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Stanford’s war on social life

• mariodiana 4y ago
  tl;dr – The Delta Tau Chi house has been closed and renamed "THX 1138."
• unethical_ban 4y ago
  Reading these comments and the article, I have to wonder if the Internet and social networks are to blame. So much of what we do described here is about skirting the rules in a healthy way, in doing things everyone knows happens but can allow to keep happening by plausible deniability. Now, everything is online. Not only is everything documented and shared, but Twitter et al amplifies anything that any aggrieved and motivated group doesn't like. It seems impossible to have any kind of semi public organization "just do fun things" any more, because some rule jockies or outsiders will scream about it, making it impossible for councils and administrations to turn a healthy blind eye.
• puffoflogic 4y ago
  "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it." Don't blame the administrators. They have simply given the students exactly what the students wanted.
• WorldPeas 4y ago
  I live over by MIT at northeastern(go ahead, make fun of me for not getting in), and all my life I've dreamt of being part of the MIT "hacker" culture. It simply does not exist at northeastern, as I know of only 4 people or so who share in the ethos I know of. Also of note at my wonderful college are the police around every corner, with their cars parked everywhere watching us, the massive network of security cameras, and the insane access control. To give you the idea of what it's like to come home after classes, I walk towards the lobby of my building, with a camera facing outwards, it sees me and unlocks door 1. Then I scan my card and a guard sees my face and door 2 unlocks. I walk under a camera which looks at my face. I then tap my keycard on my lock and punch in my code. This lock is also inside of my room, and I have been locked out of my room, while in my /own/ room twice. Back to the beginning of the digression, I am part of my university's radio club, and the MIT hacker scene. From what my friends say, MIT clamps down more and more by the day. Increased cameras, draconian universal keycard systems and obstructive bureaucrats galore. Additionally, the alumnus among them are now seen as weird outsiders ever since the pandemic shifted the access norms on campus(it used to be open and now everything is keycard controlled). I can certify I would have gone absolutely _bonkers_ without knowing these people, I can say with certainty that before I knew them it was perhaps the most miserable year of my life. I hope in the future we can be kept even safer, perhaps in little cubes with cameras on all the walls and a little screen and keyboard to take classes with. I think that will lead to a healthy dialogue on global inclusion themes and mindful wellness.
• dcchambers 4y ago
  Articles like this seem to be increasingly common and make me very sad. The sanitization and white-washing of social life and culture across the country is depressing.
• 0xLaMDA 4y ago
  > "The official explanation from Stanford for eliminating the house was that the Outdoor theme “fell short of diversity, equity and inclusion expectations.” The building formerly known as Outdoor House was added to Neighborhood T. > 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." This stuff is a cancerous cult.
• samovar_booth 4y ago
  Wow, this reads just like the story of the internet. And even California itself. Started out as a strange, insular place that attracted a bunch of exuberant people who cultivated a unique and highly creative culture. But once the capital class realized that all of these clowns created a huge opportunity, the place was occupied by powerful and unaccountable players who choked all of the joy and creativity out of it in their quest to transform it into a finely tuned and perfectly predictable money making machine.
• jspa 4y ago
  caltech is seeing a similar sort of thing. admin has progressively killed social life and house events (with covid as an excuse) and has implemented draconian key card systems and the like. bref little to no freedom. the fear of risk has increasingly killed the undergraduate experience. Seems a bit counterintuitive to promote since the greatest scientists, entrepreneurs have been risk takers.
• cryptophreak 4y ago
  The typical rebuttal to this kind of article, seen in some of the comments here, is that the author is necessarily wrong because X happens to Y people per year. Does he want students to die? In other words, "Some number of kids have probably died playing with a stick, so we absolutely must ban or regulate sticks, unless you want kids to die. Are sticks really worth the lives of children?" The first problem with this argument is the use of thought-stopping language. It seeks to neutralize all reasonableness and good judgement by appealing to the badness of outlier events. Opponents of totalitarianism are painted to be bad people because without totalitarianism uncontrolled things might happen, and that's just irresponsible. The second problem is that life is inherently risky, so the quest to eliminate risk thus necessarily trends toward eliminating all of life. 100% of people die no matter what choices they make. What should we do about that? Should we divide up the proximal causes and ban them all until no human activity is permissable? Or should we accept that yes, X people per year will die doing Y, maybe the number will even go up over time, and we're okay with that?
• tomohawk 4y ago
  Linked from the article: https://us9.campaign-archive.com/?u=c9d7a555374df02a66219b578&id=6cf2ce7346 https://us9.campaign-archive.com/?u=c9d7a555374df02a66219b57... Details on the cancellation of the JV marching band.
  • googlryas 4y ago
    Are there specific details about what the band did?
    • csdvrx 4y ago
      The report is withheld, and the statute of limitations ignored, so it's likely to be something mundane that couldn't really get them into trouble if shown in broad daylight
    • tomohawk 4y ago
      From the main article: > Stanford’s decision to sanction the Band was a sign of things to come. ... Once, the Band mocked Stanford’s rivals with crass marching formations; today, the Band designs all their pranks based on pre-approved themes from the university and clears the final plans with a panel of administrators. > The University sent a clear message with its treatment of the Band. Spontaneous organizations, particularly when they could become chaotic, controversial, or otherwise a space for breaking rules, were now something to be controlled. Rather than treating freedom and spontaneity as strengths, the dynamic became one where students had to justify their projects and ideas while under suspicion from administrators. Student life was becoming dominated by restrictive bureaucracy.
    • WoahNoun 4y ago
      History of rampant sexual harassment and hazing. > The university initiated the joint inquiry after learning of concerns regarding several band events, including off-campus trips, that the band held for its members between 2012 and 2015. The investigation found that, on several occasions, the band violated university policies regarding alcohol, controlled substances, hazing and/or sexual harassment. Violations included a tradition in which a band member was given an alcoholic concoction intended to make that individual vomit publicly; an annual trip in which some band members used illegal substances; and a band selection process in which individuals were asked a number of inappropriate questions on sexual matters.
• version_five 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • vfclists 4y ago
    What has this got to do with multiculturalism? Did the non-white male students call for these changes, or is it part of the corporate agenda of disrupting strong social networks and bonds?
    • avindroth 4y ago
      I think the implication is that multiculturalism is very hard to get right, and that one solution to it is to be very careful all the time. This leads to a sort of vague blandness that has become more prominent in the Bay area over the past few years. If you don't want to be cancelled, just don't say potentially controversial things. The thing with unique, interesting group identities (like in Stanford social groups) is that they will, invariably, offend and push some people's boundaries. This over the years has been viewed more and more negatively (as a solution to multiculturalism imho). When cancellations abound and price of offense is high, just make everything as neutral as possible. 580, 610, 113, whatever. But people's souls get slowly sucked out of them.
      • FairHope 4y ago
  • boplicity 4y ago
    I don't think you're really aware of what "equity" means. I think that would be a good place for you to expand your thinking.
  • kenjackson 4y ago
    Ehh. I think it sometimes sucks for those for which the past lack of equity benefitted them. Probably more than anywhere I see this in athletics with boys and girls. Certain Dad’s of boys complain about how when they were boys they could do all these things that are now off limits because they say girls complain about them. I’m not sure the girls feel the same way.
• humanistbot 4y ago
  I read the whole article, and it seems to be entirely about the push to remove Greek / Frat / Sorority life from campus and convert these houses to more traditional dorms. I know that some people who got a lot out of Greek Life equate it with Social Life, but most college students don't pledge/rush and it doesn't get in the way of social life. There are plenty of ways to socialize without frats.
  • scarmig 4y ago
    Most of the houses affected weren't Greek. Many were themed houses oriented around a particular experience: an Italian dorm, a Slavic dorm, a... druggie co-op, for lack of a better phrasing.
    • andai 4y ago
      Sounds like it used to be more... hmm... diverse?
