21 ms·

Stanford hates fun

• vimax 4y ago
  Always worth keeping in mind that Stanford protected John Yoo after authoring the torture memos, and it was MIT that pushed for prosecuting Aaron Schwartz. University administrators are as much your friend as HR. Edit: Berkeley not Stanford protected John Yoo
  • drewda 4y ago
    For what it's worth, John Yoo is a professor at UC Berkeley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo#Academic_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo#Academic_career
    • uoaei 4y ago
      What is that worth?
      • computerphage 4y ago
        I downvoted because your comment struck me as not caring at all about the facts.
        • uoaei 4y ago
          It's an earnest question. I don't see it as worth enough to alter the conclusion. It explains their defense, but it certainly doesn't excuse it.
• cs702 4y ago
  Wow, I don't always agree with Cochrane, but I found myself nodding in agreement to everything in this OP. The passage about Stanford asking students to apply two weeks in advance to host parties (WTF?), with an advance list of attendees (WTF?), is shocking to me. The university's response is surreal. Quoting from the WSJ: > Samuel Santos Jr., associate vice provost of inclusion, community and integrative learning within the Division of Student Affairs, says the school is working to address students’ concerns about Stanford’s social atmosphere. “The party-planning process will be streamlined and more administrators will be hired to help facilitate student social life.” “We want events to be fun, inclusive and safe and those things can happen,” Mr. Santos says. “They just require collaboration and honesty.” I couldn't agree more with Cochrane that the real problem lies in the fact that Stanford's bureaucracy has gotten so bloated that it now has an apparatchik with the title of "associate vice provost of inclusion, community and integrative learning" (not a provost, not a vice provost, but an associate vice provost... WTF?), who promises that "the party-planning process will be streamlined" (WTF?) and that "more administrators will be hired" to do so (WTF?).
  • pstuart 4y ago
    Think of the children!
    • wilg 4y ago
      Or, in this case, adults.
      • analog31 4y ago
        A special kind of "adults." I went to college and grad school in two different towns. Each college had its own culture of fun. The kind of "fun" that the colleges condoned occurred in a sheltered atmosphere, and would have been utterly off limits to the adult residents of the surrounding towns.
        • yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
          > The kind of "fun" that the colleges condoned occurred in a sheltered atmosphere, and would have been utterly off limits to the adult residents of the surrounding towns. ... What kind of "fun" is that? The only thing that I can think of that would be off limits to non-students is literally illegal activities that students shouldn't be doing either.
  • jwond 4y ago
    > who promises that "the party-planning process will be streamlined" (WTF?) and that "more administrators will be hired" to do so (WTF?). The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy
  • amluto 4y ago
    > and more administrators will be hired to help facilitate student social life. Pre-registration of large (“level 3”) parties has been a thing for a long time. But when I was there, one pre-registered a party, one did so online, and I imagine a single administrator could keep up with the entire workload. This made sense for a few reasons, including: Parties can be dangerous affairs, and campus security needs to know where to direct its attention. (There is no need for campus security to be hostile to parties, but a good campus police force should help ensure everyone’s safety.) Student groups throwing parties generally want good attendance, and pre-registration allows them to coordinate dates. Pre-registration helps avoid facepalms like throwing a party during finals. For what it’s worth, the actual policy: https://vaden.stanford.edu/super/education/parties/party-planning-guide/student-party-policy-guidelines https://vaden.stanford.edu/super/education/parties/party-pla... Isn’t that crazy.
• kenjackson 4y ago
  Weird. I know several undergrad and grad students now and recently graduated from Stanford and they are all really enjoying it and having fun. Literally every one of them. I suspect that what is fun is different for different people.
  • rightbyte 4y ago
    Maybe the party rules are applied arbitrary to get rid of students that annoy the admin somehow. I believe alot of rules that are not followed are set up for that purpose.
    • kenjackson 4y ago
      Yes. This is a well known tactic. Although the people complaining in this article are usually the demo that perpetuates it.
    • slaymaker1907 4y ago
      At my university, there were a bunch of arbitrary rules for parties at Greek houses. Solution: we hosted most the parties off campus in unofficial satellite houses. I’m sure people will find some loophole to avoid these onerous requirements.
