learning" the right thing for Stanford to do? Hard to say. What would _you_ do?
Stanford is an image-obsessed academic-business operation that's ridiculously expensive for students. Note also that Stanford featured fairly prominently in the recent admissions scandals, in which parents paid bribes to ensure acceptance.
> "The annual tuition and living expense budget to go to Stanford was $78,218 for the 2020/2021 academic year. The cost is the same for all students regardless of California residence status as there is no in-state discount." - collegecalc.org
Why go to Stanford then? Is it the world-class education, or is the networking opportunities, the chance to meet the children of other extremely wealthy parents who might ease your way into a lucrative job opportunity post-graduation?
Since the students are certainly not the ones footing the bill for an ~320,000 four-year education, this marketing operation is aimed at the parents, most likely. Safe, controlled, bland...
~$78k post tax, means that someone likely needs to earn $120k or more in income to foot this bill. That’s an astronomical sum when you consider that the US median household income is about ~$71k. $120k is around 87th percentile.
The high cost definitely makes it less accessible, but also remember that Stanford offers a huge amount of financial aid, so families that earn less than $150k pay zero tuition.
Perhaphs, the left has realized that religion controls minds, and since christianity belongs to the right, the left has tried to invent a competing religion. The result is a frankestein made of religious elements stitched together.
No way. The left, the right and the center have their puritan (in the modern sense) factions, and always have. Appearances and the overt goals may differ a bit, but what to think of radical feminism?
As someone who went to a party school (Penn State). I don’t have a lot of good things to say about the fraternities there, and will be the first to cheer their dissolution. But even that university was so hostile to everything. They made running an engineering student org close to impossible. I had to meet with risk management and mitigation multiple times a semester to build a robot. It was ridiculous.
Rather than all the useless ineffectual discussions that happens whilst a minority at Stanford continues to impose their views on the majority, what can be done to push back in a way that actually changes things?
I don’t know the answer here but I imagine a cultural attitude that reserves the greatest shame for anyone expressing authoritarian attitudes of any flavor.
The problem we have today is that people will look at disdain for one flavor of authoritarianism as an argument to impose a competing flavor of authoritarianism. Those with an authoritarian tendency exploit this dynamic actively such that societies are constantly oscillating between the different authoritarian policies, accumulating more liberty reducing rules with each swing of the pendulum.
Pass new laws to ban all those woke communists. But that's not going to work in CA. There is a bunch of rich dudes, like Soros and Pritzker, that create grants for supportive admins, professors and teachers. For example, a grant may require one to publish 5 papers on certain topics every year, or enact policies in your workplace. They get addicted to the grants, and eventually get used to the new way of thinking, so no grants are even necessary.
I've lost a lot of respect for Stanford lately. (The ill-conceived guide to acceptable words is a large part of it.)
At some point, the focal change from academic excellence to political correctness is going to tarnish many of the big schools. I hope they change course before this happens.
Sibling went to Stanford in the mid-late 90s. The absolute freedom some of the student groups had made me so jealous. Intelligent kids, doing ridiculous things, with minimal oversight, on a beautiful campus. Doubt we'll see that return unfortunately.
Weird. I know several undergrad and grad students now and recently graduated from Stanford and they are all really enjoying it and having fun. Literally every one of them.
I suspect that what is fun is different for different people.
Maybe the party rules are applied arbitrary to get rid of students that annoy the admin somehow. I believe alot of rules that are not followed are set up for that purpose.
At my university, there were a bunch of arbitrary rules for parties at Greek houses. Solution: we hosted most the parties off campus in unofficial satellite houses. I’m sure people will find some loophole to avoid these onerous requirements.
As a recent grad, I think there's room to have both had an amazing experience and be upset about huge structural issues. The student body is mostly great, the education is generally very good, and the industry connections are amazing. At the same time, the administration has become corporatized, and the "pot of gold" at the end of many degrees in the form of SV or consulting jobs means that many students and professors aren't willing to invest energy into building a better University.
I went to UT Austin for undergrad and Stanford for graduate school.
I think my interactions with authority were much, much more pleasant at Stanford than at UT. Mostly because the cops were really understanding and supportive. I frequently hosted parties (some large) at both, and not once did they come to stop me at Stanford, whereas in Austin it was always a risk.