  • avindroth 4y ago
    The point being made is not that the Greek system is being pushed out and that worsens the social atmosphere. It's that Stanford is losing its atypical social community (which includes not only the Greek system but also co-ops), and that will hurt the uniqueness and advantage of Stanford as a breeding ground for interesting thinkers. Not to mention these are just symptoms, there are more problematic things that are not ostensible.
    • ip26 4y ago
      Wait, people see Stanford as a hotbed of interesting thinkers? I didn't think that was their brand.
      • brightball 4y ago
        In the 2000s you constantly saw the Google connection talked about. NBC even made a TV show, Chuck, centered around a guy who got kicked out of Stanford unfairly so Stanford itself is a huge part of the show.
• csdvrx 4y ago
  > Lake Lagunita was closed to student activities in 2001, ostensibly to protect an endangered salamander that had taken up residence in the artificial waters. Eventually, Stanford let the lake go dry. Simple: Stanford should be held responsible for the impact their actions, that here directly caused harm to an endangered species. Either they did lie before, about the salamander (then they're on the hook for lying for material gains) or showed negligence after, causing the draught. In either case, neither the truth nor endangered species are acceptable casualties in Stanford ongoing war against its own students.
  • SamBam 4y ago
    I believe there's a fair bit of complexity regarding the salamanders, including where they actually breed, and which areas are best for them. Points is, I wouldn't spout off on this topic quite so confidently, given a one-paragraph description in a very subjective opinion piece.
  • watwut 4y ago
    Based this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=31733773&goto=item%3Fid%3D31732944%2331733773 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=31733773&goto=item%3Fi... and its parent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31733298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31733298 the whole salamader story is not that simple. Basically, what happened in the meantime was draught not caused by university. University actually allowed some water in so that salamander can breed and relocate upstream. Also, if you dig down to other events mentioned in article, what article calls spontaneity involved actual documented pretty heavy issues like sexual harassment and violence. And some of the events even as taken exactly as written in article strikes me as "I totally get why other students and people don't want to put up with this".
• dougmccune 4y ago
  I spent 3 years living in one of the co-ops briefly mentioned in the article ("In 2013, the administration took over the student-run anarchist house and painted over the old murals."). I wouldn't call it an "anarchist house" but it sure as hell was a lot of fun to live there. I painted some of those murals that are now apparently gone. We built a giant illegal loft in our room to make it two stories (which we would disassemble for a day every year when the fire inspection happened). We did some stupid and illegal shit, sure. But the sense of community was unparalleled. The alumni association owned the house, so we had to deal with all the maintenance. We came back to campus a week before everyone else every year to work on the house. We cooked and cleaned for ourselves. I've never since experienced anything close to that same feeling of communal pride. It was a mess, but it was our beautiful mess.
  • every 4y ago
    My wife and I met over 4 decades ago here [1]. She was the food buyer and I a weekly dinner chef... [1] https://collegehouses.org/listings/21st/ https://collegehouses.org/listings/21st/
    • verall 4y ago
      Collegehouses is still going strong, 21st went through some renovations a couple years ago :) Something different from what is mentioned in the article is that the Austin co-ops are not owned by alumni orgs and are not officially affiliated with any school or university.
  • pigscantfly 4y ago
    I was in the co-ops and also a frat in the early 2010's. I knew about XOX, SAE, and KA but not theta delt or sigma chi -- let alone french house, slav, haus mitt, or casa italiana. Aside from undergrads, the school will miss out, too -- my pledge class founded thirteen companies in the few years after graduation, and I hired several friends from EBF for my own -- but the administration will probably never realize what they've done to the undergraduate culture. This is really sad news; I hope the rest of the co-ops escape -- most of the housing options are extremely uninspiring to actively anti-social and not great for mental health, as the article points out.
• julianeon 4y ago
  I think I'm close to an outside observer - I didn't go to Stanford and don't have a dog in that fight, as the saying goes. I don't trust the conclusions of this article. It starts with a story about a frat which filled their building's first floor with sand, so much that they had to rent a bulldozer to relocate it to the campus lake. Then they call the Stanford admins killjoys for not supporting it. But... of course Stanford wouldn't support that! That would try anyone's patience. What kind of impact does dumping all that sand have? What about running the bulldozer over the Stanford campus? What if someone is injured by the bulldozer? I wouldn't trust teenagers renting an after-party bulldozer who never cleared that with anyone, never notified anyone, and have no proof of training. Then, the article talks about Stanford letting the lake "go dry." I live in California and I can tell you what happened: the drought. There's a killer drought, nonessential water use is discouraged, and a manmade lake in a little-used corner of a campus is the definition of nonessential. Stanford did the right thing by not artificially pumping it up. There's no malice involved; a lake like that, in 2022, is destined to dry up. So based on those things, I don't think I can trust the article to be taking a balanced, sensible position. My "middle of the road" position wold be that, yes, sometimes adventurous college kids can get away with something - once in a while. But over the long term, it's the institution's job to prevent one-off events from turning into ongoing disaster generators.
  • UncleEntity 4y ago
    > What if someone is injured by the bulldozer? I wouldn't trust teenagers renting an after-party bulldozer who never cleared that with anyone, never notified anyone, and have no proof of training. You, sir, would have an absolute conniption if you knew half the stuff we got up to in the airborne…
  • awhitty 4y ago
    You might live in California and have certainly seen the drought, but the lake didn't go dry due to drought. The lake was fed by diverting water from nearby San Francisquito Creek. The university chose to stop filling the lake for recreational use in 2001 to protect the endangered California tiger salamander as the article notes. The lake was still sometimes artificially filled to support salamander breeding, but it was not maintained to a level suitable for (most forms of) recreation (though I still saw members of KA attempt to take a raft out on 1-2ft of water during a rainy week -- I think their raft was more full of beer than the lake was of water, though my memory is hazy). The university has since removed the dam used to divert water to Lake Lag as part of a process of habitat restoration upstream. I'm not sure how that will affect the population of salamanders that depended on that water in Lake Lag, but I believe they also breed upstream and will have more sustainable natural habitat. Also, water from Searsville Dam just upstream from this project is used to irrigate Stanford's golf course, and that is cited as a reason not to remove that dam (the other reason is that removing it would change habitats that formed from the lake it created). The school has sometimes turned off its campus fountains during periods of drought. They shut the fountains down for 2 years while I was there. During that same time I didn't see them shut off water to the golf courses though, and that consumes substantially more water than the fountains. They did restore water in the fountains for the weeks leading up to our graduation, and I can recommend grabbing a pitcher of beer or two from the CoHo and walking it straight down to the fountain outside the bookstore for a soak, if the school still allows it. To summarize, if we are to infer Stanford's priorities based on how it has approached the complex dynamics around Lake Lag and its (former) tributary, I believe that would look like: golf course > endangered salamander > students.
• tjeffersonRI 4y ago
  .
  • fileyfood500 4y ago
    Thank you for sharing this! I'm sorry it got taken down. I think it's great perspective to hear that the island party still happened this year!
  • shuckles 4y ago
    That’s a pledge event for a frat, but it’s not an island in Lake Lagunita, which is no longer a lake or a lagunita.
• hoistbypetard 4y ago
  I thought Kappa Alpha got "un-housed" as part of the fallout for hosting the party where the Brock Turner assault took place. That kind of event would have led to a frat being dissolved on my campus in the 1990s. Obviously there are many other examples in this article, but that one doesn't seem to quite fit.
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    Yea I went to a different top 20 school and the frat system was absolutely full of sexusal assault. Doesn't really surprise me that universities are trying to shut them down.