  • quailfarmer 4y ago
    As a recent grad, I think there's room to have both had an amazing experience and be upset about huge structural issues. The student body is mostly great, the education is generally very good, and the industry connections are amazing. At the same time, the administration has become corporatized, and the "pot of gold" at the end of many degrees in the form of SV or consulting jobs means that many students and professors aren't willing to invest energy into building a better University.
• pannSun 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. The official explanation from Stanford for eliminating the house was that the Outdoor theme “fell short of diversity, equity and inclusion expectations.” ... > Next year, Outdoor House will be reinstated, but only because house members promised to refocus their theme on “racial and environmental justice in the outdoors.” Upholding diversity, equity, and inclusion is the first of four “ResX principles” that now govern undergraduate housing. Stanford reserves the right to unhouse any organization that does not, in their opinion, uphold these principles.
• lsy 4y ago
  The author is clearly complaining from a conservative, free-market viewpoint, but it's difficult to overlook that the conservative, free-market ideology that triumphed in the Reagan-Thatcher era has been a major driver of the complaints voiced here. The late-sixties to early-nineties free-for-all at universities was partly due to an understanding of the university as a place for the betterment of the population in the form of a largely-subsidized public good. This also tied into concepts like tenure and academic freedom which insulated students and educators from the surrounding society, and allowed students to run organizations and modify or vandalize campus property without consequence, with the benefits and costs that entailed. Today the university is largely re-imagined in the conservative mold. It is foremost an elite job-training site, and includes not only the cosmopolitan social training that companies demand of 21st-century knowledge workers, but free-market costs commensurate with the expected value of the degree in the vocational sphere. Administration has been handed over to a business class walled off from the educators, for fear of academics running the show, with predictable results of fiefdom-building. Tenured educators are disappearing and being replaced with the adjunct precariat, another conservative win. This all contributes to an atmosphere where the stakes of any action are very high for both students and university employees, and danger abounds, whether it be from lawsuits or from the possibility of being forced out of school and suffering lifelong consequences as a result. It's perplexing to see this laid at the feet of academics, when one needs look no further than other bastions of the conservative mindset, like HOAs or corporate HR departments, to find organizations that would be similarly displeased with an ad-hoc island in a common-area water feature.
  • golemiprague 4y ago
    [dead]
  • rippercushions 4y ago
    The article is blaming the school administration, a parasitic entity that's very different from the academics you're talking about. It's also clear that the increasingly bloated administration is horrendously inefficient from a free market POV, but what's happened here is not a free market, but regulatory capture: the administration makes the rules and spends the budget to benefit itself, squeezing out both teaching staff and students in the process.
• narrator 4y ago
  Since Stanford has not said anything about why they're doing this that makes any sense, I am going to throw an idea out there: I think this all dates back to the end of Halloween in the Castro[1]. This was back in 2006. S.F used to throw a huge awesome LGBTQ themed party and then some gang members decided to attend. Gang members being gang members, one threw a bottle at another and 9 people got shot. They shut the whole thing down that 10s of thousands enjoyed hugely because of that one incident. I'm thinking that the extreme overreaction was because if this incident had started a rift between any group that was not a white supremacist or Christian group and LGBTQ+ this would have been catastrophic for intersectionalism. So they had to shut it all down. The suspects were never arrested or described any more in news articles than being associated with at least one gang. Thus, I think the end of fun is to prevent any incident between the great mass of intersectionalist factions that don't like each other, or have irreconcilable differences in real life and must exist in carefully managed online spaces and social interactions in structured environments in order to present as part of a unified woke coalition. The contradictions are so great between all these groups that more and more rules must be added on top of rules to keep all the conflict from escaping out and piercing the image of a bland unified morally righteous whole. [1]https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/halloween-castro-history-violence-san-francisco-15661253.php https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/halloween-castro-histor...
  • colechristensen 4y ago
    It would be much easier to communicate if we removed words like “intersectional” and “woke” from our vocabulary. SF doesn’t want to enforce laws and fun things are less possible when violent idiots attend. There’s a demographic skew when it comes to violent idiots and people with more virtue signaling than sense are trying to turn “violent idiot” into a protected class and strangely start celebrating many of them. So we can’t have nice things that attract people who tend to hurt others.
