13 ms·

Stanford’s war against its own students

191 points by fortran77 4y ago

consumer451 4y ago
Pure politics, nothing technology related.
- nickelcitymario 4y ago
  Considering how many tech startups are founded by Stanford grads (or current students), I think it's pretty relevant on HN, in my humble opinion.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    But do we really care about Stanford's alcohol policy and it's permissiveness?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - jonathankoren 4y ago
    That's what an alumni group is for.
- windowshopping 4y ago
  Hacker news doesn't exist purely to curate tech articles. It's really for anything that people here find interesting. There are countless posts here every day that are about systems or policy or non-tech science or just simply something thought provoking.
- dang 4y ago
  HN is explicitly for more than technology related topics: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The question of how that relates to politics is fraught, of course, but if you or anyone want to know how we approach that, there are past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
- karaterobot 4y ago
  Ironically, the guidelines specifically allow non-technology stories, but advise against complaining about non-technology submissions. So, if you want to be a stickler about the rules, check out the guidelines document, already linked. > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
  - consumer451 4y ago
    I am just extremely salty because in my experience there is a clear right-leaning bias on HN for when politics is allowed. By allowed I mean not flagged. I am very much an indie, but I find this HN characteristic really unfun.
cratermoon 4y ago
[flagged]
- jdkee 4y ago
  cites The Guardian
- version_five 4y ago
  Do you have anything to say about the article?
- uejfiweun 4y ago
  This is the most blatant ad hominem I’ve ever seen, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
  - dang 4y ago
    Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- lp0_on_fire 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - dekhn 4y ago
    I wouldn't call her "rightwing"
    - michaelhoffman 4y ago
      I wouldn't call her "professional"
      - marcusverus 4y ago
        Why not?
singleshot_ 4y ago
> “He decided not to hire an outside lawyer for his defense because he said he was confident the allegations were nothing more than misunderstandings.” I’m not sure how you expect to be able to get a huge settlement out of Stanford with no lawyer, but best of luck to you, brother.
TheMoonToMyLeft 4y ago
[dead]
908B64B197 4y ago
How could this: > Stanford now has more than 10,000 administrators who oversee the 7,761 undergraduate and 9,565 graduate students—almost enough for each student to have their own personal butler. (There are about 2,290 faculty members.) These bureaucrats make up an increasingly powerful segment of the university population, as they expand their portfolio and send the message that all conflict should be adjudicated by them. (OCS reports for the 2022–2023 school year have not yet been released.) Lead to this: > “I’m sitting in two-hour-long interviews on Zoom with lawyers who are trying to verbally and rhetorically trap people,” he said. “I had young kids that were 18, 19 years old who are international asking me, ‘Hey, can I talk to this attorney and tell them I drank a beer, or am I going to get my visa revoked?’ ” I guess if you can't make it as a student there, you can always become an admin to bully those who put the work in to get admitted?
- blakesterz 4y ago
  Where is that 10,000 number coming from? I don't see it on the PDF they link to, and I don't see it on the Stanford site: https://facts.stanford.edu/administration/staff/ https://facts.stanford.edu/administration/staff/ That 10k number doesn't even sound impossible, knowing what we know about large universities now, but I just wonder where it came from. Maybe I'm missing something obvious on that PDF?
  - stagger87 4y ago
    On the linked article. Ctrl+F -> "10,000"
  - fatnoah 4y ago
    I assume it comes from this line: 12,336* managerial and professional staff There's a more granular breakdown here: https://irds.stanford.edu/data-findings/academic-and-non-academic-staff https://irds.stanford.edu/data-findings/academic-and-non-aca...
  - WatchDog 4y ago
    It's actually more than that now. Non-faculty staff have increased by about 62% since 2012, faculty increased by 16% over the same period, while students increased by less than 10%. Further breakdown: https://i.imgur.com/UCjelDs.png https://i.imgur.com/UCjelDs.png
bennysonething 4y ago
"For the past several years, Stanford has required students to adhere to a Student Party Policy, which includes a highly detailed “Harm Reduction Plan” mandating multiple sober monitors and designated alcohol service areas, and prohibiting the serving of any hard liquor. Party hosts must also provide “EANABs,” or Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages, to “contribute to an inclusive and inviting experience” for all partygoers. Hosts are also required to take an online “Party Planning Course” before submitting their applications. " Is this normal!?! I feel sorry for this generation. Attempts to make their world risk free has turned it into "fuck up once and we'll destroy you".
- boc 4y ago
  The concept of registering on-campus parties is nothing new at private universities, but these requirements are pretty insane.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    The policy looks like it's only for parties held by student organizations [1], not all parties held by its students, which makes the whole thing more silly than dystopian. [1] https://vaden.stanford.edu/student-party-policy-guidelines https://vaden.stanford.edu/student-party-policy-guidelines
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      I'm surprised they allow alcohol at student organization events, period. My boring public university no-one's heard of sure didn't, years back.
      - giraffe_lady 4y ago
        Look we are trying to have a moral panic about political correctness here get in the spirit please.
        4y ago
kodyo 4y ago
Commissars gonna commissar. No reason to submit to people like that.
tptacek 4y ago
This is such a weird article that I feel like I must not understand it. From what I can tell: A fraternity hosted one or more parties where, by finding of fact and apparently the admission of the frat itself, they served alcohol to minors, contravening an obvious Stanford policy; as a result, they had to go through an annoying adjudication process and spend several months under the thread of a long-term suspension of the fraternity. Contemporaneously, a student assaulted with a cup of coffee another student that she believed was himself responsible for assaulting one of her friends. Stanford began an annoying adjudication process, this time including a thread of expulsion from the school. The student committed suicide. The latter case is, of course, a terrible tragedy. But an adjudication process doesn't seem like a disproportionate response to an assault, however minor. Stanford students are adults; transpose this setting to a workplace and there would be no adjudication at all, only an immediate termination. The story seems dead set on pinning the responsibility for the tragedy on Stanford, and Stanford may well be at fault! But it's not clear from the article how. Meanwhile: the organizer of the frat party is less jubilant about his campus life after his frat party ran afoul of the frat party police. I feel like I have to have missed some other detail of how Stanford messed with his life, because from what I can tell, at all times in this story, he remained a Stanford student in good standing. His frat ran a risk of being prevented from hosting parties. So what? Again: if I sound flippant here, it's likely because there is some aspect of this story that I simply don't understand.