  • ineedasername 4y ago
    I also chased down a few others that had pretty solid justification: the band seems to have had a reputation of both hazing and trying to cover for or silence sexual assault accusations. I'm not saying the article has no point to make, but I'm not sure Stanford is the hill to die on for this cause. When many of the examples the article gives fall apart on inspection it starts to look like Stanford had a lot of truly fucked up shit going on in a very systemic way.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • kart23 4y ago
    Turner wasn't a member of Kappa Alpha, I don't think the fraternity had any impact on the case other than hosting the event that led to the crime. They lost their house in 2019, the case happened in 2015 and the reason they lost their house is because apparently they let people live in without paying rent to the university. https://stanforddaily.com/2019/06/19/kappa-alpha-fraternity-to-lose-house-in-fall-2019/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/06/19/kappa-alpha-fraternity-...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• BonoboIO 4y ago
  What a sad story. I can really imagine being there and have fun, be creative and „grow up“ to be an adult with a purpose in life. But now, this sounds like a soulless place, replaceable, replaceable like myself. Every student should be the same, no variations ... for what. I don’t get it. This makes me very sad.
  • 0xLaMDA 4y ago
    > "Every student should be the same, no variations ... for what. I don’t get it." Because the DEI cult said so.
  • temp8964 4y ago
    Soulless is the essence of postmodernism. I have no doubt if the admin can remove the traditional buildings, they will replace them with all cubical buildings. Yelling for diversity and at the same time replacing everything with grey color rectangles and squares is their cultural revolution.
    • frontierkodiak 4y ago
      It is silly that we naively define diversity by what is trivially measurable, which tends you can determine of a person without knowing anything of their person. Give me a campus with humanistic diversity. Let us lower the entropy of the intellectual space.
• hemloc_io 4y ago
  This highlights something I feel like most older people on Hackernews, and generally don't know about modern student life! the amount of university involvement in what's going on in everyone's personal lives has increased substantially from when you were in school, much to the adulation of a portion of the student population. Unis now focus on "student welfare", which really just means expanding the universities reach into what everyone is up to. The most obvious of this is campus police depts. Where I went to school the admin was straight up bolshevikan in mass, complexity, and sense of self importance. Generally speaking any self governing student org, particularly greek life, was treated as a liability to be carefully balanced against the amount of donations they bring in. EDIT: One more thing, 99.9% of these dumbass rules are made due to actuaries in insurance companies or lawyers trying to minimize university liability.
  • kernoble 4y ago
    The universities seem to have forgotten that there role is to teach and educate, not overreach into their student's lives. College is about learning to cope and manage on your own, as well as learn. Having a different helicopter parent at the university (compared to home) won't help that development.
    • hemloc_io 4y ago
      While it is tempting to blame universities entirely for this, and I can go on all day about it, students culture has changed a lot too. I'm not sure what has caused it.
      • MikeTheRocker 4y ago
        Can you elaborate on this? How do you think culture has changed?
        • hemloc_io 4y ago
          So someone else gave you a well thought out, and sourced answer. I'll just give you my personal thoughts on the issue, which are incomplete. I try to separate out what is actually going on from generic, "kids these days" bullshit that you hear a lot in the media, and by lots of older people. These are themes in people's lives when I was in school a couple years ago and even today, but they're not the whole story. Lots of good stuff is happening on campuses too, LGBTQ stuff being the best! It's not a big deal to be whatever you'd like. There's plenty of young people having plenty of fun, so I don't want to paint some kind of completely bleak picture, but here are some of the problems that have degraded peoples ability to be fun. The things I thing contribute the most are: - Phone cameras and the ubiquity of recording stuff - The ability for people to find those recordings if anything goes wrong in your life forever. - Lack of economic prosperity, and the feeling it's getting worse. So you can't rock the boat. -Majority of kids in college now were kids when the GFC happened, everyone I know has graduated into a recession of some kind, or knows someone who has. - Increasing policitcal polarization + extreamism. Everything has sacred tenats. If you're caught violating them you risk getting kicked out of your, economically advantaged, cohort. A small but loud minority who enjoy the political power of "catching" people out. This is true basically anywhere, left or right. This doesn't factor into your day to day, but does have a cooling effect on actual political discussion. - Rising costs of basically everything that matters. Housing costs are impossible to manage for students and recent grads, the expectation is you will not own a house, and that your quality of life will be worse than your parents. Lots of people move back in with their parents for a couple years post college, assuming they like their family. Inflation, has and will make this worse. - Extreme annoyance, and sometimes straight up rage about the fact that older people do not understand that things are systemically wrong right now. Mainly this is also related to housing. There is a sterotype of the entitled older white woman, "Karen", that everyone tries to avoid being associated with. Everyone I know has been abused at some service job by them, or in dealing with them for something related to their situation. - Huge student loan bills on degrees that aren't going to pay for them. In lots of ways this isn't even the students fault, since colleges treat them like cash cows for everything. It's very possible to end up 200-300k in debt, which even a high paying degree will not cover reasonably. People are busy and do not have to time to fight the bureaucratic machine, especially when they will probably lose. - COVID made everything above much worse. Destroyed basically all of young people's social lives, and empowered the people who were already busy trying to monitor and control people. Most of the people I know developed mental illness of some kind during that time. There was an incident at my school, where students off campus had a small BBQ and someone jumped the fence to record them and post publicly calling them "plauge rats" and asking the school to suspend them. This wasn't really met with much pushback from the student body, but the admin didn't do anything about it so kind of a wash. - People I know who didn't go to college generally fall into two camps. Both are mostly male. One camp is in jail, the other camp just stays at home with their parents and plays video games. I suspect it's just my locality thing, but a lot of people's younger male sibilings either dropped out of college, or never went and spend lots of time on twitch + discord etc. Very few if anyone I've met knows people in a trade school, even though I have older family who have worked in the trades. - For lots of people performativity is reality.[0] Either because they do not have the means to go out and party, or the social media clout is more important. This seems to effect women more than men in my experiance. Lots of places to drink have capitalized on this by adding things like ball pits. Most of these places have huge lines. For me this always seemed pretty anti social. Lots of people want to be influencers, probably the same people that wanted to be actors in previous eras. Performativity extends to politics since the bar is so low for expressing support for idea X or Y. Lots of people feel like they're doing something when they post a political message, which might be true considering how much time people spend in them. The youth political movements are completely ineffective at all levels in my experiance. They're handily beaten by geriatrics nationally, look at the presidents these last like 8 years, and locally, look at the handful of NIMBYs who have destroyed Bay Area housing for that. I think it's generally harder to commit crimes, and easier to be a criminal than it was before which influences the type of protests you can have. Lots of people also aren't willing to risk their lives for politics when things are so precarious economically and socially particularly when nothing is expected to change. - Wealth inequality has lead to rich kids pretending to be poor or underprivileged at record numbers, always been a problem in punk (To the point where it's a meme.) but you see it on campus as well. It adds to the performativity problem above. There are lots of rich kids who say things like capitalism is broken. - There is an undercurrent of people who explicitly subscribe to Malthusian/Hobbesian ideologies, and they seem to be dominant right now. Generally these break down to "there's only so many resources to go around so we much divide them according to X thing.". Lots of people believe the topline solutions and tenents generally even if they can't articulate where it comes from. This isn't a left vs right thing, both have different, insidious imo, strains of this ideology. - People in charge have the same ideology as the students. I think this is a big change for a lot of professors who are used to having to fight a right wing admin. (The biggest factor in who you vote for is your college degree.). I think it also incentives following what the admin says, b/c you're on the same "team". There is an expectation of capitulation of the admin to the most vulnerable and "vulnerable" students. The admin also viciously deals with people not in these camps. This is expected by everyone, and if the admin were to respond to everyone equally that would be a shock. This isn't always a negative! If you actually need help, disability etc, the admin will usually help you. It is a double edged sword since students expect the admin to take care of them in lots of ways. - Discussion around sexual assault/consent are constant and pervasive. Shared responsibility if you see it happening or potentially happening is expected. It's never considered one persons fault, especially in student orgs. This also is double edged sword imo. It seems like it's had a cooling effect on some peoples sex lives and sexual freedom in general, but sexual assault reporting has become much easier and more expected if something happens. I doubt you could have a co-ed shower room now, or a nudist house etc. EDIT: I think campus "free speech" issues are a red herring mostly capitalized on by a multitude of grifters, both professors and political pundits. Things are a lot more nuanced than that on campuses. 0 - Bo burnham actually has a lot of great insights into this! I'll submit some links to HN.
