18 ms·

Who Is Running Stanford?

82 points by g42gregory 4y ago

theGnuMe 4y ago
Stanfraud is the new nickname.
prepend 4y ago
My take on this is that it’s a result of stupid luxury. There’s a lot of admin positions. I’m not sure what the right amount of admin is, but seems stanford has too many doing too little and too much. I didn’t go to Stanford, I went to way lower rated schools but it seemed to me that my interactions with admin were all unpleasant and funny in a Brazil-style way. And whole I would like them to be better, I never thought that more people would solve the problems. Stanford admin staff has doubled in the past 40 years [0] and they have more admin staff than teachers. Students did not double during this period. I think admin staff are more insidious than just driving up costs (although that’s important). I think it’s an issue of giving smart people good pay and bullshit work. Perhaps with good intention they want to be constructive but choose bikeshedding topics and really drill down to do something to stay busy. I can only imagine the amount of work that went into the decision to cut sports teams and which ones, dozens of committees and papers and consultants over something completely stupid that shouldn’t even be worth a single agenda item. I remember an analysis after 9/11 that partially blamed the attacks on Middle East countries shift of cutting all the busy work for graduates so smart people got masters degrees and had nothing to do. [1] So the boredom ended up leading to more terrorism. Obviously, high tuition and kangaroo court pogroms on privileged kids is better than blowing stuff up. But perhaps the solution is to not have make work positions and release people to create real things. I think a possible solution is for alumni to stop donating and state reasons. But that might result in just hiring more admin staff to promote more donations. (I know a contact who works as one of 5 admin staff in a 4th tier subregional university that works on alumni promotions and is justified by a 1.2x return on salary based on the increased donations. So, for example, their cost is $500k per year and they produce a newsletters and a ton of spam and bring in $600k so it’s good right?) I think a Stanford degree is still very valuable and I would spend more time reading a job application with a Stanford degree, but what’s the tipping point? [0] https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-administrative-bloat-is-out-of-control/ https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-administrative-bloat-is... [1] https://slate.com/technology/2009/12/why-do-so-many-terrorists-have-engineering-degrees.html https://slate.com/technology/2009/12/why-do-so-many-terroris... “ Gambetta and Hertog propose that a lack of appropriate jobs in their home countries may have radicalized some engineers in Arab countries. The graduates they studied came of age at a time when a degree from a competitive technical program was supposed to provide a guarantee of high-status employment. But the promises of modernization and development were often stymied by repression and corruption, and many young engineers in the 1980s were left jobless and frustrated. One exception was Saudi Arabia, where engineers had little trouble finding work in an ever-expanding economy. As it happens, Saudi Arabia is also the only Arab state where the study found that engineers are not disproportionately represented in the radical movement.”
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Tangent: school “ratings” are part of the grift. Yes, there are bad schools, but you hit diminishing returns far sooner than expensive schools want you to believe.
  - prepend 4y ago
    I agree on the ratings. I struggled with a way to convey that this is not a school where you would even imagine alumni caring about. It’s the school to go to when you don’t get into the state university and don’t get into the secondary state university. Not that it’s bad, it’s just not a place that should have 5 people working on this task. So at I thought that the ranking shows that they haven’t even gotten to the point of joining the grift of rankings. It’s rated between 400-500. It’s hard to truly rank universities in general or even in specific subject areas and, for me, it falls into the unquantifiable reputation realm. I grew up with Bill Gates and Paul Allen and Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs and other successful college dropouts so I always felt I wanted to look at output and production rather than credentials. But of course, I have to settle for medical boards and whatnot and the drawbacks of that as there’s no way I can or am willing to evaluate cardiologists based solely on their work. Artists and coders, sure.
    - tough 4y ago
      thanks god cardiology isn't my calling
- detourdog 4y ago
  When my kids started Elementary school we had a Principal, a superintendent, and teachers, The superintendent both retired and we now have a Principal, a superintendent, a vice-principal, and a few specialized directors. This happened over 10 years right before my eyes. The new Principal claimed the job was just too big. We are small town with fewer than 600 students. I feel like such a grumpy old man doubting these peoples work effort. I think people that do poor jobs hire more people to create more confusion. I'm not proud of my cynicism.
MichaelZuo 4y ago
> Katie supposedly spilled coffee on a Stanford varsity football player who assaulted a friend of hers (he got to play out the season, and was never disciplined). Stanford knew that Katie was struggling after she was brought into Stanford’s byzantine and draconian student discipline process. On the last day, or actually the evening of the last day Katie could be disciplined, Stanford sent an email to her saying they were placing her diploma on hold three months short of graduation, and proceeding to a disciplinary hearing. Her parents claim she could have lost her student status, her membership on the soccer team, her captainship of the team and other benefits of a Stanford degree. This really doesn't make sense. It's difficult to believe that spilling coffee on someone else resulted in a formal disciplinary action.
- ta2304130835 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - quonn 4y ago