    • narrator 4y ago
      The new problem is "hurt others" has been expanded to include microaggressions and other trivial differences of opinion between groups. In order to hold all these groups together in a unified whole, they have to eliminate all uncontrolled "fun" situations where differences could break out into the open in an uncontrolled fashion and cause a huge PR disaster, or worse a rift between groups that have very little in common with each other and are only held together by the thinnest of intersectionalist bonds. BTW, for all you downvoters. How is closing down the Stanford outdoor hiking club not proof of this kind of thing? You have hikers and they are accused of violating some sort of diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice protocol. It's because there's some other group that has some sort of grievance with people hiking and in order to prevent conflict they have to layer on more rules and bureaucracy to keep all the grievance energy from crating a big dust up, scandal, someone suing the school, etc. They have created all these mobs of enraged activists marching around everywhere looking for someone to enrage them so they can feel validated. The school, to defend themselves creates more rules, more bureaucracy, less controversial fun, etc. Banning Halloween in the Castro was just the kickoff event to the long downhill slide since then.
• awillen 4y ago
  Former commissioner and champion of the Stanford IM Beirut (that's beer pong for the uneducated) here. The university repeatedly threatened to shut us down, but since we weren't an official group that was tough. They did ban drinking games in dorm rooms, which thankfully wasn't enforceable, but things were headed in this direction back in the late aughts. Back then, this stuff was theoretically in the name of safety, though that was totally misguided. When I got to my freshman dorm, the RAs told us to leave the door open if we were drinking, so they'd know if anything was wrong. In return, there would be no trouble. They held up their end of the bargain, and everyone was drunk but safe and free of administrative trouble. Even the Stanford sheriffs were well known for not giving you trouble unless you were flagrantly drinking in public or causing a real problem. Forcing people to hide their drinking didn't make anybody safer. It's really a shame that the administration has chosen this direction. I genuinely don't know what the point is.
  • kenjackson 4y ago
    This sounds obvious. Of course the school isn’t going to sanction illegal drinking on campus. And of course random RAs are going to possibly give more flexibility. This is like asking the police department to sanction drunken driving — versus individual cops making a judgment call.
    • awillen 4y ago
      You're misunderstanding - it wasn't random RAs; it was university policy for RAs. Same thing in every dorm. They were taught in RA training to focus on safety and not to call the police or report to administrators if underage students were drinking but otherwise fine.
      • kenjackson 4y ago
        What exactly was university policy? Approving of drinking parties or minimizing damage done by students who had drank?
        • 4y ago
• tatrajim 4y ago
  Just a bit different in the 70s. My first day as a freshman, the cool guy next door kindly approached me and muttered "Hey kid, you want a hit of hash?" The one inviolable rule for university housing was "no growing of pot plants in a dorm room facing the street". Otherwise, cheerful anarchism prevailed, mixed with some anti-war near mayhem. Good times, indeed.
• sbuccini 4y ago
  I think the way Greek life operate at Berkeley provides a study in contrasts. I distinctly remember attending a party at a Stanford frat during the "crackdown" timeframe. As I was walking up to the house, I noticed a small scrum of people gathered on the front lawn. It seemed that a cop was in a discussion with several of the brothers. He had his Maglite out and appeared to be writing them ticket. But as I got closer, I realized the brothers were grilling hot dogs and the cop was using his flashlight to illuminate the grill. A marked contrast from our house's interactions with Berkeley's police. All Berkeley frats/sororities have houses on private property, meaning they are subject to the City of Berkeley laws and regulations which are enforced by Berkeley police (as opposed to the UCPD which only operates on campus). As you can imagine, the City of Berkeley (often egged on by NIMBYs living next to the fraternity houses) were less than enthused about Greek life and tried to pass several laws/restrictions to effectively outlaw them. The university administration tried to assert some control by officially "recognizing" fraternities that complied with university policies. But at the end of the day, to the average student, it would be impossible to separate the sanctioned frats from the unsanctioned ones: they all held parties, conducted rush, held formals, etc. Having frats located on university property does have some serious advantages. One big one is forcing someone to leave entirely. Berkeley frats had to deal with people showing up from all over the Bay trying to sneak into our parties. They were never happy about not being let into the party, but there was nothing we could do to stop them from standing out on the sidewalk and causing issues. As they say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Berkeley has an extreme housing shortage. The university realized that having several thousands students willing to cram as many as people as possible into a single house was actually hugely beneficial. Ultimately, the administration stood with the fraternities against Berkeley city council because they realized that they had nowhere else to put all these students. So if I had to chose, which system is better? Having everything controlled by the university? Or ultimately being subject to the whims of cantankerous old people with too much time on their hands?