That said, I suspect that's the campus police, the administrators seem to be different. And I am sad to see that they are pushing for punishing fun.
I suspect that's partially due to the general attitude carried by authority figures in Texas. that's the only state I've been in where I've had the shit beaten out of me by cops for looking quar.
I can’t tell if this is a repost or was cited in something posted recently, but I could have sworn last I read about this, they had a snippet about how one of the many weird rituals Stanford had involves running up and kissing strangers? That’s the kind of thing I wish one of the folks I know on the faculty had warned me about before I spent a summer in Palo Alto.
Speaking as someone who didn’t go to a school with any of the cutesy crap in the OP, and last read about the institution when someone had to yank a rapist off some lady, I’m not very sympathetic.
I tried very hard to get in someplace without an athletics program to avoid west coast equivalent of Dartmouth style shenanigans… then got into neither and quit my PhD after realizing it wasn’t going to end unless I excused and ignored a litany of abusive and illegal behavior.
I feel bad for folks who JUST put on an unauthorized costume but… I saw so much shit passing through when interning in the Bay I don’t have any sympathy for the party people of Palo Alto - most of them should be sent to the nuthouse.
The problem with the Woke Left is that everything has turned into a moral issue. Not enough diversity in the party? That’s immoral and needs to be shut down!
The morality police you see in Iran is an exact extension of what you will see if this type of behavior is left to grow.
> ...When Stanford could not remove a student organization for bad behavior, they found other justifications. One such case was the end of Outdoor House, an innocuous haven on the far side of campus for students who liked hiking. The official explanation from Stanford for eliminating the house was that the Outdoor theme “fell short of diversity, equity and inclusion expectations.” ...
> Next year, Outdoor House will be reinstated, but only because house members promised to refocus their theme on “racial and environmental justice in the outdoors.” Upholding diversity, equity, and inclusion is the first of four “ResX principles” that now govern undergraduate housing. Stanford reserves the right to unhouse any organization that does not, in their opinion, uphold these principles.
> This spirit of self-organization, slightly transgressive but organized fun taught students how to organize things like the 2000s tech revolution.
Looking from the other side of the “party” that very same culture of no consequences and unchecked toxic masculinity probably also fueled the rampant problems with SA that’s been exposed widely across tech during the #metoo movement.
The author is clearly complaining from a conservative, free-market viewpoint, but it's difficult to overlook that the conservative, free-market ideology that triumphed in the Reagan-Thatcher era has been a major driver of the complaints voiced here. The late-sixties to early-nineties free-for-all at universities was partly due to an understanding of the university as a place for the betterment of the population in the form of a largely-subsidized public good. This also tied into concepts like tenure and academic freedom which insulated students and educators from the surrounding society, and allowed students to run organizations and modify or vandalize campus property without consequence, with the benefits and costs that entailed.
Today the university is largely re-imagined in the conservative mold. It is foremost an elite job-training site, and includes not only the cosmopolitan social training that companies demand of 21st-century knowledge workers, but free-market costs commensurate with the expected value of the degree in the vocational sphere. Administration has been handed over to a business class walled off from the educators, for fear of academics running the show, with predictable results of fiefdom-building. Tenured educators are disappearing and being replaced with the adjunct precariat, another conservative win. This all contributes to an atmosphere where the stakes of any action are very high for both students and university employees, and danger abounds, whether it be from lawsuits or from the possibility of being forced out of school and suffering lifelong consequences as a result. It's perplexing to see this laid at the feet of academics, when one needs look no further than other bastions of the conservative mindset, like HOAs or corporate HR departments, to find organizations that would be similarly displeased with an ad-hoc island in a common-area water feature.
The article is blaming the school administration, a parasitic entity that's very different from the academics you're talking about.
It's also clear that the increasingly bloated administration is horrendously inefficient from a free market POV, but what's happened here is not a free market, but regulatory capture: the administration makes the rules and spends the budget to benefit itself, squeezing out both teaching staff and students in the process.
My understanding of the other poster's comment was that the triumph of school administrators over tenured professors was for some time a conservative goal and ostensibly a conservative win--but it looks like it has backfired.