    Can you explain what you mean by that?
  - Bran_son 4y ago
    I was unable to find pictures of either, only Katie Meyer. Could you point me to these pictures?
- prepend 4y ago
  For me, it’s not just that. It’s that they chose to investigate spilled coffee (which is assault although the police weren’t involved so makes me think it didn’t warrant their assault label) reported not by the student but by a third party who claimed to witness it, but did not investigate the sexual assault charges against the coffee spillee. So Stanford is selectively investigating seemingly spurious charges against weak people rather than more serious charges against powerful people. So it’s a pretty cruel systemic bullying. And seems to reinforce my perception (perhaps wrong) that it’s a bullshit system that just wants to stay active and not actually do anything.
derbOac 4y ago
It's not just Stanford. Change some details and this letter could have been written about any number of universities today. With no disrespect to the writer, they came across as if they were just stumbling into the problems of modern universities and attributing it to Stanford in particular. This maybe adds to its appeal, though, as it highlights the absurdity of it all — as if someone responsible is just stumbling onto all of this and is like "what the hell is going on in here?"
- brodouevencode 4y ago
  The academy is fundamentally broken.
nla 4y ago
Who cares? Stanford has one administrator for every student. Professsors are a fraction of that. If they want to shut something down, start with the DEI office and then the law school since they are both a disgrace.
cs702 4y ago
Stanford seems to be run by a faceless bureaucracy that (a) cares first and foremost about the bureaucracy itself, its power, its reputation, its vision, its goals, its organization, its efficiency, its financial situation, etc., and (b) cares only secondarily about students. The many wonderful professors who do care about students operate at the mercy of apparatchiks in the bureaucracy.
- bumby 4y ago
  Part of the problem may be that professors have been more willing to hand over the reins of running the university to administrators in recent decades. On the surface, it may seem a good deal for the professors: they get to spend more time on researching the problems they are interested in. But the downside is they have ceded control to the "faceless bureaucracy" who care less about the traditional aims of a university (research, education) and more about the institution itself.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  People complaining about university bureaucracies is as old as the whole notion of universities. Neal Stephenson's first novel, the Big-U, is essentially about that. Not his finest work but entertaining. It's set at a fictional college near Boston. But it seems interchangeable with just about any university. Money, power, corruption, bureaucracy, etc. are all themes in that novel. The thing is, universities are places that combine a large number of people that go there, large budgets, and wide varieties of weird things that need funding, attention, etc. with lots of groups of people favoring one thing over the other and quite a bit of alumni, politicians, and other people in power obsessing over how it is all administered. So, a certain level of bureaucracy and politics are pretty much a given. As are disagreements over how this is administered. And any such organization that exists for a while inevitably develops some Kafka-esque bureaucracies. It would be anomalous if that wasn't the case. Literally almost every university on this planet has this issue. Some might regard this as a feature and not a bug. Learning to thrive in such a place helps prepare people for the real world a bit. Obviously some universities do better than others. But overall, it seems Stanford is still doing fine in producing some world class research, maintaining good academic standards, and generally attracting new generations of students that are willing to pay up the stupendously large tuition fees. I don't see what the big deal here is other than some immature people being immature, which if you think about it is the whole point of a university.
lo_zamoyski 4y ago
The examples in the article are a bit varied, so we cannot conveniently assign a single, much less single pathological cause, or even nefarious cause, apart from "general malaise and decadence" perhaps. But some of the examples do point to bloated administration as a seat of troubles. Yale, for example, has a <1:1 undergrad student to administrator ratio. That's right, more than one administrator per student. But what's important here is not just how this impacts the cost of education having to pay all those salaries and build and maintain the facilities to hold their offices. Administration has also been the motor by which, shall we say, the "new ideological norms" have been imposed on universities, and conspicuously so in recently years, by commissars in administration. I wouldn't be surprised if hiring decisions and admissions are also guided or influenced by such new ideological policing. In a way, they can't help but be influenced by them, directly or indirectly. This leads to a positive feedback loop that concentrates wackiness in universities. (I'm not objecting to concentration per se. A university is a community and certain commonly held norms must govern every community. It is essential for the common good of that community, and these are not arbitrary. I am objecting to some of the insane norms that are being imposed and highlighting the way in which it is or may be occurring.)
- bumby 4y ago