- com2kid 4y ago
  > transpose this setting to a workplace and there would be no adjudication at all, only an immediate termination. One only wishes, and maybe now days that is true, but even 10 years ago this wasn't a sure thing, especially if the aggressor was at a high level in the company.
- Psychlist 4y ago
  I think the core bit you've missed is: Stanford explicitly selects for perfectionists by requiring extremely high standards of (most) students. Those students have spend several years working very hard to get in, aware that even the slightest mis-step can cost them everything they've worked for. But they're surrounded by people trying to help them get in. Then they get to Stanford and discover that the university administration is actively hostile, it's looking for reasons to get rid of imperfect students, or students that can be blamed for imperfection (anyone running a group of students that has a problem).
ginger2016 4y ago
The article is too long. Is the headline a clickbait or is Stanford doing something against its own students?
- ModernMech 4y ago
  Depends on who you ask. According to some of my (not Stanford) students, any time I give them less than 100% I’m at war with them.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  Article is bullshit it seems
- fencepost 4y ago
  Sounds like a combination of significant changes in student policies and enforcement over the last 40-50 years (accelerating in the last 20-25?) combined with very bureaucracy- and process-heavy set of enforcement mechanisms. Editorializing a bit, this may reflect general social changes in the US - schools are seen as being "in loco parentis" though many of the students are legally adults, and parenting in the US has changed in the last 40 years from "go play at the park with your friends, but be back by sunset" to helicopter parenting and the very thought of unsupervised children at a park being something deserving of reports to Child Protective Services. So, now the school is helicopter-"in loco parentis"ing, and covering its butt with paper to shield it from the actual helicopter parents.
bigbacaloa 4y ago
US needs to stop treating 21 year olds like children.
- bluescrn 4y ago
  You can buy a gun at 18. But not a beer...
tatrajim 4y ago
As I reminisced on an earlier post about the chilling atmosphere for students at Stanford, the situation was a mite different in the 1970s. My first day there as a callow freshman from the Midwest, the cool guy next door in the dorm kindly approached me and muttered "Hey kid, you want a hit of hash?" The one inviolable rule for university housing at the time 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.
libraryatnight 4y ago
I can't take the use of "war" in this headline seriously at all. Why is everything framed so threateningly? Maybe this is a bad policy, but it seems to me they want to ensure on-campus, official student organization run, parties that serve alcohol do so responsibly and provide other drinks so people don't feel like they have to drink booze. Maybe they've gone too far in another direction, but seems something Standford and its students can hash out without it being a fan for culture war bullshit.
- dang 4y ago
  I don't like that either and if someone can suggest a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article itself), we'd be happy to change it.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    "Stanford's aggressive crackdown on its own students" ?
  - throwawayacc5 4y ago
    How about "Standford's Orwellian Peace Against its Own Students"? It's literally the title of the linked article. I don't think editorializing and changing titles to placate neo-Puritans is helping anyone. If you don't like the title, contact the author and ask them to amend the title.
  - libraryatnight 4y ago
    I'm not really sure if you can do anything about it - it is the actual title of the article. I went through the site and it seems to be mostly culture war related editorial pieces, so maybe this one's just on me to not click through when I see thefp.com Thanks for the reply though, dang.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Image-conscious corporatization of academics is a strange spectacle, certainly. Enforcing strict behavioral norms is something large corporations are known for, and that seems to be what's going on here. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/how-to-network-through-stanford-university.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/how-to-network-throu... > "...only over the past decade has the school gone all-in on an ecosystem of startup-supporting programs, turning classrooms into job fairs and students into entrepreneurs-to-be, and effectively handing the keys of the campus to venture capitalists....The most important support system today is the network of people — and cash — who now populate and surround the institution, hunting for investments." That's what students (more likely their parents) are now forking over $56K in tuition (not counting cost-of-living expenses) per year to gain access to. It certainly looks like the rise of elitist networking in the British Eton etc. school model. The recent spate of college-admission-payola scandals also point in that direction.
cpgxiii 4y ago
Many US colleges/universities maintain a particular kind of legal bubble, where the surrounding city/state law enforcement largely leaves college police/security to their own devices to create an environment in which students very rarely face actual legal consequences for their misdeeds. On the whole, this is generally a good thing, in that it mitigates the worst effects of a broken national drug and alcohol policy. Local law enforcement doesn't want to have to deal with the large number of student alcohol and drug-related offenses (and especially not their parents), schools want to avoid the bad publicity of their students ending up in jail, and students definitely don't want to end up in the court system either. That is the trade you make as a student going to a prestigious private school - you won't end up in real court unless you do something incredibly egregious, but you will have to deal with the internal disciplinary process that could (but very rarely does) expel you. If you want to be a school-sanctioned student organization, living within the legal bubble, you get to play by the rules that sustain the bubble. If you don't, live off campus and take your chances with local police.
qintl55 4y ago
I love the covid angle thrown in for dramatic effect-- "poor students wanted the parties to get over covid blues and look how the college is punishing them!! Evil College!" My immigrant 0.02$-- if you care about building a life, being a frat president or organizing parties are optional activities. But then again, I also don't get why college football coaches are paid more than CS professors...
mrkeen 4y ago