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  “Stanford's new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat's vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting.” This is true at MIT as well. Can’t imagine the hacks of old being allowed. Our zero risk society is perfectly boring.
  • laverya 4y ago
    https://imgur.com/gallery/YiqlS https://imgur.com/gallery/YiqlS There has to be an age at which we learn risky lessons. For a while, that age was college. (It used to be younger than that) What age are we supposed to learn now?
  • hprotagonist 4y ago
    pour one out for senior house.
    • whymauri 4y ago
      and east campus (next year) and random hall (when it comes)
      • musicale 4y ago
        Any dorm called Random Hall has got to be good.
    • gumby 4y ago
      I was just out rafting in California last weekend with a dorm mate from señor haus… we’ve known each other 40 years. Destroying it was a tragedy,
      • hprotagonist 4y ago
        yeah. I hung out there in the early 2000s, but was never a resident. Roommates with the head RA’s younger brother. I was very jealous :)
• kernoble 4y ago
  A lot of these high-end schools have been working to crack down on forms of risk, at the cost of a huge amount of fun and personal discovery. The issues is, this has happened for kids all the way down to when they are toddlers. People need to be able to be in risky, crazy, abnormal situations; it's part of growing up and figuring out who you are. This will only push it later in life, when the risks are far higher, and/or will just have even more uncreative drones.
• ketzo 4y ago
  It is absolutely impossible to take this article seriously, because the author refuses to acknowledge the un-fucking-believably fraught legacy that the Greek fraternity system has, at Stanford and at every other school. > Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus Oh, yeah, Stanford’s really afraid of “student spontaneity.” They’re definitely not afraid of organizations that: - ritualize physical and mental abuse - force people to consume dangerous amounts of drugs and alcohol - institutionalize racism, classism, and misogyny - protect - and encourage! - sexual assaulters Fraternities aren’t all bad. Fraternity brothers aren’t all bad. I was one, and I met some of the best friends of my life. But that also means I know just how fucking bad it gets, even now (2016-2020). Yeah, sucks, you don't get to live in a big fun house and pull Animal House-style pranks any more. You lost your privileges after killing a fucking kid. https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Family-sues-Stanford-roommates-after-son-s-death-16791879.php https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Family-sues-Stanford-ro... Oh, sorry -- did I say a kid, singular? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hazing_deaths_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hazing_deaths_in_the_U... 29 dead in the U.S. in the last 12 years. And the author makes this out to be some stick-in-the-mud administrator trying to take away their toys. Makes me fucking sick.
  • dash2 4y ago
    Aside from the factual problems here, which others have pointed out, I can't help thinking that the unfocused, angry, self-righteous tone of this post is related to the problems described in the article. It's as if people and organizations have bent over backward to appease the loudest, most furious, least reasonable zealots. I mean, OP has been made fucking sick! How can we not listen? To be explicit about this: I think many people have discovered how to progress through life by being as angry as possible. I very much doubt this anger is real, and when it is, it more often reflects the writer's personality than the flaws of the world around them. This is bad, and has seriously harmed society and culture in the past 10 years. We should develop social norms that very clearly and pointedly discourage it.
    • MattyRad 4y ago
      Agreed, OP's comment is a perfect example of moralizing that saps energy and interest from generic everyday life, the exact type of conservativism that would rather live in a safe, boring world than an interesting but flawed one. Even if OP's comment is made in good faith (which I don't think it is), it shows a growing trend in the position that everyone shares collective responsibility for all wrongs committed.
• narrator 4y ago
  Has anyone interviewed anyone in the administration to figure out what their thinking was with the enactment of these policies? More importantly, who was responsible, and how did they get put in that position of authority? Our world seems to be about seizing power and then doing whatever you want with no clear explanation as to why. Everything is opaque these days or nonsensical. Just do what we tell you or get cancelled.
  • Avicebron 4y ago
    by being talented and politically ambitious?
• dgs_sgd 4y ago
  I can see why there's a push to eliminate Greek life given all the unfortunate events associated with it. But I'm extremely confused this example: > 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.” They can't even organize around a common interest unless it passes some bureaucrat's standard of diversity?
  • sandworm101 4y ago
    >unless it passes some bureaucrat's standard of diversity? That is what was said, but not why the school is attacking student organizations. Any student organization presents a liability to the school. An outdoor club, something with the schools name on it where student go out and teach each other how to ski on glaciers or climb rocks? The schools are listening to their lawyers, their insurance schemes. They are against any and all groups that operate without direct school management. I was a member of the VOC, UBC's outdoor club and an organization that predates the school itself. Every year I am surprised that the school hasn't moved to to shut them down. https://www.ubc-voc.com/tripagenda/upcoming.php https://www.ubc-voc.com/tripagenda/upcoming.php
    • majormajor 4y ago
      Go a layer deeper. Liability to whom? Blame the lawyers and blame the parents both. The lawyers part... that's a broader issue with how the American legal system is intentionally adversarial. The parents part... that could be changed more easily, but reducing risk is absolutely what they're pushing for currently. So, short of not depending on parents' money... which is of course tough at an expensive private school, but also even tough at public schools that are no longer even close to as affordable as they used to be too... what ya gonna do?
    • hooloovoo_zoo 4y ago
      I don’t think so. Stanford has several suicides a year. Any theoretical liability from and outdoor accident is a rounding error on their total liability for student deaths, morbid though it is.
• Hizonner 4y ago
  Why would you make your housing or social life, or indeed your weird edgy experiences of whatever kind, dependent on the same institution teaching your classes? That's the actual root cause. And I understand that some of these institutions require living on campus, at least in the first years, which is absolutely insane.
  • throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    Because most of the people who are going to college are getting there via life paths that will not have had them on the wrong side of big bureaucratic institutions very much so they don't see the danger.
  • hemloc_io 4y ago
    I had another comment about university involvement in student life higher up, but I wanted to address the residency thing specifically. Lots of these colleges require students living on campus for money for inflated rent, b/c students rent money can come from student loans (It's guaranteed income.). Same with mandatory dining plans. My college particularly hated cheaper dining options that opened up around there and used the local govt to try and shut them down, b/c it made the rent for commercial properties less desirable and made students switch off the uni plan lol. Sometimes they even engage in mutually beneficial arrangements with development companies like American Campus which will build a building, that the college then forces students to live in! Since the Uni owns the land that building is on it is tax advantaged. Rent money goes to American Campus so they build the building for cheap since it's guaranteed income. I believe they even give the building over to the college after X years. This was standard in all the colleges in that area btw, no escaping it.
  • closeparen 4y ago
    The thing you are getting at Stanford, or any place like it, is immersion in the campus community. If you want to view it as a transaction where you pay for access to lectures and someone to grade your work, then yes, a lot of things about it are going to seem dumb. Community colleges and commuter branches of state university systems serve those needs better.
• woodruffw 4y ago
  Since it keeps getting trotted out onto this site: Palladium is a far-right magazine masquerading as an independent publication. It's bankrolled by Peter Thiel, and its founders and editors are a veritable "who's who" of reactionary (and explicitly white supremacist[1]) thought leader types. [1]: https://splinternews.com/leaked-emails-show-how-white-nationalists-have-infiltra-1837681245 https://splinternews.com/leaked-emails-show-how-white-nation...
  • n8ta 4y ago
    Anywhere else I could read about this? Never heard of splinternews and I'm not familiar with it or Palladium.