  >Administration has also been the motor by which, shall we say, the "new ideological norms" have been imposed on universities In his book The Coddling of the American Mind Jonathan Haidt covers some of this in-depth. He speaks about the growth of administrators and their general CYA approach, which seems evidenced in the article, among other causes. But where he draws an important distinction from your conclusion is that he claims these universities are reacting to changes in the student culture and administrators aren't the root cause themselves. He goes on to describe how, because colleges are now run as businesses, they must conform to their customers (students) preferences. Beyond the obvious extravagance of new facilities, this also extends towards cultural policies. Some of that leads to an overly protective safety culture (e.g., expecting third parties to intervene to solve issues) which, in turn, creates the need for more administrators. What's interesting in his book is that he lays the case that this is even more prevalent in prestigious universities because the overly protective safety culture is more prevalent in upper-middle and upper class American culture, which is over-represented in these institutions.
tivert 4y ago
> By themselves, some recent actions taken by Stanford were somewhat humorous. The school has been the butt of jokes by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and numerous other major and local papers. For example, the IT department came out with its “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” to be used on its websites. The national media had a field day with this action, especially when it recommended no longer using the word “American.” Wow. That document says the word "chief" should not be used because it's a "cultural appropriation" of indigenous communities. The word is derived from Latin via French, and was first used in 14th-century Middle English (i.e. pre-contact): https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chief https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chief. How can a supposed academic institution put out such a policy that obviously hadn't been vetted by a language expert, let alone someone who could be bothered to use a dictionary?
- ModernMech 4y ago
  Because it was just some clueless people in the IT department. Stanford doesn't have "language experts" on call to vet every bad idea from every department, nor would it be reasonable to expect them to. Hard to believe people are still getting bent out of shape about this.
  - tivert 4y ago
    > Because it was just some clueless people in the IT department. It speaks to a surprising lack of basic policy-making competence. > Stanford doesn't have "language experts" on call to vet every bad idea from every department, nor would it be reasonable to expect them to. I'm sure they have tenured English professors on campus. Apparently no one had the sense to walk across campus and run this by one. And even if it was impossible to vet this language policy with a "language experts," due to the lack of a some pre-existing bureaucratized process to do so, that doesn't excuse the fact that they apparently failed to use a dictionary and some common sense. > Hard to believe people are still getting bent out of shape about this. I'm not "bent out of shape," I'm laughing at their amusing display of incompetence.
    - 4y ago
fwlr 4y ago
There’s a great quote from a recent TV show that summarizes the putative value of a college degree: The whole point of a college degree is to show a potential employer that you showed up someplace four years in a row, completed a series of tasks reasonably well, and on time. So if he hires you, there’s a semi-decent chance that you’ll show up there every day and not fuck his business up. (Delivered by Sylvester Stallone! https://youtube.com/shorts/SUlrllck1Po https://youtube.com/shorts/SUlrllck1Po) Arguably the value proposition of Stanford and other colleges in the same situation has changed. Rather than show ability to complete reasonably complex tasks on time, a Stanford degree’s real value now is that it shows the bearer is capable of safely navigating the diversity/equality/inclusion bureaucracy. From this perspective, the fact that Stanford has enough administrators to give each one a full-time salaried job harassing one individual student each and still have staff left over to run classes is actually strengthening their value. Anyone who graduates from Stanford has survived a bureaucratic gauntlet infinitely more insane and Kafka-esque than whatever your DEI department can cook up. Hire a Stanford graduate and you can be sure they won’t bring shame on your company with an insensitive word or sexually suggestive action. Ironically, perhaps these colleges are preparing students for the workplace more effectively than they have in decades.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > The whole point of a humanities college degree is to show a potential employer that you showed up someplace four years in a row, completed a series of tasks reasonably well, and on time. Lets be honest here, some degrees show proficiency in some field. Other degrees, which are far more popular, show that you showed up on time, four years in a row. The value an EE graduate or an MD graduate has is not the same as the value of someone who could have coasted through university with minimal effort.
  - version_five 4y ago
    I think everyone agrees that the skillset will differ depending on the degree and the university. The point was that within the area of your degree, university also signals conformity.
  - 4y ago
forgingahead 4y ago
American universities have become extravagant nurseries for overgrown babies, both the students and the staff. Some ancient professors (ie: pre 2013) are probably still ok, but otherwise the whole thing has become nothing but a bunch of crybabies and whiners pointing at each other and screeching. University used to be a signal; get in, graduate, and maybe you've got something more to you than the average person. Now, it's an anti-signal: if you actually jumped through the hoops to get in, and went into debt to indoctrinate yourself, not to mention actively harm your ability to function in the real world, then sane employers are going to forgo you.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  We can all point to extravagances in industries we don't like, and then declare them playgrounds for overgrown babies. I remember when I was in undergrad walking past the Google offices in Pittsburgh. There was a bridge above them where you could look down into the window. I didn't really know about Google at the time, but my eyes were caught by the bean bags, foosball table, ping pong table, the giant wall of candy, and of course the bright primary colors. I think there was a finger painting station back there too, but I can't be sure. For the longest time I had thought it was a daycare but I was confused as to why there were never any children. Turns out it was an office for Google engineers! So it's pretty rich to hear about how Universities are nurseries from a website dedicated to the tech industry. Especially when universities are attended by 18-21 year olds who still have developing frontal lobes. The tech industry is mostly (ostensibly) grown ass men, so what's their excuse for the bean bags and candy walls?