Sounds completely orthogonal to higher education. > “If I didn’t get into Stanford, I probably wasn’t going to go to college,” he told me. > he returned for his junior year in the fall of 2021 hoping to salvage a sense of community and camaraderie > host a party at his fraternity, Kappa Sigma, where he was now president Is he a student, or is he LARPing some idealised college experience he saw in a movie? > Party hosts must also provide “EANABs,” or Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages, to “contribute to an inclusive and inviting experience” for all partygoers. Hosts are also required to take an online “Party Planning Course” before submitting their applications. Lock it down harder. Do your parties off-campus.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  My understanding is that stanford doesn't really have "off-campus". Everyone lives on campus. As far as whether he partied too much, that's kind of the point of college to probably more than half of students in America. Not to learn academics but to network with peers.
- pyfi 4y ago
  [flagged]
ihateyouall123 4y ago
[flagged]
AlbertCory 4y ago
I didn't attend Stanford, but I've been on campus a zillion times for various functions (cultural events, choir, extension classes). It's not like most colleges. There's no big group of off-campus apartment buildings that nearly all upperclassmen live in. Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages is, without doubt, the most nanny-ish rule ever invented ("What? You only have Coke? That's not equally attractive! I'm writing you up.")
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages is, without doubt, the most nanny-ish rule ever invented Without that, everybody would be compliant who had a tap, or a hose around the back.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    OR, non-drinkers would bring their own water bottles. As people do nowadays anyway.
christkv 4y ago
Man compared to the mayhem that was student life at NTNU in Trondheim this sound awful.
zainhoda 4y ago
“past several years” Umm… I went to Stanford from 2002-2006 and this policy was in place back then. Why is this news now?
- m-ee 4y ago
  They’ve clearly ratcheted up the enforcement, EANABs did not used to be mandated (except maybe having water available?), and underage drinking was only a problem for the person doing it if they got caught outside with an open container or biking while drunk. While I was there there was an “open door” drinking policy for freshmen. Meaning RAs would not stop you from drinking anything you chose but wanted the doors open so they could intervene quickly if someone got alcohol poisoning. It’s my understanding that hard alcohol is now banned so people just close the door. Specific policies aside it’s clear from their actions that the university wants to purge student control from housing or social organizations. They unceremoniously eliminated the European theme houses, ended student control of band, have been picking the frats off one by one. The coops are probably next on the chopping block.
throwaway22032 4y ago
The US has such a weird attitude towards alcohol. In my day at Oxford every college had a bar worked by the students. I don't remember if ours was open every evening but it felt often enough.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  The UK is a heavily binge drinking and alcoholic country: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151102-why-do-the-british-drink-so-much https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151102-why-do-the-briti... > I discovered that 2004 was Peak Booze: the year when Brits drank more than they had done for a century, and more than they have done in the decade since. Leading the way to this alcoholic apogee were those of us born around 1980. No other generation drank so much in their early 20s. Why us? > Everyone in alcohol research knows the graph. It plots the change in annual consumption of alcohol in the UK, calculated in litres of pure alcohol per person. (None of us drinks pure alcohol, thankfully; one litre of pure alcohol is equivalent to 35 pints of strong beer.) In 1950, Brits drank an average of 3.9 litres per person. Look to the right and at first the line barely rises. Then, in 1960, it begins to creep upward. The climb becomes steadier during the 1970s. The upward trajectory ends in 1980, but that turns out to be temporary. By the late 1990s consumption is rising rapidly again. > Come Peak Booze, in 2004, we were drinking 9.5 litres of alcohol per person – the equivalent of more than 100 bottles of wine – each year.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    That's not really true, though. You can't really consider an article on a "National Enquirer"-type website to be a solid source of factual information.
  - frant-hartm 4y ago
    As someone who comes from central Europe and lived in UK for a few years I say this - UK is not particularly alcoholic. It's the drinking culture which is terrible and I think it's due to 2 facts: - pubs close early - if you want a pub open longer than till 11 pm you need a more expensive license. I was told it's a remnant of a WWII policy when they needed workers ready in the morning to work in factories. Anyway the places which stay oper are more expensive. This encourages binge drinking. If you drink 8 lagers in 2 hours because the club you go to afterwards is twice as expensive you get pretty drunk. If you spaced it out between 9 pm and 4 am you would be fine. - very strict enforcement of no alcohol till 18. When the teens turn 18 and get access to alcohol they get shitfaced. I started drinking at home or at pubs at 15 and I learned how much I can safely drink. It also took off the forbidden fruit badge. Try any UK high street on Friday 11 pm, there UK doesn't seem to have bright future :-)
exogeny 4y ago
The exact same thing happened/is happening at Carnegie Mellon. To the school, the undergraduates are nothing but PR and legal liabilities, therefore any fun or social life must be eradicated.
prepend 4y ago
> the university hired outside lawyers to step in Cynically I think that the university spending lots on billable hours makes these types of investigations more likely to continue and grow. It seems like universities having infinite money through their endowments lets them fund stupid projects like these investigations and a near 1:1 student to admin ratio. This seems like something like alumni and benefactors can help by requiring some governance of this stupid pork. Or maybe federal funds will not pay for orgs that spend more on admin than teaching or research.
balozi 4y ago
Consider this writer's observation then juxtapose the crazy incident involving the Fifth Circuit Judge protest just a few day prior to publication of this article. It seems like a tale of two very different institutions. One where the students are victimized by a ruthless bureaucracy, and the other where the students are the true menace. The only common factor is a twisted administrative state.
sharkjacobs 4y ago
Talk about burying the lede, the article is 4000 words deep before they mention that the draconian party requirements were implemented after an unconscious student was raped behind a dumpster at a frat party in 2015.
- projectazorian 4y ago
  And these fraternities are housed on campus, as far as I can tell. The university is entitled to impose whatever requirements it likes on social clubs that use university property. And administrators are justified in taking a harsh stance against a category of clubs that have a long rap sheet for sexual assault, hazing, and extreme binge drinking. It would be unethical for administrators to not take action. As other posters have pointed out these rules are in fact liberal by university standards. Many universities ban alcohol from undergrad social events entirely, others are completely dry across the board. The traditional approach would be for the frats to move off campus if they don’t like the rules, but that’s not possible because Palo Alto, so instead they’re trying to do culture war special pleading in conservative media.