I did: it's a notionally independent unit of Stanford that has an endowment of $0.7B, while Stanford as a whole has $37.8B. Can this tail really wag the entire dog?
The neat thing about being leftist in the USA today is you can blame 100% of the problems caused by overregulation on "muh free market!", a mythical boogieman supposedly in control of the US economy but in reality essentially nonexistent.
> difficult to overlook that the conservative, free-market ideology that triumphed in the Reagan-Thatcher era
The western conservative parties have disgraced themselves over the last 40 years with their failure to conserve successful free-market competition, no doubt. Looking at the US, and counting likely 2nd order effects, the majority of the economy is directed by government spending. ~40% directly, and probably double-digits indirectly as services to that 40%. Major fields like education, healthcare, energy, banking and housing are paralysed by regulation.
The US still gets to claim relatively free market vs Europe or Asia, but the situation is so far gone it is debatable whether there are any genuinely free-market policies. A free market would not be paying for these administrators, for example.
But all of that doesn't mean that the universities exist in the conservative image. The situation is the ugly compromise between a failed conservative movement to re-establish free markets and anti-market forces.
This is a fantastic comment, and an incisive view of the problem. I don’t wish to sound to cynical, but in response to
> It’s perplexing to see this laid at the feet of academics …
I believe the answers are partly contained in your comment. For one, it’s in the professional interests of the administrative class to continue to demonize, marginalize, and disempower academics. For another, it’s in their political interests to continue pushing academic institutions towards job-training programs rather than expanding intellects.
Maybe the socialists finally took over up there. Based on other recent articles about Stanford, that seems highly likely. They are implementing policy that closely mirrors many of the same elements of Mao's philosophy.
Speaking of things that I learned in a frat-like environment: there's a kind of accepted tyranny to actually doing a thing. If you plan a party, it more or less goes the way you want. If you run Twitter, same thing.
We're in some kind of horseshoe world where self-identifying Democrats are already more likely to be virgins than their Republican counterparts. Just looking at the 20 somethings I know, I don't see how this trend of progressives being less fit in life doesn't continue until we at least have 20 years of dominance from more conservative backgrounds by default. I don't see any way to reverse the trends that have become base parts of the progressive culture.
I'll let my comment stand so as to not try to pretend I didn't say something I did, but perhaps virginity was an overly charged proxy for life fitness. My apologies. Just as weirdly favouring conservative types and less charged: living alone.
We've flipped. Democrats have become the default position in many ways, and conservatives are either outcasts or the cool kids, depending on where you are.
I think this is equally strange to many conservatives who are still attempting to digest this.
When several liberal writers went on tirades regarding how it should be forbidden for people to talk about their sex lives in public, it occurred to me the current liberals were not the ones of my formative years.
People try to dismiss the complaints of the old guard as them being left behind, but that is clearly not the case. As you say, there have been a number of "flips" that are clearly not "progressions". Expanding civil rights from blacks, to gays, to trans, is clearly a progression and no old school Democrat (for example) bats an eye. Speech and sex stand out as clearly having reversed and if you buy into the current ideology then the previous attitudes were wrong, sure. But pretending they extend naturally in the same way as expanding civil rights seems dishonest.
I started my career in the liberal arts and one of the reasons I abandoned them was that they were a poor investment. Physics may have "revolutions" but it always builds on the math of the previous generation if nothing else. Someone who could ace a test in 1930 could do well cold today and learn the quantum stuff relatively quickly. A 1960's feminist is wrong about just about everything according to a modern one and maybe the modern one is indeed right but it just shows that learning about feminism is useless except in as much as you need "right now". There's no future return for investment today.
The way I see it these institutions should be razed - not because they "aren't fun" but because they're inherently exclusionary and produce a cadre of out-of-touch elites who think or operate as if the rest of us are genetically inferior for not passing their arbitrary class hurdles at 17.
The rest of us have nothing because these elites have everything.
I didn't apply, but if I did they wouldn't let me in, no. I only had a 1500/1600 SAT and didn't have any patents or first author papers when I was 17. I was doomed to a life of failure.
I'm not sure how what you said is supposed to be a "gotcha", it describes literally 99.99% of humanity.
https://archive.ph/1hPrX