- roncesvalles 4y ago
  A bit orthogonal but I very much consider academic study beyond undergraduate to be an anti-signal. Not so much at an institution like Stanford, where doing a PhD still means something; but very quickly past the sparse handful of top tier universities, a PhD is little more than a UBI program for people unable to integrate into the workforce.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    > PhD is little more than a UBI program for people unable to integrate into the workforce. People with Ph.D.s have the highest employment rate of any degree, so I'm not sure how you can hold this opinion. Maybe you're just a little biased against Ph.D.s? https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/education-pays.htm https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/educa...
dandare 4y ago
> I was then saddened to read about Stanford soccer player Katie Meyer, who had committed suicide last March after a badly botched disciplinary action No need to continue reading.
- bequanna 4y ago
  Can you continue that thought? I don’t follow you.
kmeisthax 4y ago
Stanford doesn't need competent admin - in fact, that would detract from the organization's hidden imperatives. While Stanford is nominally a university, it is also a high-class university. This is the school all of America's rich elites send their kids to, because they remember it being the best school to go to when they were kids. And those rich elites are perfectly willing to shower money on a school that does not deserve it in exchange for stupid vanity and ego projects. To be clear: every university has at least one stupidly rich alumni that bought a vanity building[0]. The thing that makes Stanford unique is that they have an outsize number of stupidly rich alumni, all of whom send their kids there. And this means that everyone else who wants to "network" with these stupidly rich kids needs to go to Stanford. So Stanford admin isn't actually selling an education, they're selling access. What this does to the actually educational part of the school is sort of what oil does to a fledgling democracy. All organizations are colony organisms that must continue bringing in resources to keep individual cells aligned with the colony. Smart leaders know this and will intentionally diversify their income to reduce business risk. On the other hand, if you don't diversify income - or one particular source of income grows so much it dwarfs everything else - then the organization's interests can no longer persist. They must be set aside to serve the interest of maintaining and exploiting that income. The tail wags the dog. Who's running Stanford? Whoever's needed to get and keep rich kids on campus so they have access to sell in order to justify their high tuition costs. Remember, education has diminishing returns: a $100,000 degree does not get you 10x as much knowledge as a $10,000 one, and people signing up for schools will figure this out. So everything else is an afterthought - including the actual classes, testing, and certifications that people are ostensibly paying for. Because you aren't going to Stanford purely because the classes are that good. International students are another source of unusually lucrative revenue. China has loads of middle-class students that go to western universities if they can't pass the extremely strict Gaokao test that you need in order to get into a Chinese uni. American colleges manipulated college rankings to increase their share of foreign students. This is great, until China suddenly can't send kids overseas anymore, and then colleges see revenues fall off a cliff. Athletic departments themselves have done this to other schools that aren't in the Ivy League. The NCAA was set up with a bunch of very odd rules ostensibly established to prevent professionalization of college sports, but in practice they just perpetuate the exploitation of athletes that are pros in all but name. Any college with a half-decent team can command a lucrative sports fandom, so the NCAA became a billion dollar franchise anyway. As a result, more and more of the budget of an educational institution is dedicated to running a sports team consisting of unpaid pro athletes whose courseload is a bunch of fake Swahili courses[1]. When colleges are treated as businesses, the only people who matter are the administrators that can find new ways to increase revenue. Everything else is an afterthought. [0] From my personal experience: SUNY Stony Brook has the Charles B. Wang Center, an extremely expensive, over-budget building whose primary utilization is housing an Asian fusion restaurant. The actual conference rooms there were rarely used for classes. Hell, back when I-CON was still on campus, they didn't even use that building. (If something has somehow changed about the Wang Center since the decade and change I went to that school, let me know.) [1] I did not make this up. https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/unc-investigation-athletes-pushed-into-fake-classes-by-counselors/ https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/unc-investig...
Maursault 4y ago
Stanford's history is a little shocking. Founder Amasa Leland Stanford, a robber baron, the 8th Governor of California and subsequent US Senator, died of heart failure, but had locomotor ataxia, a symptom of tabes dorsalis, which is a late consequence of neurosyphilis. His wife, cofounder Jane Sanford, died of strychnine poisoning, murdered by... we're really not sure, but my money's on her late husband's syphilic lover.
musicale 4y ago
Although this is a letter to the editor rather than an op-ed, I seem to recall Stanford's newspaper inadvertently publishing an AI-generated op-ed submission at one point. The problem is likely to get worse.