fortran77 4y ago
I disagree with this author’s description of Meyer. > But in August 2020, Meyer rode her bike past a football player who she believed engaged in sexual misconduct with one of her younger teammates. Suddenly and impulsively, she spilled the coffee she was holding onto him. Impulsively throwing coffee on someone in the name of a #MeToo rumor. It's a tragedy she killed herself, but she also shouldn't assault people. An impulsive assault is still an assault. Shame on The Free Press for not seeing this. And shame on Stanford for not letting police and courts handle this. If she gets convicted of assault, expel her. Don’t do the “kangaroo court” thing.
Balgair 4y ago
I promise this gets back around: I've been trying to compare the various football codes (soccer, american, gaelic, australian, etc). Mostly as a way to try to make up new codes. Get a big chart together, find permutations, viola, new game. It's going okay-ish. However, when you start diving into this you run into where these games originated. And they mostly come out of the 'public' schools around London in the later part of the 1700s. What's amazing is that a lot of these codes are still played to this day. You can find YT videos of them, drone shots, the works. One of the strangest ones is called the 'Eton Wall Game'[0]. The rules are pretty simple. You and 11 other 'friends' get together along a 100 meter long wall and smash into 12 of the other blokes. There's a ball too. That's pretty much it. The wiki is a bit funny when it compares it to rugby, since the Wall Game was invented 57 years beforehand. But the culture of the Eton Wall Game (and we're coming back to the article now) is what is just bonkers (pardon the pun). The 'big game' is on Saint Andrew's Day, November 30th (and you do have to call out the Gregorian calendar now, as it's so old). Here the Collegers and Oppidans play each other for bragging rights. An aside on UK 'public schools': These are, in US terms, very much very elite private schools. Only the richest of the rich go to these places. Like, I think every UK prime minister went to one of these few schools, many royals too. They are also, and this is important to remember, for ages 12-17 and almost exclusively male. At Eton, they all wear top hats and tails to class, as far as I can tell, every single day. They speak latin. It's like just totally wild to me here in 2023. Boris Johnson was the 'keeper' of the aforementioned Wall when he was there as a Colleger. Gives the Catholic Church a run on sticking to tradition. Also the Collegers number just 70 students, so I think just 10 in each year (not entirely certain here). Oppidans run about 1200 students, I think. But, I'm a rando from the US, so I know very little here about how things are post covid and whatnot. Etonians, please chime in. Back to the Wall Game. I want to remind that this is a predecessor game to soccer and rugby. It's like a coelacanth of sports. The Wall itself is on a field 'controlled' by the Collegers, so they are the ones that can practice on it. Not entirely sure about how that is ... possible for 12-17 year olds, but that's the super rich for you. The poor-boy Oppidans then hop over the wall, the Collegers walk up arm in arm, they then bash each other against the wall like so many pencil erasers for 50 minutes. The game is limited to the oldest boys, so just the 16 and 17 year olds. Scoring is seemingly rare and complicated. Suffice to say, a true-blue goal in the St Andrew's Day 'big game' was last scored in 1909, like over 100 years ago. Really. Also, these 'goals are just a shed door and a tree that's starting to get old now. Like I said, a living fossil of sports. You'd think that the Collegers having the ability stop the Oppidans from, you know, practicing, would put a damper on the Oppidans chances, right? (And now here is where we get back to the OP article). But no! Because culture. As far as my internet research can take me, it is tradition for the Collegers to be completely hungover during the game. Sometimes they have missed the game entirely. Hang on a second. Hungover? Yes! The night before is a huge bash for the Collegers. They all get drunk, the only adult headmastery-person in charge leaves for the night to escape the riot, and the drunken older boys then go about terrorizing the younger ones, including beatings and strippings. I don't know what the last few years of reading the news has done to you, but drunk 16+ year olds without any adult supervision (culture) that are, like, super-hazing the younger boys is not a, let's say, bright place. Yes, okay, that's a dark place. I am not saying that assaults happen (because I do not have any evidence that I could lazily find online), but come on. As far as I can tell, this has been going on for centuries. The current heir to the throne of England and his brother both went through this particular school. Like, most of the heads of the UK government went through this system and culture, these dark places, for years during their most formative times. After this dive into a strange little game, I don't wonder about the debacle that was Brexit. So, bringing this all back to Stanford. Look, it's one of the elite schools here in the US. The culture of this school, like it or not, really does shape the minds of the future leaders of the US and beyond. When the admins do things to these young adults, whether by malice or beneficence or accident, then that has huge effects downrange. Making all these kids into nervous purebreds sure is a lot better than St. Andrew's Eve at Eton, but it's not the best thing either. I don't know how the pressure is going to get let out, but it's gotta happen somehow. Otherwise we end up broken leaders like the UK has. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_wall_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_wall_game
Claude_Shannon 4y ago
I don't see what's the point of the article. It is supposed to be weird that uni bans alcohol from uni parties? At my uni being drunk was an instant expulsion without right to appeal, I don't see what's wrong with it. If you disagree, you don't have to study there.
slackfan 4y ago
Imagine committing yourself to an education institution. In tyol 2023. Lol. Lmao even.
th13row 4y ago
[flagged]
Vaslo 4y ago
This is why fraternities need to begin pulling themselves away from these institutions. There is no upside to being affiliated with a university anymore.
mcv 4y ago
> Stanford now has more than 10,000 administrators who oversee the 7,761 undergraduate and 9,565 graduate students Is that normal? This sounds ridiculously excessive to me. (Also, Stanford is a lot smaller than I thought.) Amsterdam has two universities, each with 30k+ students and about 5000 employees (+/- 1000).
gumby 4y ago
I can understand how the "Stanford Student Party Policy" emerged and evolved (my own dorm at MIT was summarily shut down by the administration) though I do think it's a shame. But I've attended several parties at Stanford faculty housing that were ragers, exceeding my own undergraduate memories (except no live bands). These are also on campus in the suburban faculty neighborhoods where tenured profs live. I'm even invited to one tonight that I expect will be lit (though I won't be there). Yes, they do have "EANABs" but that's just because the hosts are grownups, and have kids so such things are table stakes.