  • watwut 4y ago
    The best system is the one that treats all students equally instead of giving special privileges to Greek organizations. Let them be just like all other orgs, with no special rules just for them. Half the problems will dissappear overnight.
• colechristensen 4y ago
  This is embarrassing and antithetical to what a university should be. The whole purpose of an undergraduate education should be to build young people into having the knowledge and skills to really be free in society. A literally “liberal” education in the original sense of the word. Instead adults have to ask permission to have guests. That’s how you manufacture consent for a police state, making people live in an environment where the authorities have to approve of everything until their mid twenties. This is also how you waste student money, state money, research money funneling it away into entirely unnecessary jobs. University of California students just got done with a strike, maybe Stanford students should strike until the administration stops wasting their money.
  • laidoffamazon 4y ago
    They should have simply have gone to their state school. That they didn't indicates quite a bit, imho (they think the rest of us who can't get in are subhuman, and in the Stanford case, are probably eugenicists explicitly).
    • colechristensen 4y ago
      Uh, no. This is ridiculous. I’m met plenty of perfectly nice Stanford folks. A bit of an elitist trend in a few, but the “subhuman” and “eugenicist” comments are really unnecessary.
      • laidoffamazon 4y ago
        It's the natural conclusion of their beliefs in themselves as ubermensch - that the rest of us are untermensch. I'm sure many are nice on the surface, but they fundamentally don't think of us as equals - there's a good reason why they didn't go to their state schools after all. You can see it in people like Dan Gross who named his venture fund after the eugenics research fund Pioneer Fund and called other people "NPCs" in a lecture that got big on HN a few years ago.
        • 4y ago
• ahstilde 4y ago
  The bastions of elite-school fun are, ironically, in state schools. University of Virginia, University of Michigan, UNC -- these schools are so large that it's impossible to completely shut out self-organized chaos. I fully expect the next wave of excellence to come from these schools.
  • laidoffamazon 4y ago
    It's pretty clear the Stanford elite think of the people who go to public schools as either lazy or stupid, perhaps both (maybe add in a dash of "NPC"? That's the new mold of thinking it seems). They'll whine and complain but they won't change their preferences because the point of Stanford is to get away from the types of people that go to UNC.
    • m4rtink 4y ago
      Its interesting how here in the Czech Republic all the good & famous universities (Charles University, Masaryk University, Mendel University, Czech Technical University, etc.) are all public schools while private ones are hardly even on the radar.
      • hindsightbias 4y ago
        They’ve all actually read Kundera.
      • laidoffamazon 4y ago
        Sure, same for Oxbridge, the Canadian schools (Toronto, UBC, Waterloo, McGill), the Japanese schools, the ETHZ, EPFL... Stanford is also significantly more selective than all of those institutions. But unlike the IITs or Tsinghua, which are as or more selective, it's not based on grades and scores, but also additional class signals.
    • voidfunc 4y ago
      I dunno about Stanford, but my interactions with MITers gives me the same impression. If you didn't attend to MIT or one of the other big schools you're lesser. Maybe that's what these schools should focus on when they teach compassion, diversity and inclusion.
• laidoffamazon 4y ago
  The way I see it these institutions should be razed - not because they "aren't fun" but because they're inherently exclusionary and produce a cadre of out-of-touch elites who think or operate as if the rest of us are genetically inferior for not passing their arbitrary class hurdles at 17. The rest of us have nothing because these elites have everything.
  • InCityDreams 4y ago
    >exclusionary and produce a cadre of out-of-touch elites who think or operate as if the rest of us are genetically inferior ...wouldn't let you in, eh?
    • laidoffamazon 4y ago
      I didn't apply, but if I did they wouldn't let me in, no. I only had a 1500/1600 SAT and didn't have any patents or first author papers when I was 17. I was doomed to a life of failure. I'm not sure how what you said is supposed to be a "gotcha", it describes literally 99.99% of humanity.