  • preordained 4y ago
    Uh huh. And as to the article in question...exactly what is "far right"? I think the Overton window is rapidly running out of shifting room...
• akomtu 4y ago
  "Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting." Dolores Umbridge must have assumed the office of High Inquisitor at Stanford.
• cs137 4y ago
  I read this whine-piece and it had the opposite effect of what the author intended. I read it and thought, "Well, fucking good." I don't have anything against most Stanford students. (I mean, the startup bros and spoiled legacy kids can choke, but I imagine many if not most of them are normal people.) However, he's describing a college culture that is racist, classist, and misogynist... and I'm happy to see it get crushed. And sure, the crushing is being done by neoliberal authoritarian capitalists, who aren't my favorite people, but if a side effect of this is the next generation hating neoliberal authoritarian capitalists for whitewashing and degrading their college experience, then I'll take it.
  • preordained 4y ago
    It sounds like you took away from it exactly what you came for
  • CrazyStat 4y ago
    > However, he's describing She. Perhaps telling that you just assumed the author was a man.
• alamortsubite 4y ago
  I lived in one of the co-ops mentioned in the article in '93. None of us lugged a camera to KAbo, Exotic Erotic, or any band parties that year. The author doesn't seem to consider it, but I wonder if a better title for the article might be, Our Phones' War on Social Life.
• m463 4y ago
  I wonder if this is just the march of "accountability" that comes from ubiquitous cellphone cameras, cloud photos and the general erosion of student privacy (both self-inflicted and external)
• aaron695 4y ago
• WalterBright 4y ago
  How ineffably sad. Stanford might as well built some Soviet-style apartment buildings and complete the transformation to equality utopia.
  • junofan 4y ago
    Ha check out EVGR. Not winning anybody a Pritzker.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jackcosgrove 4y ago
  Sometimes it feels like we're living in the second Victorian age. Living sanitized lives and speaking sanitized language, with recurring bouts of moral panic. Even in the early 00s when I was in college everything seemed to have become lamer than it was just a decade prior. 20th century libertinism peaked in the 70s and has been in retreat since then.
  • tsol 4y ago
    But the big difference is this time the country is more secular than ever before
  • sanderjd 4y ago
    I dunno, I think the 90s were pretty great.
    • WorldPeas 4y ago
      but were you a social actor(above age 18, etc.) in the 80s or 70s? I'll agree, it could've been pretty great but perhaps not as free as beforehand. I'll invoke the allegory of the cave
    • maccolgan 4y ago
      Except the drugs I suppose.
  • droidist2 4y ago
    > 20th century libertinism peaked in the 70s and has been in retreat since then. I agree with the 70s. The AIDS epidemic began in the 80s, which could have been a big reason. The wild and free way of life has been in retreat, and epidemics cause big chunks to be lost all at once. Maybe we'll look back on 2020s the same way: "Wow society was so wild and free up until the 2010s."
  • bmj 4y ago
    20th century libertinism peaked in the 70s and has been in retreat since then. This is certainly true, but it is also not the only source of the problems outlined in the essay (and by others in this discussion). It's this: Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting. And this isn't just university life. Read Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head and Why We Drive to get a sense of the ways that safety-ism is the new American way. As humans, we develop cognitively and emotionally when we are placed in risky situations (whether emotionally or physically). Perhaps it's college kids doing dumb things, or perhaps it's kids building bike jumps in the local park or homemade zip lines in the local park.
• mathogre 4y ago
  It is a sad, soulless world in which we live today. I went to an otherwise anonymous state college on the east coast in the latter 1970s. One of the fun things I remember was picking up lunch from McDonalds using my former roommate's Ford Pinto. If you're not familiar with the Pinto, look it up. It was a "great" car. Yeah. Driving to McDonalds was fun and exciting! This Pinto was a 4 speed manual, where the shifter could easily be lifted out of the drive shaft tunnel. But that was trivial in comparison to the fact the brakes were limited to the parking brake. The drive to MickyD's was five to ten miles, including travel on a highway. You plan your stops. A real emergency would be bad, but regular driving was merely interesting. When I got back to my former roommate's house, we enjoyed a great lunch! The drive was fun. I'm saddened by what Stanford has become. I look at the list of companies founded by Stanford Alumni, and am duly impressed. I look at what the "edges" of the Stanford population is today, and see the end of Stanford dominance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_founded_by_Stanford_University_alumni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_founded_by_S... Here are your choices about life. It's wobbling on two wheels until you get it right or depending on training wheels and helmets to keep you safe. It's taking risks or saying, "Mommy, may I?" Mommy's gonna say, "No, honey, I don't want you to get hurt or for you to hurt anyone else." Training wheels and Mommy's protection? Fuck that.
  • neilv 4y ago
    I'm sympathetic to the idea of not infantilizing college students, but not to the anecdote of driving 5-10 miles to McDonald's in a Pinto without brakes. Sounds like it'd endanger others.
    • SamBam 4y ago
      Romanticizing pure stupidity is always one of nostalgia's greatest tricks.
      • chairmanwow1 4y ago
        You are exactly the problem OP is talking about
• jdkee 4y ago
  Similarly, Senior House shut down at MIT. See https://www.wired.com/story/a-weird-mit-dorm-dies-and-a-crisis-blooms-at-colleges/ https://www.wired.com/story/a-weird-mit-dorm-dies-and-a-cris...
• closeparen 4y ago
  UChicago also set to bulldozing the fun and quirky parts of its undergraduate residential life towards the tail end of my time there. A very similar sense of nostalgia, loss, and rage at the anonymous administrators hell-bent on whitewashing everything pervaded the campus. Perhaps it’s a phenomenon of our cultural moment. Or perhaps, like with Burning Man, it’s just part of the way that the communities of these institutions define themselves. https://chicagomaroon.com/2015/04/28/residents-of-satellite-dorms-protest-following-housing-changes-by-admin/ https://chicagomaroon.com/2015/04/28/residents-of-satellite-...
  • curiousllama 4y ago
    Oh man - those satellite forms closing was just chaos. At least when Pierce closed we got exploding toilets out of it. I was always disappointed at the sanitization of anything involving more than a half dozen people. Even lascivious ball was just tame
• at_a_remove 4y ago
  My last university is in the throes of getting rid of Greek Life. First it was crackdowns on dangerous hazing behavior, but you know how the slippery slope goes: next was alcohol, then just vague accusations. Meanwhile, there's a strong attempt from the usual suspects to convince students that Greek life is inherently racist. The sororities seem to have bought this concept more than the fraternities and some have closed their own chapters. Now, I have no love for Greek life but I think it ought to be an option. Some people really benefit from it.
• andai 4y ago
  >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. Stanford Daily writes: >The URGC also wrote that Outdoor House should pursue “meaningful engagement with faculty and staff in the important areas of equity and inclusion to more fully address the cultural concerns of the previous outdoor house that you included so explicitly in your application.” The house’s theme applicants focused on shifting its framework to address issues inherent in centering a house around outdoor culture — a traditionally white and wealthy space. In a Letter to the Community, Outdoor House community members wrote that “Centered on expensive hobbies, the house has not shown enough regard to the people we exclude, the land we recreate on, or perspectives outside the mainstream interpretation of outdoor recreation.” https://stanforddaily.com/2021/04/20/outdoor-house-loses-appeal-for-denied-theme-housing-haus-mitt-and-frosoco-also-discontinued-under-resx/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/04/20/outdoor-house-loses-app...