191 points by fortran77 4y ago

consumer451 4y ago

Pure politics, nothing technology related.

nickelcitymario 4y ago
Considering how many tech startups are founded by Stanford grads (or current students), I think it's pretty relevant on HN, in my humble opinion.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  But do we really care about Stanford's alcohol policy and it's permissiveness?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- jonathankoren 4y ago
  That's what an alumni group is for.
windowshopping 4y ago
Hacker news doesn't exist purely to curate tech articles. It's really for anything that people here find interesting. There are countless posts here every day that are about systems or policy or non-tech science or just simply something thought provoking.
dang 4y ago
HN is explicitly for more than technology related topics: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The question of how that relates to politics is fraught, of course, but if you or anyone want to know how we approach that, there are past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
karaterobot 4y ago
Ironically, the guidelines specifically allow non-technology stories, but advise against complaining about non-technology submissions. So, if you want to be a stickler about the rules, check out the guidelines document, already linked. > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
- consumer451 4y ago
  I am just extremely salty because in my experience there is a clear right-leaning bias on HN for when politics is allowed. By allowed I mean not flagged. I am very much an indie, but I find this HN characteristic really unfun.

cratermoon 4y ago

[flagged]

jdkee 4y ago
cites The Guardian
version_five 4y ago
Do you have anything to say about the article?
uejfiweun 4y ago
This is the most blatant ad hominem I’ve ever seen, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
- dang 4y ago
  Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
lp0_on_fire 4y ago
[flagged]
- dekhn 4y ago
  I wouldn't call her "rightwing"
  - michaelhoffman 4y ago
    I wouldn't call her "professional"
    - marcusverus 4y ago
      Why not?

singleshot_ 4y ago

> “He decided not to hire an outside lawyer for his defense because he said he was confident the allegations were nothing more than misunderstandings.” I’m not sure how you expect to be able to get a huge settlement out of Stanford with no lawyer, but best of luck to you, brother.

TheMoonToMyLeft 4y ago

[dead]

908B64B197 4y ago

How could this: > Stanford now has more than 10,000 administrators who oversee the 7,761 undergraduate and 9,565 graduate students—almost enough for each student to have their own personal butler. (There are about 2,290 faculty members.) These bureaucrats make up an increasingly powerful segment of the university population, as they expand their portfolio and send the message that all conflict should be adjudicated by them. (OCS reports for the 2022–2023 school year have not yet been released.) Lead to this: > “I’m sitting in two-hour-long interviews on Zoom with lawyers who are trying to verbally and rhetorically trap people,” he said. “I had young kids that were 18, 19 years old who are international asking me, ‘Hey, can I talk to this attorney and tell them I drank a beer, or am I going to get my visa revoked?’ ” I guess if you can't make it as a student there, you can always become an admin to bully those who put the work in to get admitted?

blakesterz 4y ago
Where is that 10,000 number coming from? I don't see it on the PDF they link to, and I don't see it on the Stanford site: https://facts.stanford.edu/administration/staff/ https://facts.stanford.edu/administration/staff/ That 10k number doesn't even sound impossible, knowing what we know about large universities now, but I just wonder where it came from. Maybe I'm missing something obvious on that PDF?
- stagger87 4y ago
  On the linked article. Ctrl+F -> "10,000"
- fatnoah 4y ago
  I assume it comes from this line: 12,336* managerial and professional staff There's a more granular breakdown here: https://irds.stanford.edu/data-findings/academic-and-non-academic-staff https://irds.stanford.edu/data-findings/academic-and-non-aca...
- WatchDog 4y ago
  It's actually more than that now. Non-faculty staff have increased by about 62% since 2012, faculty increased by 16% over the same period, while students increased by less than 10%. Further breakdown: https://i.imgur.com/UCjelDs.png https://i.imgur.com/UCjelDs.png

bennysonething 4y ago

"For the past several years, Stanford has required students to adhere to a Student Party Policy, which includes a highly detailed “Harm Reduction Plan” mandating multiple sober monitors and designated alcohol service areas, and prohibiting the serving of any hard liquor. Party hosts must also provide “EANABs,” or Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages, to “contribute to an inclusive and inviting experience” for all partygoers. Hosts are also required to take an online “Party Planning Course” before submitting their applications. " Is this normal!?! I feel sorry for this generation. Attempts to make their world risk free has turned it into "fuck up once and we'll destroy you".

boc 4y ago
The concept of registering on-campus parties is nothing new at private universities, but these requirements are pretty insane.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  The policy looks like it's only for parties held by student organizations [1], not all parties held by its students, which makes the whole thing more silly than dystopian. [1] https://vaden.stanford.edu/student-party-policy-guidelines https://vaden.stanford.edu/student-party-policy-guidelines
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I'm surprised they allow alcohol at student organization events, period. My boring public university no-one's heard of sure didn't, years back.
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      Look we are trying to have a moral panic about political correctness here get in the spirit please.
      - 4y ago

kodyo 4y ago

Commissars gonna commissar. No reason to submit to people like that.

tptacek 4y ago

This is such a weird article that I feel like I must not understand it. From what I can tell: A fraternity hosted one or more parties where, by finding of fact and apparently the admission of the frat itself, they served alcohol to minors, contravening an obvious Stanford policy; as a result, they had to go through an annoying adjudication process and spend several months under the thread of a long-term suspension of the fraternity. Contemporaneously, a student assaulted with a cup of coffee another student that she believed was himself responsible for assaulting one of her friends. Stanford began an annoying adjudication process, this time including a thread of expulsion from the school. The student committed suicide. The latter case is, of course, a terrible tragedy. But an adjudication process doesn't seem like a disproportionate response to an assault, however minor. Stanford students are adults; transpose this setting to a workplace and there would be no adjudication at all, only an immediate termination. The story seems dead set on pinning the responsibility for the tragedy on Stanford, and Stanford may well be at fault! But it's not clear from the article how. Meanwhile: the organizer of the frat party is less jubilant about his campus life after his frat party ran afoul of the frat party police. I feel like I have to have missed some other detail of how Stanford messed with his life, because from what I can tell, at all times in this story, he remained a Stanford student in good standing. His frat ran a risk of being prevented from hosting parties. So what? Again: if I sound flippant here, it's likely because there is some aspect of this story that I simply don't understand.