• motohagiography 4y ago
  The people behind these efforts exploit the basic agreeableness, tolerance, and good nature of students everywhere. What I see on the other side of the 90's was that behind almost every "transgressive, alternative" culture participant was an authoritian personality expressed as punk resentment. None of them cared about the oppressed, it's just a means to an end where they elevate themselves through criticism using the oppressed as examples and a front for their own more petty grievences. Things like green hair and other alternative culture tropes used to signal an anti-authoritarian attitude, but now it signals a hyper authoritarian one using rote criticisms to target anything simple enough that others just enjoy, and which others won't match the irrational aggression being used against them to defend their simple enjoyment of it, and in yielding, it just empowers these bullies. We need to stop believing and listening to histrionic authoritarian personalities. It was a mistake, and they systematically abuse the very tolerance that characterizes western culture with a simple escalating bullying technique of, "oh, so you say you are tolerant, do you tolerate this moral abomination? No? Well then you are intolerant and if you don't denounce your own dispicable intolerance hard enough, then surely you are a collaborator! Pay me off and I won't tell the world what a disgusting person you are!" Stanford (and other universities) got hustled by the oldest hustle since street corners were invented, and they're both too naive to figure it out, and too conceited to admit they have been taken by less intelligent but galactically more street smart people they thought they could just be nice to and help. Stanford doesn't hate fun, it just has a terminal ideological cancer.
  • _ea1k 4y ago
    > It was a mistake, and they systematically abuse the very tolerance that characterizes western culture with a simple escalating bullying technique of, [...] This is what has been bothering me about the modern idea of tolerance. "We'll tolerate anything but intolerance" seems to transition to simple bullying far too often.
    • poszlem 4y ago
      Not to mention the fact that the paradox of tolerance was in fact a PARADOX. Most people quoting Popper online to promote censorship forgets that part. It is important to remember that a paradox does not have a straightforward solution. And if the solution exists it is likely about allowing more speech not less.
• greggarious 4y ago
  I can’t tell if this is a repost or was cited in something posted recently, but I could have sworn last I read about this, they had a snippet about how one of the many weird rituals Stanford had involves running up and kissing strangers? That’s the kind of thing I wish one of the folks I know on the faculty had warned me about before I spent a summer in Palo Alto. Speaking as someone who didn’t go to a school with any of the cutesy crap in the OP, and last read about the institution when someone had to yank a rapist off some lady, I’m not very sympathetic. I tried very hard to get in someplace without an athletics program to avoid west coast equivalent of Dartmouth style shenanigans… then got into neither and quit my PhD after realizing it wasn’t going to end unless I excused and ignored a litany of abusive and illegal behavior. I feel bad for folks who JUST put on an unauthorized costume but… I saw so much shit passing through when interning in the Bay I don’t have any sympathy for the party people of Palo Alto - most of them should be sent to the nuthouse. (And not a bar.)
• lazyeye 4y ago
  Rather than all the useless ineffectual discussions that happens whilst a minority at Stanford continues to impose their views on the majority, what can be done to push back in a way that actually changes things?
  • malandrew 4y ago
    I don’t know the answer here but I imagine a cultural attitude that reserves the greatest shame for anyone expressing authoritarian attitudes of any flavor. The problem we have today is that people will look at disdain for one flavor of authoritarianism as an argument to impose a competing flavor of authoritarianism. Those with an authoritarian tendency exploit this dynamic actively such that societies are constantly oscillating between the different authoritarian policies, accumulating more liberty reducing rules with each swing of the pendulum.
  • akomtu 4y ago
    Pass new laws to ban all those woke communists. But that's not going to work in CA. There is a bunch of rich dudes, like Soros and Pritzker, that create grants for supportive admins, professors and teachers. For example, a grant may require one to publish 5 papers on certain topics every year, or enact policies in your workplace. They get addicted to the grants, and eventually get used to the new way of thinking, so no grants are even necessary.
• huevosabio 4y ago
  I went to UT Austin for undergrad and Stanford for graduate school. I think my interactions with authority were much, much more pleasant at Stanford than at UT. Mostly because the cops were really understanding and supportive. I frequently hosted parties (some large) at both, and not once did they come to stop me at Stanford, whereas in Austin it was always a risk. That said, I suspect that's the campus police, the administrators seem to be different. And I am sad to see that they are pushing for punishing fun.
  • convolvatron 4y ago
    I suspect that's partially due to the general attitude carried by authority figures in Texas. that's the only state I've been in where I've had the shit beaten out of me by cops for looking quar.