82 points by g42gregory 4y ago

Stanfraud is the new nickname.

My take on this is that it’s a result of stupid luxury. There’s a lot of admin positions. I’m not sure what the right amount of admin is, but seems stanford has too many doing too little and too much. I didn’t go to Stanford, I went to way lower rated schools but it seemed to me that my interactions with admin were all unpleasant and funny in a Brazil-style way. And whole I would like them to be better, I never thought that more people would solve the problems. Stanford admin staff has doubled in the past 40 years [0] and they have more admin staff than teachers. Students did not double during this period. I think admin staff are more insidious than just driving up costs (although that’s important). I think it’s an issue of giving smart people good pay and bullshit work. Perhaps with good intention they want to be constructive but choose bikeshedding topics and really drill down to do something to stay busy. I can only imagine the amount of work that went into the decision to cut sports teams and which ones, dozens of committees and papers and consultants over something completely stupid that shouldn’t even be worth a single agenda item. I remember an analysis after 9/11 that partially blamed the attacks on Middle East countries shift of cutting all the busy work for graduates so smart people got masters degrees and had nothing to do. [1] So the boredom ended up leading to more terrorism. Obviously, high tuition and kangaroo court pogroms on privileged kids is better than blowing stuff up. But perhaps the solution is to not have make work positions and release people to create real things. I think a possible solution is for alumni to stop donating and state reasons. But that might result in just hiring more admin staff to promote more donations. (I know a contact who works as one of 5 admin staff in a 4th tier subregional university that works on alumni promotions and is justified by a 1.2x return on salary based on the increased donations. So, for example, their cost is $500k per year and they produce a newsletters and a ton of spam and bring in $600k so it’s good right?) I think a Stanford degree is still very valuable and I would spend more time reading a job application with a Stanford degree, but what’s the tipping point? [0] https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-administrative-bloat-is-out-of-control/ https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-administrative-bloat-is... [1] https://slate.com/technology/2009/12/why-do-so-many-terrorists-have-engineering-degrees.html https://slate.com/technology/2009/12/why-do-so-many-terroris... “ Gambetta and Hertog propose that a lack of appropriate jobs in their home countries may have radicalized some engineers in Arab countries. The graduates they studied came of age at a time when a degree from a competitive technical program was supposed to provide a guarantee of high-status employment. But the promises of modernization and development were often stymied by repression and corruption, and many young engineers in the 1980s were left jobless and frustrated. One exception was Saudi Arabia, where engineers had little trouble finding work in an ever-expanding economy. As it happens, Saudi Arabia is also the only Arab state where the study found that engineers are not disproportionately represented in the radical movement.”

Waterluvian 4y ago
Tangent: school “ratings” are part of the grift. Yes, there are bad schools, but you hit diminishing returns far sooner than expensive schools want you to believe.
- prepend 4y ago
  I agree on the ratings. I struggled with a way to convey that this is not a school where you would even imagine alumni caring about. It’s the school to go to when you don’t get into the state university and don’t get into the secondary state university. Not that it’s bad, it’s just not a place that should have 5 people working on this task. So at I thought that the ranking shows that they haven’t even gotten to the point of joining the grift of rankings. It’s rated between 400-500. It’s hard to truly rank universities in general or even in specific subject areas and, for me, it falls into the unquantifiable reputation realm. I grew up with Bill Gates and Paul Allen and Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs and other successful college dropouts so I always felt I wanted to look at output and production rather than credentials. But of course, I have to settle for medical boards and whatnot and the drawbacks of that as there’s no way I can or am willing to evaluate cardiologists based solely on their work. Artists and coders, sure.
  - tough 4y ago
    thanks god cardiology isn't my calling
detourdog 4y ago
When my kids started Elementary school we had a Principal, a superintendent, and teachers, The superintendent both retired and we now have a Principal, a superintendent, a vice-principal, and a few specialized directors. This happened over 10 years right before my eyes. The new Principal claimed the job was just too big. We are small town with fewer than 600 students. I feel like such a grumpy old man doubting these peoples work effort. I think people that do poor jobs hire more people to create more confusion. I'm not proud of my cynicism.