com2kid 4y ago
> transpose this setting to a workplace and there would be no adjudication at all, only an immediate termination. One only wishes, and maybe now days that is true, but even 10 years ago this wasn't a sure thing, especially if the aggressor was at a high level in the company.
Psychlist 4y ago
I think the core bit you've missed is: Stanford explicitly selects for perfectionists by requiring extremely high standards of (most) students. Those students have spend several years working very hard to get in, aware that even the slightest mis-step can cost them everything they've worked for. But they're surrounded by people trying to help them get in. Then they get to Stanford and discover that the university administration is actively hostile, it's looking for reasons to get rid of imperfect students, or students that can be blamed for imperfection (anyone running a group of students that has a problem).

ginger2016 4y ago

The article is too long. Is the headline a clickbait or is Stanford doing something against its own students?

ModernMech 4y ago
Depends on who you ask. According to some of my (not Stanford) students, any time I give them less than 100% I’m at war with them.
hot_gril 4y ago
Article is bullshit it seems
fencepost 4y ago
Sounds like a combination of significant changes in student policies and enforcement over the last 40-50 years (accelerating in the last 20-25?) combined with very bureaucracy- and process-heavy set of enforcement mechanisms. Editorializing a bit, this may reflect general social changes in the US - schools are seen as being "in loco parentis" though many of the students are legally adults, and parenting in the US has changed in the last 40 years from "go play at the park with your friends, but be back by sunset" to helicopter parenting and the very thought of unsupervised children at a park being something deserving of reports to Child Protective Services. So, now the school is helicopter-"in loco parentis"ing, and covering its butt with paper to shield it from the actual helicopter parents.

bigbacaloa 4y ago

US needs to stop treating 21 year olds like children.

bluescrn 4y ago
You can buy a gun at 18. But not a beer...

tatrajim 4y ago

As I reminisced on an earlier post about the chilling atmosphere for students at Stanford, the situation was a mite different in the 1970s. My first day there as a callow freshman from the Midwest, the cool guy next door in the dorm kindly approached me and muttered "Hey kid, you want a hit of hash?" The one inviolable rule for university housing at the time 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.

libraryatnight 4y ago

I can't take the use of "war" in this headline seriously at all. Why is everything framed so threateningly? Maybe this is a bad policy, but it seems to me they want to ensure on-campus, official student organization run, parties that serve alcohol do so responsibly and provide other drinks so people don't feel like they have to drink booze. Maybe they've gone too far in another direction, but seems something Standford and its students can hash out without it being a fan for culture war bullshit.

dang 4y ago
I don't like that either and if someone can suggest a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article itself), we'd be happy to change it.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  "Stanford's aggressive crackdown on its own students" ?
- throwawayacc5 4y ago
  How about "Standford's Orwellian Peace Against its Own Students"? It's literally the title of the linked article. I don't think editorializing and changing titles to placate neo-Puritans is helping anyone. If you don't like the title, contact the author and ask them to amend the title.
- libraryatnight 4y ago
  I'm not really sure if you can do anything about it - it is the actual title of the article. I went through the site and it seems to be mostly culture war related editorial pieces, so maybe this one's just on me to not click through when I see thefp.com Thanks for the reply though, dang.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Image-conscious corporatization of academics is a strange spectacle, certainly. Enforcing strict behavioral norms is something large corporations are known for, and that seems to be what's going on here. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/how-to-network-through-stanford-university.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/how-to-network-throu... > "...only over the past decade has the school gone all-in on an ecosystem of startup-supporting programs, turning classrooms into job fairs and students into entrepreneurs-to-be, and effectively handing the keys of the campus to venture capitalists....The most important support system today is the network of people — and cash — who now populate and surround the institution, hunting for investments." That's what students (more likely their parents) are now forking over $56K in tuition (not counting cost-of-living expenses) per year to gain access to. It certainly looks like the rise of elitist networking in the British Eton etc. school model. The recent spate of college-admission-payola scandals also point in that direction.

cpgxiii 4y ago

Many US colleges/universities maintain a particular kind of legal bubble, where the surrounding city/state law enforcement largely leaves college police/security to their own devices to create an environment in which students very rarely face actual legal consequences for their misdeeds. On the whole, this is generally a good thing, in that it mitigates the worst effects of a broken national drug and alcohol policy. Local law enforcement doesn't want to have to deal with the large number of student alcohol and drug-related offenses (and especially not their parents), schools want to avoid the bad publicity of their students ending up in jail, and students definitely don't want to end up in the court system either. That is the trade you make as a student going to a prestigious private school - you won't end up in real court unless you do something incredibly egregious, but you will have to deal with the internal disciplinary process that could (but very rarely does) expel you. If you want to be a school-sanctioned student organization, living within the legal bubble, you get to play by the rules that sustain the bubble. If you don't, live off campus and take your chances with local police.

qintl55 4y ago

I love the covid angle thrown in for dramatic effect-- "poor students wanted the parties to get over covid blues and look how the college is punishing them!! Evil College!" My immigrant 0.02$-- if you care about building a life, being a frat president or organizing parties are optional activities. But then again, I also don't get why college football coaches are paid more than CS professors...

mrkeen 4y ago

Sounds completely orthogonal to higher education. > “If I didn’t get into Stanford, I probably wasn’t going to go to college,” he told me. > he returned for his junior year in the fall of 2021 hoping to salvage a sense of community and camaraderie > host a party at his fraternity, Kappa Sigma, where he was now president Is he a student, or is he LARPing some idealised college experience he saw in a movie? > Party hosts must also provide “EANABs,” or Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages, to “contribute to an inclusive and inviting experience” for all partygoers. Hosts are also required to take an online “Party Planning Course” before submitting their applications. Lock it down harder. Do your parties off-campus.