• csande17 4y ago
  The administrators described in the article are a symptom, not the cause. I attended a relatively high-ranked college a few years ago and would not have ever considered attending an event named "Exotic Erotic", because: 1. In modern society, everyone is carrying an Internet-connected video camera and nearly every nontrivial social event is filmed. 2. Sexual assault and harassment cases are often litigated in the informal justice system, where there is no statute of limitations, "guilty until proven innocent" standards are often applied, and "I was just a dumb kid trying to navigate a new social environment" is not an excuse. 3. Almost everything I did was expected to be a form of resume-building, even as early as high school. Will my actions at Exotic Erotic look good to employers? Will they by acceptable to social media users twenty years from now? Can I absolutely guarantee that no one at the event will feel I made them uncomfortable? (Am I willing to bet my future career — the whole reason I am spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend an elite college — on all of the answers being "yes" just to attend one party?) I mean, several campus advocacy groups were explicitly trying to tell men to stop engaging in those kinds of risky social behaviors! I don't know that that's a bad thing. I've heard some people, especially women, really did get physically and psychologically injured at these kinds of events. Perhaps cancelling these events is a reasonable price to pay to keep those people safe.
  • ripper1138 4y ago
    I think you missed the point.
  • titanomachy 4y ago
    Point 1 is legit. Going to a really raunchy party that doesn’t have a no-phones policy might have been a little much even for college-aged me. But I disagree with much of the rest. You’re welcome to make those choices for yourself, making your life about resume-building and career from an early age, and certainly society benefits a lot from people like that. But suggesting that everyone should be forced into those choices feels wrong to me. I think having a colorful and joyful life has its own value, but even if we’re sticking to utilitarian arguments, a lot of the people who benefited humanity the most were certainly not resume-driven rule-followers in their youth. As for false rape accusations… I think this is one of those things that gets talked about so much that it seems more common than it is. I believe it can happen, but every one of my male friends has made it this far in life without being accused of rape. If you only have sex with people who enthusiastically want to have sex with you, I think you can probably put this somewhere between “plane crash” and “lightning strike” in terms of how much you should worry about it.
• quailfarmer 4y ago
  I was involved in the Associated Students of Stanford University, the "student government." It's an independent non-profit, but also recognized by the University, and constantly on the edge of being consumed by the admin bureaucracy. I made an explicit effort to spend funds in a way that was specifically targeted at "fun" programming, but in retrospect I should probably have been more radical. Also interesting to see the traction Eva (the author of the Palladium article) has gotten. She has a complicated reputation, but I'm glad to see a major constructive contribution. Any Alumni in the Bay who want to help support student self-administration, I encourage you to reach out to the ASSU. It's an institution perpetually lacking wisdom (like any student group).
• stoppingin 4y ago
  The same Stanford that labeled the word 'American' to be harmful? https://nypost.com/2022/12/20/stanford-releases-guide-against-harmful-language-including-term-american/ https://nypost.com/2022/12/20/stanford-releases-guide-agains... They do seem to hate fun indeed!
  • isitmadeofglass 4y ago
    Your misrepresenting the actual content of the guide.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  Stanford is an image-obsessed academic-business operation that's ridiculously expensive for students. Note also that Stanford featured fairly prominently in the recent admissions scandals, in which parents paid bribes to ensure acceptance. > "The annual tuition and living expense budget to go to Stanford was $78,218 for the 2020/2021 academic year. The cost is the same for all students regardless of California residence status as there is no in-state discount." - collegecalc.org Why go to Stanford then? Is it the world-class education, or is the networking opportunities, the chance to meet the children of other extremely wealthy parents who might ease your way into a lucrative job opportunity post-graduation? Since the students are certainly not the ones footing the bill for an ~320,000 four-year education, this marketing operation is aimed at the parents, most likely. Safe, controlled, bland...
  • malandrew 4y ago
    ~$78k post tax, means that someone likely needs to earn $120k or more in income to foot this bill. That’s an astronomical sum when you consider that the US median household income is about ~$71k. $120k is around 87th percentile.
    • dragonwriter 4y ago
      > ~$78k post tax, means that someone likely needs to earn $120k or more in income to foot this bill. You seem to be assuming a 35% total tax rate at $120k gross income, which seems wildly high.
      • dmitrygr 4y ago
        Actually that’s low if you live in CA and are paying that state tax too
        • reducesuffering 4y ago
          You both should just do the calculation, as you're both incorrect. A single 120k income in CA will have 30% income taxed in total, leaving ~84k. https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#KqAFYxsdZP https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#KqAFY...