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• zbrozek 4y ago
  My interactions with Stanford administrators convinced me that I didn't need a graduate degree and that I would never donate to the school. Beyond that, I also got totally fed up trying to figure out how to get definitive positive permission to do anything. At one point I asked facilities if I could build an oven to cure composites. They reviewed and approved the plans. But when some other group within the school saw the result, they flipped out and hired a consultant to trump up false hazards. I was only clued in because a sympathetic dean leaked an email to me. I invited the fire marshal out to take a look, and I got a thumbs up to operate. I eventually moved the oven to rented space elsewhere since I was told I couldn't keep the thing on campus. I was then told my student group would be dissolved if we used off-campus facilities. We agreed that if I brought it back that my group could use it for its intended purpose for a year and then find another solution next year. I found a crew demolishing it at 4 AM the following morning. A deal's a deal, I guess. We went back to heating our composites with propane heaters aimed into a collapsible wood-and-plastic box, rather than our electrically heated concrete and flame-resistant foam box. The propane solution has been used every year since.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
    And we're told the reason China is rocketing ahead is because of IP theft. Meanwhile, we can't train competent engineers, technicians, and tradesmen, in the West, because everyone is too caught up in this type of gatekeeping and pigheadedness.
    • steve76 4y ago
      [dead]
    • ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
      When I was in college the science building had a machine shop. Old-time professors remembered when the department hired technicians to build experiments. Students would build crazy things there for classes, like 2 meter high tesla coils. After I graduated they built a new science building for $X00M. It was very eco-friendly, had its own cafe, lots of natural lighting, lots of nooks for small groups of students to gather and study ... but no machine shop. (Although since then they have added a 3D printer service.) But when you look at places with high rates of innovation like Shenzhen or SV, one of their strengths is that the people with knowledge of techniques are nearby to readily avaiable facilities for production. I wonder how much production knowledge has been lost from the West (c.f. the rust belt), and how much that will cost us in the long term.
• fallingfrog 4y ago
  The only problem with this article is that it tries to tie the loss of culture and fun with increasing diversity or something. As if including black people is gonna make it less fun? No, the loss of fun is due to financialization and lawyers getting involved with everything and trying to make everything about maximizing profits and fear of lawsuits. Got nothing to do with equality. The DSA for what it’s worth, throws great parties.
  • ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
    On the other hand, I would not be surprised if (lack of) diversity is being used as an excuse/cudgel to shut down student orgs.
    • fallingfrog 4y ago
      It’s a totally cynical excuse though. Just a cover for their real goals, which is to have less liability and a more reliable profit stream. The problem with this article is that it seems to take everything these administrators are saying at face value, as if they genuinely are shutting down campus life in retaliation for black people not getting invited to the parties. I mean come on. Here’s the Stanford board of directors: https://boardoftrustees.stanford.edu/board-members/ https://boardoftrustees.stanford.edu/board-members/ You think any of these people actually care about diversity as opposed to money?
  • barry-cotter 4y ago
    Diversity is not anti fun. Black people, Hispanic people, Asians, everyone else, lots of them are fun. Judgmental people are not fun. Woke scolds are not fun. People who get diversity jobs are not fun. The same personality type that were judgmental Christian censorship happy party haters in the 1950s are judgmental censorship happy party haters now. Let us hope that just as the 1960s followed the 1950s or the Roaring Twenties followed Victorian prudishness these people see their values trampled underfoot. Let freedom reign.
  • querez 4y ago
    To be honest, I often felt that a lot of Diversity and Equity campaigns lead to more sterile environments: when I (Not American) joined my current (American) corporation, DEI training hammered down the point to cut out any type of joke and remark unless it was super sterile. This was definitely not something I was used to before. I can see that such things are a necessity unless you want to end up in litigation all the time, because a joke or prank that might seem harmless to 99.9% of people will still offend that one outlier, and at the scale of huge corporations (or huge college campuses) you will find that one person who perceives this as yet another micro-agression at their expense. So everything that isn't bland and non-offensive gets increasingly outlawed, or at least discouraged. It definitely leads to a lot of self-censoring. Am I even allowed to poke fun at my own geekness, or make fun of stereotypes of my own nationality (obviously I wouldn't make fun of other people's traits these days), or will that offend any bystander that also shares these features with me? Of course, the end result is what you pointed out: in a litigation-happy place (like the US) everything that offends people is going to be dragged into the courts by someone, and is going to cost actual money, and everyone wants to avoid that.
• fallingfrog 4y ago
  The same people who (rightly) criticize draconian campus administrators will go out and yell about “law and order” the next day. You can’t have it both ways. There’s a reason things have gotten like this, and it’s all those people who sue the campus every time someone breaks a finger and all those investors who demand maximum profits from the university. Those same people are the ones demanding more police, more cameras everywhere, and so on. That would be the wealthy and powerful. Got nothing to do with diversity, nor will having less minorities on campus make the joy come back- if anything it’s the parents of the rich kids who are the problem. The insidious thing about an article like this is that it mixes truth with lies. And of course, the overpolicing not just on campus but all through our society is real! But it’s not caused by racial equity. That’s stupid.
• mdavis6890 4y ago
  I wonder if this has anything to do with a difference in demographics and college selection behavior of applicants. No data here, but maybe parents are taking an increasing roll in college choice, and the beaurocrats are simply catering to the wishes of those parents. Do they get parents coming on college tours saying “hey look at that awesome anarchist house?” Or are they getting parents saying “wow, look at all the new, clean, fancy building conducive to studying?” Honest question here. I’m can’t also help but think of Dead Poets Society. Which if you haven’t watched you should !
• derevaunseraun 4y ago
  > Stanford students live in brand new buildings with white walls. We have a $20 million dollar meditation center that nobody uses. But students didn’t ask for any of that. We just wanted a dirty house with friends. From my experience, covid exacerbated this significantly. I don't know if it's just the universities or a broader cultural shift. And as the article says, the administrators introduced more "community initiatives" to exonerate themselves of gleefully destroying campus life and letting it atrophy for two years straight (while making students pay in person tuition for online school) It feels like in the past couple years we've gone from a culture of spontaneity and grassroots initiative to one of bitter obsequiousness that's obsessed with taking itself seriously. The only way to subvert it is by turning it into one big joke edit: thanks to OP for posting this magazine, it's the first thing I've seen in a while that actually has something to say
  • efields 4y ago
    We moved early-covid to a neighborhood in my wife's hometown. Got twice the space inside and outside for the same price we sold (moving from major metro -> minor metro). In a few short months, our bff neighbors were gone, meeting new neighbors was hard, bars closed and spontaneity was gone, so we settled into Covid life. I was watching a lot of Monty Don and so I did the most logical thing to do to a new backyard: I ripped up a huge chunk of grass on the southern side of the house, built soil with lasagna gardening techniques, and hand-laid a bluestone path. Sure, gardening is some privileged shit in this day and age, but I basically put myself down a 5 year path determined by seasons, weather, microbiology and how much I was willing to learn in my spare time. It's beautiful chaos half the time, but it's starting to surprise and delight everyone who visits. It's also a place to be less serious about life. You need some humility. Sometimes being off by two weeks can ruin a plant. LOL let's try again next year. No biggie. Americans need more of that. It doesn't have to be gardening of course, but please go out of your way to find something that can introduce more surprising and rewarding variables into your life that you enjoy figuring out.
  • watwut 4y ago
    Interesting aspect of this is that in Stanford survey, overwhelming majority of students (83%) want to see Greek life reformed, de-housed, or abolished. This is not administrators against students in general issue. This is administration doing moves that are broadly supported by majority of students.
• fallingfrog 4y ago
  Some of the last places where there is real freedom are public places, the commons- national parks. Wild places. There are trails I’ve climbed where I had to drag myself over a ledge next to a 200 foot drop. And you feel alive. Imagine if that was privatized, how fast they’d put a barbed wire fence around that spot. Freedom is found in the places where money hasn’t infected yet- sadly that’s not college campuses, not anymore. We need to reclaim freedom, and taking risk, as a left wing value- something you are left with when the cops and bean counters go away. Those nude houses and communal parties were common spaces- where people could be free without anyone being in charge. That’s the beating heart of anarchism. Again, you can’t have both freedom to experiment and also demand law and order at the same time.