HDThoreaun 4y ago
My understanding is that stanford doesn't really have "off-campus". Everyone lives on campus. As far as whether he partied too much, that's kind of the point of college to probably more than half of students in America. Not to learn academics but to network with peers.
pyfi 4y ago
[flagged]

ihateyouall123 4y ago

[flagged]

AlbertCory 4y ago

I didn't attend Stanford, but I've been on campus a zillion times for various functions (cultural events, choir, extension classes). It's not like most colleges. There's no big group of off-campus apartment buildings that nearly all upperclassmen live in. Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages is, without doubt, the most nanny-ish rule ever invented ("What? You only have Coke? That's not equally attractive! I'm writing you up.")

pessimizer 4y ago
> Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages is, without doubt, the most nanny-ish rule ever invented Without that, everybody would be compliant who had a tap, or a hose around the back.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  OR, non-drinkers would bring their own water bottles. As people do nowadays anyway.

christkv 4y ago

Man compared to the mayhem that was student life at NTNU in Trondheim this sound awful.

zainhoda 4y ago

“past several years” Umm… I went to Stanford from 2002-2006 and this policy was in place back then. Why is this news now?

m-ee 4y ago
They’ve clearly ratcheted up the enforcement, EANABs did not used to be mandated (except maybe having water available?), and underage drinking was only a problem for the person doing it if they got caught outside with an open container or biking while drunk. While I was there there was an “open door” drinking policy for freshmen. Meaning RAs would not stop you from drinking anything you chose but wanted the doors open so they could intervene quickly if someone got alcohol poisoning. It’s my understanding that hard alcohol is now banned so people just close the door. Specific policies aside it’s clear from their actions that the university wants to purge student control from housing or social organizations. They unceremoniously eliminated the European theme houses, ended student control of band, have been picking the frats off one by one. The coops are probably next on the chopping block.

throwaway22032 4y ago

The US has such a weird attitude towards alcohol. In my day at Oxford every college had a bar worked by the students. I don't remember if ours was open every evening but it felt often enough.

pessimizer 4y ago
The UK is a heavily binge drinking and alcoholic country: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151102-why-do-the-british-drink-so-much https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151102-why-do-the-briti... > I discovered that 2004 was Peak Booze: the year when Brits drank more than they had done for a century, and more than they have done in the decade since. Leading the way to this alcoholic apogee were those of us born around 1980. No other generation drank so much in their early 20s. Why us? > Everyone in alcohol research knows the graph. It plots the change in annual consumption of alcohol in the UK, calculated in litres of pure alcohol per person. (None of us drinks pure alcohol, thankfully; one litre of pure alcohol is equivalent to 35 pints of strong beer.) In 1950, Brits drank an average of 3.9 litres per person. Look to the right and at first the line barely rises. Then, in 1960, it begins to creep upward. The climb becomes steadier during the 1970s. The upward trajectory ends in 1980, but that turns out to be temporary. By the late 1990s consumption is rising rapidly again. > Come Peak Booze, in 2004, we were drinking 9.5 litres of alcohol per person – the equivalent of more than 100 bottles of wine – each year.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  That's not really true, though. You can't really consider an article on a "National Enquirer"-type website to be a solid source of factual information.
- frant-hartm 4y ago
  As someone who comes from central Europe and lived in UK for a few years I say this - UK is not particularly alcoholic. It's the drinking culture which is terrible and I think it's due to 2 facts: - pubs close early - if you want a pub open longer than till 11 pm you need a more expensive license. I was told it's a remnant of a WWII policy when they needed workers ready in the morning to work in factories. Anyway the places which stay oper are more expensive. This encourages binge drinking. If you drink 8 lagers in 2 hours because the club you go to afterwards is twice as expensive you get pretty drunk. If you spaced it out between 9 pm and 4 am you would be fine. - very strict enforcement of no alcohol till 18. When the teens turn 18 and get access to alcohol they get shitfaced. I started drinking at home or at pubs at 15 and I learned how much I can safely drink. It also took off the forbidden fruit badge. Try any UK high street on Friday 11 pm, there UK doesn't seem to have bright future :-)

exogeny 4y ago

The exact same thing happened/is happening at Carnegie Mellon. To the school, the undergraduates are nothing but PR and legal liabilities, therefore any fun or social life must be eradicated.

prepend 4y ago

> the university hired outside lawyers to step in Cynically I think that the university spending lots on billable hours makes these types of investigations more likely to continue and grow. It seems like universities having infinite money through their endowments lets them fund stupid projects like these investigations and a near 1:1 student to admin ratio. This seems like something like alumni and benefactors can help by requiring some governance of this stupid pork. Or maybe federal funds will not pay for orgs that spend more on admin than teaching or research.

balozi 4y ago

Consider this writer's observation then juxtapose the crazy incident involving the Fifth Circuit Judge protest just a few day prior to publication of this article. It seems like a tale of two very different institutions. One where the students are victimized by a ruthless bureaucracy, and the other where the students are the true menace. The only common factor is a twisted administrative state.

sharkjacobs 4y ago

Talk about burying the lede, the article is 4000 words deep before they mention that the draconian party requirements were implemented after an unconscious student was raped behind a dumpster at a frat party in 2015.

projectazorian 4y ago
And these fraternities are housed on campus, as far as I can tell. The university is entitled to impose whatever requirements it likes on social clubs that use university property. And administrators are justified in taking a harsh stance against a category of clubs that have a long rap sheet for sexual assault, hazing, and extreme binge drinking. It would be unethical for administrators to not take action. As other posters have pointed out these rules are in fact liberal by university standards. Many universities ban alcohol from undergrad social events entirely, others are completely dry across the board. The traditional approach would be for the frats to move off campus if they don’t like the rules, but that’s not possible because Palo Alto, so instead they’re trying to do culture war special pleading in conservative media.

fortran77 4y ago

I disagree with this author’s description of Meyer. > But in August 2020, Meyer rode her bike past a football player who she believed engaged in sexual misconduct with one of her younger teammates. Suddenly and impulsively, she spilled the coffee she was holding onto him. Impulsively throwing coffee on someone in the name of a #MeToo rumor. It's a tragedy she killed herself, but she also shouldn't assault people. An impulsive assault is still an assault. Shame on The Free Press for not seeing this. And shame on Stanford for not letting police and courts handle this. If she gets convicted of assault, expel her. Don’t do the “kangaroo court” thing.