MichaelZuo 4y ago

> Katie supposedly spilled coffee on a Stanford varsity football player who assaulted a friend of hers (he got to play out the season, and was never disciplined). Stanford knew that Katie was struggling after she was brought into Stanford’s byzantine and draconian student discipline process. On the last day, or actually the evening of the last day Katie could be disciplined, Stanford sent an email to her saying they were placing her diploma on hold three months short of graduation, and proceeding to a disciplinary hearing. Her parents claim she could have lost her student status, her membership on the soccer team, her captainship of the team and other benefits of a Stanford degree. This really doesn't make sense. It's difficult to believe that spilling coffee on someone else resulted in a formal disciplinary action.

ta2304130835 4y ago
[flagged]
- quonn 4y ago
  Can you explain what you mean by that?
- Bran_son 4y ago
  I was unable to find pictures of either, only Katie Meyer. Could you point me to these pictures?
prepend 4y ago
For me, it’s not just that. It’s that they chose to investigate spilled coffee (which is assault although the police weren’t involved so makes me think it didn’t warrant their assault label) reported not by the student but by a third party who claimed to witness it, but did not investigate the sexual assault charges against the coffee spillee. So Stanford is selectively investigating seemingly spurious charges against weak people rather than more serious charges against powerful people. So it’s a pretty cruel systemic bullying. And seems to reinforce my perception (perhaps wrong) that it’s a bullshit system that just wants to stay active and not actually do anything.

derbOac 4y ago

It's not just Stanford. Change some details and this letter could have been written about any number of universities today. With no disrespect to the writer, they came across as if they were just stumbling into the problems of modern universities and attributing it to Stanford in particular. This maybe adds to its appeal, though, as it highlights the absurdity of it all — as if someone responsible is just stumbling onto all of this and is like "what the hell is going on in here?"

brodouevencode 4y ago
The academy is fundamentally broken.

nla 4y ago

Who cares? Stanford has one administrator for every student. Professsors are a fraction of that. If they want to shut something down, start with the DEI office and then the law school since they are both a disgrace.

cs702 4y ago

Stanford seems to be run by a faceless bureaucracy that (a) cares first and foremost about the bureaucracy itself, its power, its reputation, its vision, its goals, its organization, its efficiency, its financial situation, etc., and (b) cares only secondarily about students. The many wonderful professors who do care about students operate at the mercy of apparatchiks in the bureaucracy.

bumby 4y ago
Part of the problem may be that professors have been more willing to hand over the reins of running the university to administrators in recent decades. On the surface, it may seem a good deal for the professors: they get to spend more time on researching the problems they are interested in. But the downside is they have ceded control to the "faceless bureaucracy" who care less about the traditional aims of a university (research, education) and more about the institution itself.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
People complaining about university bureaucracies is as old as the whole notion of universities. Neal Stephenson's first novel, the Big-U, is essentially about that. Not his finest work but entertaining. It's set at a fictional college near Boston. But it seems interchangeable with just about any university. Money, power, corruption, bureaucracy, etc. are all themes in that novel. The thing is, universities are places that combine a large number of people that go there, large budgets, and wide varieties of weird things that need funding, attention, etc. with lots of groups of people favoring one thing over the other and quite a bit of alumni, politicians, and other people in power obsessing over how it is all administered. So, a certain level of bureaucracy and politics are pretty much a given. As are disagreements over how this is administered. And any such organization that exists for a while inevitably develops some Kafka-esque bureaucracies. It would be anomalous if that wasn't the case. Literally almost every university on this planet has this issue. Some might regard this as a feature and not a bug. Learning to thrive in such a place helps prepare people for the real world a bit. Obviously some universities do better than others. But overall, it seems Stanford is still doing fine in producing some world class research, maintaining good academic standards, and generally attracting new generations of students that are willing to pay up the stupendously large tuition fees. I don't see what the big deal here is other than some immature people being immature, which if you think about it is the whole point of a university.

lo_zamoyski 4y ago

The examples in the article are a bit varied, so we cannot conveniently assign a single, much less single pathological cause, or even nefarious cause, apart from "general malaise and decadence" perhaps. But some of the examples do point to bloated administration as a seat of troubles. Yale, for example, has a <1:1 undergrad student to administrator ratio. That's right, more than one administrator per student. But what's important here is not just how this impacts the cost of education having to pay all those salaries and build and maintain the facilities to hold their offices. Administration has also been the motor by which, shall we say, the "new ideological norms" have been imposed on universities, and conspicuously so in recently years, by commissars in administration. I wouldn't be surprised if hiring decisions and admissions are also guided or influenced by such new ideological policing. In a way, they can't help but be influenced by them, directly or indirectly. This leads to a positive feedback loop that concentrates wackiness in universities. (I'm not objecting to concentration per se. A university is a community and certain commonly held norms must govern every community. It is essential for the common good of that community, and these are not arbitrary. I am objecting to some of the insane norms that are being imposed and highlighting the way in which it is or may be occurring.)

