6 ms·

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

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.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      One factor might be the ubiquity of recording devices. It seems reasonable that people behave differently if they think their spontaneity might expose them to liability down the road due to a recording of it.
      - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
        There’s also something about dating. The kids I know in college right now have no interest in dating or love or romantic involvement. I don’t know how that applies here, but it’s a big change from when I was in college.
        the_only_law 4y ago
        A little past college age now, but even people I know in their late 20s have given up on dating and such. I won't pretend to know all the reasons, but I find it funny how much every one I know hates dating apps for good reasons, but always comes back to them.
        insightcheck 4y ago
        > "A little past college age now, but even people I know in their late 20s have given up on dating and such." A major reason is that romantic relationship experience compounds, and so it's difficult to start with relationships later in life. For many people, it's much harder to start a first romantic relationship, than it is to develop subsequent ones. Multiple rejections early on, especially when other people seem to find relationships easy, can lead to reduced self-esteem ("Am I creepy? What is wrong with me?" etc.). It can lead to habits such as having a huge fear of rejection and flirting through physical touch, which leads to a lack of confidence reinforced by further rejection, which further erodes romantic confidence in a negative feedback loop. Low-quality romantic advice on the internet, such as on Reddit, worsens the problem. Anecdotally, I've found the common, highly-upvoted advice of telling a person "I like you" before you're dating to never once work in my personal experience, while leaning in and pausing while paying attention to social cues to kiss on a date actually led to relationships. My advice to any guys in their 20s trying to date would be: 1) ignore most internet advice on dating (maybe not this comment, but absolutely avoid incel communities and 4chan), 2) consider an experienced psychotherapist for anxiety if you have rejection anxiety, and 3) try to observe a male friend who is good at relationships who is a moral person, and see what he does (e.g. jokes in a flirty way, and notice how he flirts with touch); if you don't know a friend like this, try to make one (e.g. through a social activity like rock climbing or martial arts).
    - insightcheck 4y ago
      An essay that thoroughly explores this is called "The Coddling of the American Mind," which was published in The Atlantic in 2015 [1]. The essay presents an argument against the aversion of covering certain points of views in a university course, with the rationale that it might cause emotional harm against students. Another article that shows how student tolerance of opposing views in the US has changed over time was published in Vox [2.] However, for a diversity of views, a strong counter-argument to the above narrative was published in Times Higher Education [3], which argues that it's quite feasible to teach courses with controversial material, and educators should not be afraid of their students. These articles include evidence that university student culture has indeed changed, with reports of certain groups of university students being more outspoken about the coverage of certain controversial material in courses. There are arguments for and against about whether or not this change is good for the development of university students as people, but there has certainly been a change in university student culture. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod... [2] https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afrai... [3] https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/06/09/essay-rejects-hype-over-fear-liberal-or-diverse-students https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/06/09/essay-reject...
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
> 99.9% of these dumbass rules are made due to actuaries in insurance companies or lawyers trying to minimize university liability. I think you're vastly over-estimating the numbers being crunched and vastly over estimating the "well I don't like it and it could lead to some unspecified harm and it's hard to quantify the good that it brings in so we're going to reduce/control/ban it"
- hemloc_io 4y ago
  Sorry, may have been too vague on that point. I do agree there is not likely to be some sort of mustache twirling excel crunching person in middle management who flips the "anti-party" switch. I do think that a lot of this stuff is the output of working groups who use data to tackle common issues you see in Unis though, generally with good intentions. However there are certain times when this actually is the case. For e.g. when it comes to Greek life you'll see many social/party related rules that are made specifically for/by their insurance providers. These often are things like you must keep a licensed bartender to serve drinks, everyone can only bring X amount that have to be checked in and served back them, every social event must be registered with the university etc. As for minimizing liabilities, my university had many trainings you must go through if you're part of any student org. The trainings are, at least in my experiance, not useful and only serve as something the university can point to in the event of an issue and say "hey we tried". I'd assume it's standard practice for most colleges, and while there may be some level of true belief in the effectiveness of these trainings I really doubt it considering they mostly amounted to motivational speakers who charge obscene speaking fees. This happened in dorms too, but is less extensive, and frankly more useful b/c it was student (RA) to student and not a speech. Also see most COVID policy written related to a uni. Particularly in the beginning of the pandemic. At my school, parents were forced to pickup their children from across the country in crowded dorms all at once. This was back when it was assumed covid had a huge death rate and was already spreading where we lived. My assumption is this was done to minimize liability for the university, even at the expense of infecting anywhere these kids were going. I fail to see how this was medically the best move. There was no quarantine period, and no-one was given the ability to stay unless you had a valid reason. (This included greek life and other mixed university-managed + student org housing, which doubly makes no sense unless it was about liability, since they were entirely independent from university in terms of maintenance, access etc) A bunch of orgs on my campus petitioned the university to stay, especially those with vulnerable family and we were universally told to leave or we'd be arrested for trespass. Another was seeing that our university police department owned riot gear. Sorry for ranting a bit, I do admit I have a chip on my shoulder about that.
cs137 4y ago
I was in college in the 2000s and this bureaucratization was starting already. The class of 2006 having cell phones was a minor scandal--college students were no longer exploratory rulebreakers, but rich kids (back then, the assumption was that someone with a cell phone had money) with helicopter parents. I don't know how much there was an actual change, but the feeling of a shift from a cool Gen X to a decidedly less interesting Millennial college culture (this isn't to say that Millennials are less interesting individually--I don't believe it to be true) happened around 2002. (Fall 2001 was an something different entirely, because the obvious.) Nostalgia is a powerful disinfectant. The people who pulled off the pranks of yore risked getting in serious trouble as much then as they do now. It's just that hindsight changes one's view of things: the misbehaviors one got away with are now seen as harmless... and this is especially pronounced among people whose social class means they get away with almost everything.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  I had the opportunity to go back and visit my undergrad (not Stanford) university recently, where I spent much of the 90s as a student in various states of mischief and sobriety. Maybe I am just remembering things with nostalgia-colored glasses, but it just seems so different now. So bland and vanilla. Everything that was quirky, silly, grimy, dangerous, weirdo, degenerate, beatnik, or irreverent is now gone. Every building, hall and dorm in the place looks and feels like a sterile, gray hospital now. The arcades and dive bars and unique hangouts that used to be down on the city's main road have been replaced with banks, fast food chains, clothing factory outlets, more banks, trendy bistros that spent $1M on just their logo, and so on. Everything is just soulless and cardboard now. Even the students! The guys walking around don't stink like we used to--they all have this weird happy preppy-optimist-i'm-on-camera vibe. Nobody is retching on the sidewalk or sitting in the shrubs high as a kite. Everyone just seems to be kind of nervously hustling everywhere. Feels like a foreign country honestly.
  - nullc 4y ago
    > happy preppy-optimist-i'm-on-camera vibe perhaps because everyone is actually on camera all the time now, at least when they're in public-- and almost all the space at a university is public enough for that purpose.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
watwut 4y ago
Tho, Greek life could exist only inside universities, because it was facilitated by universities. Actual university uninvolved life would had students renting flats and houses from homeowners around (which would not be bad at all). It would had street numbers on houses and no one would treat it as insult. If you made sand hill in house or in someones garden or wherever, owners would take issue with it.