• crotho 4y ago
  [dead]
• stevehawk 4y ago
  > The party-planning process will be streamlined and more administrators will be hired to help facilitate student social life. Where's that essay on bullshit jobs when you need it.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• neonate 4y ago
  WSJ article with same title: https://www.wsj.com/articles/stanford-tree-mascot-suspended-11671720777 https://www.wsj.com/articles/stanford-tree-mascot-suspended-... https://archive.ph/1hPrX https://archive.ph/1hPrX
• julianeon 4y ago
  There is a lot of discussion covering various points other comments have addressed. I'll tell you what I find most personally surprising, though: The assumption that partying is something important that needs to be preserved. Look, I'm not coming at this from a culture war perspective. I'm speaking from my own experience here: if I could go back and talk to my 17 year old self in the first week of school all these decades later, I'd ask about all the parties I was thinking of attending, and say, "Yeah, none of those matter. Feel free to skip, oh.., every one, from now until graduation." Connections? Didn't make any that mattered. Romances? Zero. Friendships? Basically they were as strong as they needed to be from daily conversations. What was really valuable and unique were the classes, though I had a hard time seeing that then. But people here seem to disagree - and I don't think it's because they're all in college either. They really find they have value. Sadly, they did not for me.
  • kaesar14 4y ago
    Different strokes for different folks. I learned pretty much all of my adult social skills at parties. Computer science classes were useful but everything useful I learned in college was from the traditional college experience of partying and meeting as many people as possible.
  • vorpalhex 4y ago
    College is where I went from being a rando loner to actually having friends, and part of that was attending parties. Those friends have more impact on me today than whatever my GPA average might have been with a few less hangovers.
  • freejazz 4y ago
    >Connections? Didn't make any that mattered. Romances? Zero. Friendships? Basically they were as strong as they needed to be from daily conversations. Geez, can't imagine why
    • julianeon 4y ago
      Keep in mind, this is me reporting back decades later on the results. But I acted very social at the time and as if I really believed in the value of drinking w friends, going to parties etc. I’m just telling you now that the data is in, it was a waste. For example, I made connections, including to lawyers and one to a friend who was an MIT prof for a while; the problem is, they didn’t amount to anything practically useful (I’m not a lawyer or in that profs field). And a connection is defined by its practical utility. As for the friendships, truthfully I could’ve substituted any one of those friendships for another one in my 20s or 30s and I don’t see it changing much. Or I could’ve basically been as strong friends w them post college, even w less face time in college. In other words all this partying and close time w your buddies in college is, in my experience, vastly overrated. I could’ve skipped out on most of it and not been worse off.
• _siis 4y ago
  Maybe the socialists finally took over up there. Based on other recent articles about Stanford, that seems highly likely. They are implementing policy that closely mirrors many of the same elements of Mao's philosophy.
• keepquestioning 4y ago
  Good. Get rid of the toxic bro behavior at these institutions. If you want to fuck around, go off campus.
• fexecve 4y ago
  It's unfair to put 100% of the blame for this on Stanford. A lot of the things they're doing are responses to the current political climate in the world today. Any discrimination, or even perception of discrimination, is likely to have non-zero consequences for Stanford. Furthermore, people are actively looking for discrimination, because "$27 billion university has discrimination among its fraternities and sororities" is a juicy news headline, if you can make it stick. Is creating an "associate vice provost of inclusion, community and integrative learning" the right thing for Stanford to do? Hard to say. What would _you_ do?
• gtrevorjay 4y ago
  Speaking of things that I learned in a frat-like environment: there's a kind of accepted tyranny to actually doing a thing. If you plan a party, it more or less goes the way you want. If you run Twitter, same thing. We're in some kind of horseshoe world where self-identifying Democrats are already more likely to be virgins than their Republican counterparts. Just looking at the 20 somethings I know, I don't see how this trend of progressives being less fit in life doesn't continue until we at least have 20 years of dominance from more conservative backgrounds by default. I don't see any way to reverse the trends that have become base parts of the progressive culture. [Edit: anonymizing]
  • vorpalhex 4y ago
    We've flipped. Democrats have become the default position in many ways, and conservatives are either outcasts or the cool kids, depending on where you are. I think this is equally strange to many conservatives who are still attempting to digest this. When several liberal writers went on tirades regarding how it should be forbidden for people to talk about their sex lives in public, it occurred to me the current liberals were not the ones of my formative years.