bumby 4y ago
>Administration has also been the motor by which, shall we say, the "new ideological norms" have been imposed on universities In his book The Coddling of the American Mind Jonathan Haidt covers some of this in-depth. He speaks about the growth of administrators and their general CYA approach, which seems evidenced in the article, among other causes. But where he draws an important distinction from your conclusion is that he claims these universities are reacting to changes in the student culture and administrators aren't the root cause themselves. He goes on to describe how, because colleges are now run as businesses, they must conform to their customers (students) preferences. Beyond the obvious extravagance of new facilities, this also extends towards cultural policies. Some of that leads to an overly protective safety culture (e.g., expecting third parties to intervene to solve issues) which, in turn, creates the need for more administrators. What's interesting in his book is that he lays the case that this is even more prevalent in prestigious universities because the overly protective safety culture is more prevalent in upper-middle and upper class American culture, which is over-represented in these institutions.

tivert 4y ago

> By themselves, some recent actions taken by Stanford were somewhat humorous. The school has been the butt of jokes by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and numerous other major and local papers. For example, the IT department came out with its “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” to be used on its websites. The national media had a field day with this action, especially when it recommended no longer using the word “American.” Wow. That document says the word "chief" should not be used because it's a "cultural appropriation" of indigenous communities. The word is derived from Latin via French, and was first used in 14th-century Middle English (i.e. pre-contact): https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chief https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chief. How can a supposed academic institution put out such a policy that obviously hadn't been vetted by a language expert, let alone someone who could be bothered to use a dictionary?

ModernMech 4y ago
Because it was just some clueless people in the IT department. Stanford doesn't have "language experts" on call to vet every bad idea from every department, nor would it be reasonable to expect them to. Hard to believe people are still getting bent out of shape about this.
- tivert 4y ago
  > Because it was just some clueless people in the IT department. It speaks to a surprising lack of basic policy-making competence. > Stanford doesn't have "language experts" on call to vet every bad idea from every department, nor would it be reasonable to expect them to. I'm sure they have tenured English professors on campus. Apparently no one had the sense to walk across campus and run this by one. And even if it was impossible to vet this language policy with a "language experts," due to the lack of a some pre-existing bureaucratized process to do so, that doesn't excuse the fact that they apparently failed to use a dictionary and some common sense. > Hard to believe people are still getting bent out of shape about this. I'm not "bent out of shape," I'm laughing at their amusing display of incompetence.
  - 4y ago

fwlr 4y ago

There’s a great quote from a recent TV show that summarizes the putative value of a college degree: The whole point of a college degree is to show a potential employer that you showed up someplace four years in a row, completed a series of tasks reasonably well, and on time. So if he hires you, there’s a semi-decent chance that you’ll show up there every day and not fuck his business up. (Delivered by Sylvester Stallone! https://youtube.com/shorts/SUlrllck1Po https://youtube.com/shorts/SUlrllck1Po) Arguably the value proposition of Stanford and other colleges in the same situation has changed. Rather than show ability to complete reasonably complex tasks on time, a Stanford degree’s real value now is that it shows the bearer is capable of safely navigating the diversity/equality/inclusion bureaucracy. From this perspective, the fact that Stanford has enough administrators to give each one a full-time salaried job harassing one individual student each and still have staff left over to run classes is actually strengthening their value. Anyone who graduates from Stanford has survived a bureaucratic gauntlet infinitely more insane and Kafka-esque than whatever your DEI department can cook up. Hire a Stanford graduate and you can be sure they won’t bring shame on your company with an insensitive word or sexually suggestive action. Ironically, perhaps these colleges are preparing students for the workplace more effectively than they have in decades.

lelanthran 4y ago
> The whole point of a humanities college degree is to show a potential employer that you showed up someplace four years in a row, completed a series of tasks reasonably well, and on time. Lets be honest here, some degrees show proficiency in some field. Other degrees, which are far more popular, show that you showed up on time, four years in a row. The value an EE graduate or an MD graduate has is not the same as the value of someone who could have coasted through university with minimal effort.
- version_five 4y ago
  I think everyone agrees that the skillset will differ depending on the degree and the university. The point was that within the area of your degree, university also signals conformity.
- 4y ago

forgingahead 4y ago

American universities have become extravagant nurseries for overgrown babies, both the students and the staff. Some ancient professors (ie: pre 2013) are probably still ok, but otherwise the whole thing has become nothing but a bunch of crybabies and whiners pointing at each other and screeching. University used to be a signal; get in, graduate, and maybe you've got something more to you than the average person. Now, it's an anti-signal: if you actually jumped through the hoops to get in, and went into debt to indoctrinate yourself, not to mention actively harm your ability to function in the real world, then sane employers are going to forgo you.