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.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    One factor might be the ubiquity of recording devices. It seems reasonable that people behave differently if they think their spontaneity might expose them to liability down the road due to a recording of it.
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      There’s also something about dating. The kids I know in college right now have no interest in dating or love or romantic involvement. I don’t know how that applies here, but it’s a big change from when I was in college.
      - the_only_law 4y ago
        A little past college age now, but even people I know in their late 20s have given up on dating and such. I won't pretend to know all the reasons, but I find it funny how much every one I know hates dating apps for good reasons, but always comes back to them.
        insightcheck 4y ago
        > "A little past college age now, but even people I know in their late 20s have given up on dating and such." A major reason is that romantic relationship experience compounds, and so it's difficult to start with relationships later in life. For many people, it's much harder to start a first romantic relationship, than it is to develop subsequent ones. Multiple rejections early on, especially when other people seem to find relationships easy, can lead to reduced self-esteem ("Am I creepy? What is wrong with me?" etc.). It can lead to habits such as having a huge fear of rejection and flirting through physical touch, which leads to a lack of confidence reinforced by further rejection, which further erodes romantic confidence in a negative feedback loop. Low-quality romantic advice on the internet, such as on Reddit, worsens the problem. Anecdotally, I've found the common, highly-upvoted advice of telling a person "I like you" before you're dating to never once work in my personal experience, while leaning in and pausing while paying attention to social cues to kiss on a date actually led to relationships. My advice to any guys in their 20s trying to date would be: 1) ignore most internet advice on dating (maybe not this comment, but absolutely avoid incel communities and 4chan), 2) consider an experienced psychotherapist for anxiety if you have rejection anxiety, and 3) try to observe a male friend who is good at relationships who is a moral person, and see what he does (e.g. jokes in a flirty way, and notice how he flirts with touch); if you don't know a friend like this, try to make one (e.g. through a social activity like rock climbing or martial arts).
  - insightcheck 4y ago
    An essay that thoroughly explores this is called "The Coddling of the American Mind," which was published in The Atlantic in 2015 [1]. The essay presents an argument against the aversion of covering certain points of views in a university course, with the rationale that it might cause emotional harm against students. Another article that shows how student tolerance of opposing views in the US has changed over time was published in Vox [2.] However, for a diversity of views, a strong counter-argument to the above narrative was published in Times Higher Education [3], which argues that it's quite feasible to teach courses with controversial material, and educators should not be afraid of their students. These articles include evidence that university student culture has indeed changed, with reports of certain groups of university students being more outspoken about the coverage of certain controversial material in courses. There are arguments for and against about whether or not this change is good for the development of university students as people, but there has certainly been a change in university student culture. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod... [2] https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afrai... [3] https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/06/09/essay-rejects-hype-over-fear-liberal-or-diverse-students https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/06/09/essay-reject...