Balgair 4y ago

I promise this gets back around: I've been trying to compare the various football codes (soccer, american, gaelic, australian, etc). Mostly as a way to try to make up new codes. Get a big chart together, find permutations, viola, new game. It's going okay-ish. However, when you start diving into this you run into where these games originated. And they mostly come out of the 'public' schools around London in the later part of the 1700s. What's amazing is that a lot of these codes are still played to this day. You can find YT videos of them, drone shots, the works. One of the strangest ones is called the 'Eton Wall Game'[0]. The rules are pretty simple. You and 11 other 'friends' get together along a 100 meter long wall and smash into 12 of the other blokes. There's a ball too. That's pretty much it. The wiki is a bit funny when it compares it to rugby, since the Wall Game was invented 57 years beforehand. But the culture of the Eton Wall Game (and we're coming back to the article now) is what is just bonkers (pardon the pun). The 'big game' is on Saint Andrew's Day, November 30th (and you do have to call out the Gregorian calendar now, as it's so old). Here the Collegers and Oppidans play each other for bragging rights. An aside on UK 'public schools': These are, in US terms, very much very elite private schools. Only the richest of the rich go to these places. Like, I think every UK prime minister went to one of these few schools, many royals too. They are also, and this is important to remember, for ages 12-17 and almost exclusively male. At Eton, they all wear top hats and tails to class, as far as I can tell, every single day. They speak latin. It's like just totally wild to me here in 2023. Boris Johnson was the 'keeper' of the aforementioned Wall when he was there as a Colleger. Gives the Catholic Church a run on sticking to tradition. Also the Collegers number just 70 students, so I think just 10 in each year (not entirely certain here). Oppidans run about 1200 students, I think. But, I'm a rando from the US, so I know very little here about how things are post covid and whatnot. Etonians, please chime in. Back to the Wall Game. I want to remind that this is a predecessor game to soccer and rugby. It's like a coelacanth of sports. The Wall itself is on a field 'controlled' by the Collegers, so they are the ones that can practice on it. Not entirely sure about how that is ... possible for 12-17 year olds, but that's the super rich for you. The poor-boy Oppidans then hop over the wall, the Collegers walk up arm in arm, they then bash each other against the wall like so many pencil erasers for 50 minutes. The game is limited to the oldest boys, so just the 16 and 17 year olds. Scoring is seemingly rare and complicated. Suffice to say, a true-blue goal in the St Andrew's Day 'big game' was last scored in 1909, like over 100 years ago. Really. Also, these 'goals are just a shed door and a tree that's starting to get old now. Like I said, a living fossil of sports. You'd think that the Collegers having the ability stop the Oppidans from, you know, practicing, would put a damper on the Oppidans chances, right? (And now here is where we get back to the OP article). But no! Because culture. As far as my internet research can take me, it is tradition for the Collegers to be completely hungover during the game. Sometimes they have missed the game entirely. Hang on a second. Hungover? Yes! The night before is a huge bash for the Collegers. They all get drunk, the only adult headmastery-person in charge leaves for the night to escape the riot, and the drunken older boys then go about terrorizing the younger ones, including beatings and strippings. I don't know what the last few years of reading the news has done to you, but drunk 16+ year olds without any adult supervision (culture) that are, like, super-hazing the younger boys is not a, let's say, bright place. Yes, okay, that's a dark place. I am not saying that assaults happen (because I do not have any evidence that I could lazily find online), but come on. As far as I can tell, this has been going on for centuries. The current heir to the throne of England and his brother both went through this particular school. Like, most of the heads of the UK government went through this system and culture, these dark places, for years during their most formative times. After this dive into a strange little game, I don't wonder about the debacle that was Brexit. So, bringing this all back to Stanford. Look, it's one of the elite schools here in the US. The culture of this school, like it or not, really does shape the minds of the future leaders of the US and beyond. When the admins do things to these young adults, whether by malice or beneficence or accident, then that has huge effects downrange. Making all these kids into nervous purebreds sure is a lot better than St. Andrew's Eve at Eton, but it's not the best thing either. I don't know how the pressure is going to get let out, but it's gotta happen somehow. Otherwise we end up broken leaders like the UK has. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_wall_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_wall_game

Claude_Shannon 4y ago

I don't see what's the point of the article. It is supposed to be weird that uni bans alcohol from uni parties? At my uni being drunk was an instant expulsion without right to appeal, I don't see what's wrong with it. If you disagree, you don't have to study there.

slackfan 4y ago

Imagine committing yourself to an education institution. In tyol 2023. Lol. Lmao even.

th13row 4y ago

[flagged]

Vaslo 4y ago

This is why fraternities need to begin pulling themselves away from these institutions. There is no upside to being affiliated with a university anymore.

mcv 4y ago

> Stanford now has more than 10,000 administrators who oversee the 7,761 undergraduate and 9,565 graduate students Is that normal? This sounds ridiculously excessive to me. (Also, Stanford is a lot smaller than I thought.) Amsterdam has two universities, each with 30k+ students and about 5000 employees (+/- 1000).

gumby 4y ago

I can understand how the "Stanford Student Party Policy" emerged and evolved (my own dorm at MIT was summarily shut down by the administration) though I do think it's a shame. But I've attended several parties at Stanford faculty housing that were ragers, exceeding my own undergraduate memories (except no live bands). These are also on campus in the suburban faculty neighborhoods where tenured profs live. I'm even invited to one tonight that I expect will be lit (though I won't be there). Yes, they do have "EANABs" but that's just because the hosts are grownups, and have kids so such things are table stakes.