ModernMech 4y ago
We can all point to extravagances in industries we don't like, and then declare them playgrounds for overgrown babies. I remember when I was in undergrad walking past the Google offices in Pittsburgh. There was a bridge above them where you could look down into the window. I didn't really know about Google at the time, but my eyes were caught by the bean bags, foosball table, ping pong table, the giant wall of candy, and of course the bright primary colors. I think there was a finger painting station back there too, but I can't be sure. For the longest time I had thought it was a daycare but I was confused as to why there were never any children. Turns out it was an office for Google engineers! So it's pretty rich to hear about how Universities are nurseries from a website dedicated to the tech industry. Especially when universities are attended by 18-21 year olds who still have developing frontal lobes. The tech industry is mostly (ostensibly) grown ass men, so what's their excuse for the bean bags and candy walls?
roncesvalles 4y ago
A bit orthogonal but I very much consider academic study beyond undergraduate to be an anti-signal. Not so much at an institution like Stanford, where doing a PhD still means something; but very quickly past the sparse handful of top tier universities, a PhD is little more than a UBI program for people unable to integrate into the workforce.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > PhD is little more than a UBI program for people unable to integrate into the workforce. People with Ph.D.s have the highest employment rate of any degree, so I'm not sure how you can hold this opinion. Maybe you're just a little biased against Ph.D.s? https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/education-pays.htm https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/educa...

dandare 4y ago

> I was then saddened to read about Stanford soccer player Katie Meyer, who had committed suicide last March after a badly botched disciplinary action No need to continue reading.

bequanna 4y ago
Can you continue that thought? I don’t follow you.

kmeisthax 4y ago

Stanford doesn't need competent admin - in fact, that would detract from the organization's hidden imperatives. While Stanford is nominally a university, it is also a high-class university. This is the school all of America's rich elites send their kids to, because they remember it being the best school to go to when they were kids. And those rich elites are perfectly willing to shower money on a school that does not deserve it in exchange for stupid vanity and ego projects. To be clear: every university has at least one stupidly rich alumni that bought a vanity building[0]. The thing that makes Stanford unique is that they have an outsize number of stupidly rich alumni, all of whom send their kids there. And this means that everyone else who wants to "network" with these stupidly rich kids needs to go to Stanford. So Stanford admin isn't actually selling an education, they're selling access. What this does to the actually educational part of the school is sort of what oil does to a fledgling democracy. All organizations are colony organisms that must continue bringing in resources to keep individual cells aligned with the colony. Smart leaders know this and will intentionally diversify their income to reduce business risk. On the other hand, if you don't diversify income - or one particular source of income grows so much it dwarfs everything else - then the organization's interests can no longer persist. They must be set aside to serve the interest of maintaining and exploiting that income. The tail wags the dog. Who's running Stanford? Whoever's needed to get and keep rich kids on campus so they have access to sell in order to justify their high tuition costs. Remember, education has diminishing returns: a $100,000 degree does not get you 10x as much knowledge as a $10,000 one, and people signing up for schools will figure this out. So everything else is an afterthought - including the actual classes, testing, and certifications that people are ostensibly paying for. Because you aren't going to Stanford purely because the classes are that good. International students are another source of unusually lucrative revenue. China has loads of middle-class students that go to western universities if they can't pass the extremely strict Gaokao test that you need in order to get into a Chinese uni. American colleges manipulated college rankings to increase their share of foreign students. This is great, until China suddenly can't send kids overseas anymore, and then colleges see revenues fall off a cliff. Athletic departments themselves have done this to other schools that aren't in the Ivy League. The NCAA was set up with a bunch of very odd rules ostensibly established to prevent professionalization of college sports, but in practice they just perpetuate the exploitation of athletes that are pros in all but name. Any college with a half-decent team can command a lucrative sports fandom, so the NCAA became a billion dollar franchise anyway. As a result, more and more of the budget of an educational institution is dedicated to running a sports team consisting of unpaid pro athletes whose courseload is a bunch of fake Swahili courses[1]. When colleges are treated as businesses, the only people who matter are the administrators that can find new ways to increase revenue. Everything else is an afterthought. [0] From my personal experience: SUNY Stony Brook has the Charles B. Wang Center, an extremely expensive, over-budget building whose primary utilization is housing an Asian fusion restaurant. The actual conference rooms there were rarely used for classes. Hell, back when I-CON was still on campus, they didn't even use that building. (If something has somehow changed about the Wang Center since the decade and change I went to that school, let me know.) [1] I did not make this up. https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/unc-investigation-athletes-pushed-into-fake-classes-by-counselors/ https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/unc-investig...

Maursault 4y ago

Stanford's history is a little shocking. Founder Amasa Leland Stanford, a robber baron, the 8th Governor of California and subsequent US Senator, died of heart failure, but had locomotor ataxia, a symptom of tabes dorsalis, which is a late consequence of neurosyphilis. His wife, cofounder Jane Sanford, died of strychnine poisoning, murdered by... we're really not sure, but my money's on her late husband's syphilic lover.

musicale 4y ago

Although this is a letter to the editor rather than an op-ed, I seem to recall Stanford's newspaper inadvertently publishing an AI-generated op-ed submission at one point. The problem is likely to get worse.