throwaway0a5e 4y ago

> 99.9% of these dumbass rules are made due to actuaries in insurance companies or lawyers trying to minimize university liability. I think you're vastly over-estimating the numbers being crunched and vastly over estimating the "well I don't like it and it could lead to some unspecified harm and it's hard to quantify the good that it brings in so we're going to reduce/control/ban it"

hemloc_io 4y ago
Sorry, may have been too vague on that point. I do agree there is not likely to be some sort of mustache twirling excel crunching person in middle management who flips the "anti-party" switch. I do think that a lot of this stuff is the output of working groups who use data to tackle common issues you see in Unis though, generally with good intentions. However there are certain times when this actually is the case. For e.g. when it comes to Greek life you'll see many social/party related rules that are made specifically for/by their insurance providers. These often are things like you must keep a licensed bartender to serve drinks, everyone can only bring X amount that have to be checked in and served back them, every social event must be registered with the university etc. As for minimizing liabilities, my university had many trainings you must go through if you're part of any student org. The trainings are, at least in my experiance, not useful and only serve as something the university can point to in the event of an issue and say "hey we tried". I'd assume it's standard practice for most colleges, and while there may be some level of true belief in the effectiveness of these trainings I really doubt it considering they mostly amounted to motivational speakers who charge obscene speaking fees. This happened in dorms too, but is less extensive, and frankly more useful b/c it was student (RA) to student and not a speech. Also see most COVID policy written related to a uni. Particularly in the beginning of the pandemic. At my school, parents were forced to pickup their children from across the country in crowded dorms all at once. This was back when it was assumed covid had a huge death rate and was already spreading where we lived. My assumption is this was done to minimize liability for the university, even at the expense of infecting anywhere these kids were going. I fail to see how this was medically the best move. There was no quarantine period, and no-one was given the ability to stay unless you had a valid reason. (This included greek life and other mixed university-managed + student org housing, which doubly makes no sense unless it was about liability, since they were entirely independent from university in terms of maintenance, access etc) A bunch of orgs on my campus petitioned the university to stay, especially those with vulnerable family and we were universally told to leave or we'd be arrested for trespass. Another was seeing that our university police department owned riot gear. Sorry for ranting a bit, I do admit I have a chip on my shoulder about that.

cs137 4y ago

I was in college in the 2000s and this bureaucratization was starting already. The class of 2006 having cell phones was a minor scandal--college students were no longer exploratory rulebreakers, but rich kids (back then, the assumption was that someone with a cell phone had money) with helicopter parents. I don't know how much there was an actual change, but the feeling of a shift from a cool Gen X to a decidedly less interesting Millennial college culture (this isn't to say that Millennials are less interesting individually--I don't believe it to be true) happened around 2002. (Fall 2001 was an something different entirely, because the obvious.) Nostalgia is a powerful disinfectant. The people who pulled off the pranks of yore risked getting in serious trouble as much then as they do now. It's just that hindsight changes one's view of things: the misbehaviors one got away with are now seen as harmless... and this is especially pronounced among people whose social class means they get away with almost everything.

ryandrake 4y ago
I had the opportunity to go back and visit my undergrad (not Stanford) university recently, where I spent much of the 90s as a student in various states of mischief and sobriety. Maybe I am just remembering things with nostalgia-colored glasses, but it just seems so different now. So bland and vanilla. Everything that was quirky, silly, grimy, dangerous, weirdo, degenerate, beatnik, or irreverent is now gone. Every building, hall and dorm in the place looks and feels like a sterile, gray hospital now. The arcades and dive bars and unique hangouts that used to be down on the city's main road have been replaced with banks, fast food chains, clothing factory outlets, more banks, trendy bistros that spent $1M on just their logo, and so on. Everything is just soulless and cardboard now. Even the students! The guys walking around don't stink like we used to--they all have this weird happy preppy-optimist-i'm-on-camera vibe. Nobody is retching on the sidewalk or sitting in the shrubs high as a kite. Everyone just seems to be kind of nervously hustling everywhere. Feels like a foreign country honestly.
- nullc 4y ago
  > happy preppy-optimist-i'm-on-camera vibe perhaps because everyone is actually on camera all the time now, at least when they're in public-- and almost all the space at a university is public enough for that purpose.

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watwut 4y ago

Tho, Greek life could exist only inside universities, because it was facilitated by universities. Actual university uninvolved life would had students renting flats and houses from homeowners around (which would not be bad at all). It would had street numbers on houses and no one would treat it as insult. If you made sand hill in house or in someones garden or wherever, owners would take issue with it.