  • watwut 4y ago
    You would not be allowed to make a hill out of sand or use bulldozer in national parks. In national park, salamander habitat takes precedse over your wish to swim. Loud parties are not allowed either.
• fallingfrog 4y ago
  Here’s the Stanford board of trustees: Felix J. Baker, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Baker Brothers Investments, New York, NY Richard N. Barton, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Zillow, Seattle, WA Aneel Bhusri, Co-Founder & CEO, Workday, San Francisco, CA DeAngela J. Burns-Wallace, Secretary of Administration & CITO, State of Kansas, Topeka, KS Michael C. Camuñez, President & CEO, Monarch Global Strategies LLC, Los Angeles, CA Michelle R. Clayman, Managing Partner & Chief Investment Officer, New Amsterdam Partners LLC, New York, NY RoAnn Costin, President, Wilderness Point Investments, Cambridge, MA James G. Coulter, Founding Partner & Executive Chairman, TPG Capital, LP, San Francisco, CA Roberta B. Denning, Greenwich, CT Katharine B. Duhamel, San Francisco, CA José E. Feliciano, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Clearlake Capital Group LP, Santa Monica, CA Henry A. Fernandez, Chairman and CEO, MSCI Inc., New York, NY Angela S. Filo, Co-Founder, Yellow Chair Foundation, Palo Alto, CA Sakurako D. Fisher, San Francisco, CA James D. Halper, Executive Chairman, Owl Rock Opportunities Fund, Los Angeles, CA Marc E. Jones, Chairman & CEO, Aeris, San Jose, CA Tonia G. Karr, San Francisco, CA Sarah H. Ketterer, CEO, Causeway Capital, Los Angeles, CA Carol C. Lam, Attorney, La Jolla, CA Marc S. Lipschultz, Co-Founder and President, Owl Rock Capital, New York, NY Kenneth E. Olivier, Chairman Emeritus, Dodge and Cox, San Francisco, CA Carrie W. Penner, Walton Family Foundation, Menlo Park, CA Laurene Powell Jobs, Founder/President, Emerson Collective, Palo Alto, CA Mindy B. Rogers, Atherton, CA Lily Sarafan, CEO, Home Care Assistance, San Francisco, CA Srinija Srinivasan, Palo Alto, CA Jeffrey E. Stone, Chairman Emeritus and Senior Partner, McDermott Will & Emery LLP, Chicago IL Gene T Sykes, Global Co-Head of M&A & Chairman, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Los Angeles, CA Marc Tessier-Lavigne, President, Stanford University, Stanford, CA Elizabeth H. Weatherman, Special Limited Partner, Warburg Pincus, LLC, New York, NY Maurice C. Werdegar, CEO, WTI, Portola Valley, CA Clara Wu Tsai, La Jolla, CA Jerry Yang, AME Cloud Ventures, Palo Alto, CA Charles D. Young, Chief Operating Officer, Invitation Homes, Dallas, TX You really think any of these people care about diversity? They care about money.
• femiagbabiaka 4y ago
  What is the obsession with college campuses and what happens on them? I feel like there is a circuit of people obsessed with producing content claiming that random campus scandals say something about society at large.
  • asdff 4y ago
    It's a perennial bone of contention because people who have a good experience in college want it to stay the same for everyone, and people who have a bad experience want to burn it down. Makes for good clickbait and everyone loves to see some b roll footage of greek letters on local news.
  • mschuster91 4y ago
    > I feel like there is a circuit of people obsessed with producing content claiming that random campus scandals say something about society at large. The people who organize the scandalized behavior used to be the ones that went on to the leadership roles of society and normalized that sort of conduct in their companies. So yes, tackling the problem on the root was necessary, and we will see the fruits of that over the next decades as the "old guard" retires and workplaces will become at least somewhat better as a result.
• musicale 4y ago
  I'm sure there's a reason (probably related to lawsuits, liability, or negative publicity) for universities cracking down on student-run housing options, but it flies in the face of the idea of "residential education" - that students could actually learn something by being in charge of their residences. Since university administrations can just wait for undergraduate cohorts to graduate, it's up to alumni, graduate students, faculty and staff to push back, but they rarely do. The point about eliminating certain houses during the pandemic makes sense - the administration had the advantage of undergraduate turnover (and loss of institutional memory) as well as pandemic stress and amnesia. If we look at Yahoo! or Google, which originally were hosted on Stanford's network (though Excite was hosted off campus?), or Cromemco, a computer company that was actually started in a graduate engineering dorm at Stanford in the 1970s, we can see that ultimately it may be in the university's (financial) interest to sometimes let students do what they want. Then again Facebook originated as an abuse of Harvard's undergraduate face book, so maybe some cracking down isn't entirely a bad idea.
  • vianneychevalie 4y ago
    VLC was born out of the need of Centrale students to share videos efficiently on-campus. Centrale being one of the top French engineering schools.
• musicale 4y ago
  > the administration put the notoriously anti-establishment Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band on “super-probation,” I guess double secret probation didn't work.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• aidenn0 4y ago
  > Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting. Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon now, but this sounds like the direction the entire country has been heading for a long time now. For each individual choice between risky joy and safe ennui we have chosen the safe option, starting with the riskiest (or at least perceived to be riskiest) behaviors and continuing on. It's hard to argue against most of these choices in isolation, but the final result seems clearly undesirable to me.
  • tim333 4y ago
    Though ironically the rate of young people dying in the US is considerably higher than most developed countries. I guess drugs, guns etc. https://www.prb.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/population-bulletin-early-life-mortality.pdf https://www.prb.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/population-bu...
• asdff 4y ago
  I think what gets missed about greek life in general is that its just a group of students. It's not inherently more dangerous or not than any other group of college age students. In my experiences in undergrad, organizations like club rugby or even the marching band were where you seriously got hazed or had risky partying going on. Greek parties in contrast were regulated. Representatives from the interfraternity council would walk through and inspect that you had people staffing the party and supplies like water and food. Pledges would work as bouncers or watch out for people getting too ill. People who were misbehaving would get tossed out routinely for the parties open more to the public, and members showing poor behavior would also get removed from the fraternity entirely. Its a much safer environment to party than at some random off campus house where there's no rules, no inspections, no one deciding not to party and be a bouncer, and therefore anyone is potentially wandering in off the street into the party. Ironic that the university would go so hard after these student orgs that actually do a good job managing things like underage drinking or keeping drug use from getting too out of hand, while turning a blind eye to the fact that most partying isn't even happening withing student orgs but just from random people throwing big parties in their off campus houses. Just goes to show they care more about optics and how easy it is for the media to write a hit piece on greek life than actually being pragmatic about safety.
  • datavirtue 4y ago
    I think they call it: "throwing the baby out with the bath water." Jaw dropping incompetence caused by corporate Woke panic.
  • _fat_santa 4y ago
    I can totally see the logic of why the admin would want to remove them. Popular school, always in the news, greek life poses a liability, even if that liability is so small. The DEI Office is screaming because greek life is a diversity nightmare to the casual onlooker (the one writing the hit pieces, which is what they are really scared of). The logic makes perfect sense from one line of thinking, but it's stupid because it overlooks the benefits of these places. I almost can't describe why they are beneficial, part of it is the community and part of it is just having to deal with problems and conflict. I look at greek life as "partially structured community building". This is where a university gives you a piece of land and a building, some funding, and tells the students to figure the rest out with a framework to guide them. Inevitably there will be messy moments, but that's kind of the point, because greek life is basically a giant class on figuring out life. You drink on a tuesday afternoon on the front lawn when you're a greek so you can realize that's not a worthwhile thing to do as an adult.