    • gtrevorjay 4y ago
      People try to dismiss the complaints of the old guard as them being left behind, but that is clearly not the case. As you say, there have been a number of "flips" that are clearly not "progressions". Expanding civil rights from blacks, to gays, to trans, is clearly a progression and no old school Democrat (for example) bats an eye. Speech and sex stand out as clearly having reversed and if you buy into the current ideology then the previous attitudes were wrong, sure. But pretending they extend naturally in the same way as expanding civil rights seems dishonest. I started my career in the liberal arts and one of the reasons I abandoned them was that they were a poor investment. Physics may have "revolutions" but it always builds on the math of the previous generation if nothing else. Someone who could ace a test in 1930 could do well cold today and learn the quantum stuff relatively quickly. A 1960's feminist is wrong about just about everything according to a modern one and maybe the modern one is indeed right but it just shows that learning about feminism is useless except in as much as you need "right now". There's no future return for investment today.
• RickJWagner 4y ago
  I've lost a lot of respect for Stanford lately. (The ill-conceived guide to acceptable words is a large part of it.) At some point, the focal change from academic excellence to political correctness is going to tarnish many of the big schools. I hope they change course before this happens.
• remote_phone 4y ago
  The problem with the Woke Left is that everything has turned into a moral issue. Not enough diversity in the party? That’s immoral and needs to be shut down! The morality police you see in Iran is an exact extension of what you will see if this type of behavior is left to grow.
• mips_avatar 4y ago
  As someone who went to a party school (Penn State). I don’t have a lot of good things to say about the fraternities there, and will be the first to cheer their dissolution. But even that university was so hostile to everything. They made running an engineering student org close to impossible. I had to meet with risk management and mitigation multiple times a semester to build a robot. It was ridiculous.
• giardini 4y ago
  “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” ― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
  • goatlover 4y ago
    It's weird seeing the left take a turn for the puritanical. It used to be seen as an exclusive domain of the religious right.
    • akomtu 4y ago
      Perhaphs, the left has realized that religion controls minds, and since christianity belongs to the right, the left has tried to invent a competing religion. The result is a frankestein made of religious elements stitched together.
    • tgv 4y ago
      No way. The left, the right and the center have their puritan (in the modern sense) factions, and always have. Appearances and the overt goals may differ a bit, but what to think of radical feminism?
• 23B1 4y ago
  The slow but welcome death of industrialized education
• omginternets 4y ago
  The amount of vitriol from some of the comments (on the article page, not here) is eye-popping. I’m not sure what to make of it.
• strictnein 4y ago
  Sibling went to Stanford in the mid-late 90s. The absolute freedom some of the student groups had made me so jealous. Intelligent kids, doing ridiculous things, with minimal oversight, on a beautiful campus. Doubt we'll see that return unfortunately.
• moomin 4y ago
  I’m not convinced the biggest problem facing higher education today is the decline of the frat house.
• gorgoiler 4y ago
  I have the same problem in the office where I work. Mostly I’m relatively stoic about it. Sometimes it makes me sad. I built my career in the post tech boom 2000s in a culture where engineering and product were hands-down the most important people in the business. If I wanted to bolt a cool second hand espresso grinder to the mini kitchen wall — one bought with my own massively over egged salary — then no one could stop me. Paint a mural paying homage to a map(parseInt) type bug that took down the site? Sure! Here’s a sculpture made of empty beer cans from Friday night drinks in the office. All very silly, hit/miss sometimes on taste, but all part of the flavour. Everyone did things like this: hosted silly parties, brought in weird food, etc etc. The sense of eccentric character was strong. Hackers were hackers in everything, not just their codebase. Now I get admonished by HR anytime I do anything which they perceive as being equivalent to daubing crayon in the walls. Merry Christmas HN. Keep the spirit of hacker-past alive!
• isitmadeofglass 4y ago
  > This spirit of self-organization, slightly transgressive but organized fun taught students how to organize things like the 2000s tech revolution. Looking from the other side of the “party” that very same culture of no consequences and unchecked toxic masculinity probably also fueled the rampant problems with SA that’s been exposed widely across tech during the #metoo movement.