• beefman 4y ago
  In fairness, this sort of transformation has taken place in every station of American life. My dweeb chemist parents regularly hosted and attended parties with their dweeb chemist colleauges. My wife and I have hosted 3 parties in the last 17 years. We had to fight for the modicum of freedom our kids had growing up. Our oldest now has a car but his licence forbids him taking friends along.[1] Our youngest built his first model rocket this week, to find it's only feasible to launch with a club. The nearest club, which used to host monthly launches at Moffett field, is closed until Fall. So it'll take as long to drive to and from the launch site as to buid a rocket, and the maximum launch cadence is monthly. Not a viable hobby for a 13-year-old, unless it's your only hobby and your parents help with everything. Churches have disintegrated, workplaces are toast. The loss of "third places" was measured by Putnam.[2] Somebody on twitter suggested companies should have sports teams, aparrently unaware it was quite common until recently. On my first day of work in California in 2001, my boss asked me if I'd tried ecstasy yet.[3] Nowadays you must be mentally ill to take it, under a doctor's supervision. Hope you get better like us! [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-education-and-safety/educational-materials/fast-facts/provisional-licensing-ffdl-19/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-education-and-safety/ed... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone [3] https://twitter.com/clumma/status/1519377410810023936 https://twitter.com/clumma/status/1519377410810023936
  • spicymaki 4y ago
    Indeed, I think we have too many laws on the books. However in this climate I am afraid of unscrupulous legislators who are looking pare down on hard fought freedoms for ideological reasons.
  • javajosh 4y ago
    Freedom is wonderful because you can go out and build what you want to see more of in the world. Chances are, if you're missing "third places" in your life, then other people are. Or, just as likely, there is a reason you gave it up, and maybe you weren't aware of the trade-offs at the time, and now it's time to correct it. Universities are (somewhat) unique in that they are microcosms, with very central control over a relatively small population. But the public, the world at large, is far more chaotic and free. The problem is, as usual, a fundamentally corrupt justice system that serves only the parochial, low-intelligence, low-curiosity instincts of it's law enforcement officers ("that don't look right. Time to put a stop to it, and if they don't stop I'll beat and arrest them under one of the many pretexts available to me." Lots of things don't look right when your IQ is 90.) Time, of course, is the enemy, since the court defaults to "no". The court is not interested in speeding anything up. Ever. Still, scrappy entrepreneurs hanging a shingle and offering a "third place" for profit are somewhat respected by the establishment. Hence 3rd wave coffee shops with live music, microbreweries, and so on. Otherwise the need to keep a low profile with physical exploration puts a serious damper on real world experimentation, much to the detriment of society as a whole. This is, perhaps, the most positive light in which to see the conservative side of the gun debate: if dying kids isn't enough to motivate gun control, then its also not enough to prevent them from launching rockets or mixing up explosives in their kitchen for fun, or working on cars in their front-yards. At least if they die doing one of those things, they'll die happy. And if they don't die, they'll know something about the world.
• DocTomoe 4y ago
  It's funny ... the article makes a great reading about creeping authoritarianism, but all I get from each paragraph is "do not hire Stanford graduates that left after 2013". These organisations exist in their splendour because society gives them a higher perceived status than the community college next door. This status will quickly drop if graduates become unhireable.
• seu 4y ago
  So many complaints about how their "social life" is destroyed and cultural freedoms lost for the sake of "financial interests", but then those same "freedom loving", "spontaneous" grads go later and create startups that do exactly that with other people's life, turning everything we value and cherish into one or another form of homologized business, standardizing our interactions and destroying community in city life. You don't have the "spontaneity" of going to a shop anymore, everything is delivery. You don't share public transport anymore (and what is that if not enjoying living in "community" with other people?), you take an uber (and when it's finally robotized, you won't even talk with a driver anymore). You don't ask for directions or recommendations, you just look at maps or yelp or whatever. Social life is being destroyed by exactly that same people, and I find those complaints quite cynical.
  • aembleton 4y ago
    Where do you live? I certainly have the spontaneity of going to a shop - I cycled to one yesterday; much more fun than waiting for a delivery. I share public transport - its much cheaper than getting an Uber, something I haven't done for a couple of years.
• sharikous 4y ago
  I wonder if there is a connection with smartphone culture. In the old times you lived in your physical environment and did not spend an inordinate amount of time in social network or the internet. Students would have been more defensive with regards to their bastions of freedom against the administration if this felt closer to them- that's my guess
• g42gregory 4y ago
  It's not clear to me that US/Western Universities continue to be worth the money, resources and mindshare that they occupy. Should we continue to bother? Is the world turning to Asia? Are we not better off sending our kids to Singapore's Universities (the instruction is in English), for example?
• Claude_Shannon 4y ago
  I don't see why it is being complained about. University has no moral duty to provide social life, their only goal (and, the goal of the students!) should be to teach / learn.
  • imgabe 4y ago
    Of course, we should never do anything beneficial unless there is an explicit moral duty to do it. In this case, all that Standford had to do was nothing and let the emergent social life continue uninterrupted. Did they have a moral duty to interfere with the students' right to free association?
    • mschuster91 4y ago
      > In this case, all that Standford had to do was nothing and let the emergent social life continue uninterrupted. And keep watching as students were routinely subjected to hazing, excessive drinking and sometimes outright criminal behavior such as overt discrimination, hate crimes, sexual assault up to rapes? Fraternities had more than enough chances to rein in the worst of the bad behavior and they failed ridiculously at that. At some point, adults had to take over since self-regulation failed.
      • imgabe 4y ago
        Nobody is subjected to hazing or “excessive“ drinking. These are voluntary activities you can choose to engage in or not. For criminal matters there’s the police. It was not limited only to fraternities either.
        • Claude_Shannon 4y ago
          Mhmmm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hazing_deaths_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hazing_deaths_in_the_U...
          • imgabe 4y ago
• lutorm 4y ago
  The amount of control American universities exercise over their students is mind-boggling to me. I went to Uppsala University in Sweden, which has a rich and varied student life. But none of that has anything to do with the University (any of them, there are 3 in town). The universities provide education, period. Housing is not run by the University, and it certainly has nothing to do with student social life. What stops a bunch of Stanford students from starting whatever club they want in their spare time? Obviously it can't be on Stanford property, so maybe that's the difference, they have their students over a barrel because they can deny them access to housing which I guess is hard to find otherwise?
  • michaelt 4y ago
    > What stops a bunch of Stanford students from starting whatever club they want in their spare time? In my country, nothing - but if your club is willing to submit to the university authorities, they will provide some resources that will help the club survive your graduation. For example, spaces at new-member-recruitment events when the university gets a new class of students, usage of university rooms outside of teaching hours, some storage space, maybe some money, and so on. And because clubs for students have to completely replace their membership every 3-4 years in order to survive, that help can be the difference between a club that continues to exist and one that doesn't.
  • _fat_santa 4y ago
    > What stops a bunch of Stanford students from starting whatever club they want in their spare time? Technically nothing, but often times its funding. If it's a university sponsored club, the school will give you money in certain cases. Often times students rely on that money to keep the club going, depending on what they do.
  • DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
    American universities are not at all like European universities. Think summer camp for young adults, with classes in the background. Campus life and sports are just as important as academics. European universities are much more bare-bones and focused on their core mission of education. That's mostly good, in my opinion, as university is way cheaper in Europe and students tend to be more focused on their studies, but it also means that as a student, you're much more on your own. At an American university, there are always dozens of administrators or counselors you can go talk to about any issue you have, from "How do I register for this class?" to issues in your personal life.
• jaqalopes 4y ago
  Nothing could possibly elicit less sympathy from me than forcing frat bros to follow the normal rules that everyone else already lives by. The entire institution of college Greek life exists to enable and conceal sexual assault and unmeritocratic career networking. If you need that kind of toxic infrastructure to feel like you have a social life then that's pretty pathetic.
• Metacelsus 4y ago
  Seems like MIT's crackdown on Senior House.