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> I'm kind of surprised by your defensiveness about this. I'm not defending anything (I called them clueless!), I was stating the actual scope of what we're ta

> I'm kind of surprised by your defensiveness about this. I'm not defending anything (I called them clueless!), I was stating the actual scope of what we're talking about. It's true that subcommittees compose the whole organization, but at the same time, what happened was that the whole organization was judged as if it were the small subcommittee. The rush to condemn Stanford as a whole is what I'm critiquing. > I'd expect if someone stops by your office with a problem, you'd give them at least a few minutes of your time to help. And when your day ends up filled with spell checking documents when you have a Ph.D. in English, maybe you might rethink that open door policy.

tivert 4y ago
> I'm not defending anything (I called them clueless!), I was stating the actual scope of what we're talking about. It's true that subcommittees compose the whole organization, but at the same time, what happened was that the whole organization was judged as if it were the small subcommittee. You kinda are. You seem to be trying to shift blame to a scapegoat, which is a pretty common defense tactic. If you shoot someone, you can't claim you're innocent because it was only your finger that pulled the trigger. Obviously things are a little blurrier with organizations, but certainly not totally disconnected. >> I'd expect if someone stops by your office with a problem, you'd give them at least a few minutes of your time to help. > And when your day ends up filled with spell checking documents when you have a Ph.D. in English, maybe you might rethink that open door policy. That's an obvious mischaracterization of what they would have been asked to do, or what would have happened. People are usually pretty respectful of other people's time, especially in these kinds of situations.
- michael_j_x 4y ago
  If an IT department of a major organization has both the time and motivation to construct and publicize such a document, that speaks volumes of the incentive structure and cooperate priorities of their organization. The fact that they released such document in the public domain without first running it from the PR department speaks volumes to their incompetence. This was not some random internal IT document. This was an official, public Stanford policy, advertised as part of a specific PR strategy.
  - ehvatum 4y ago
    If you saw a chart of Stanford administrative overhead growth, you would be aghast. All these useless busybody administrators sucking down $100k+/yr compete for visibility in order to grow their compensation and hire yet even more of their dipshit buddies. They are a cancer. Learning, teaching, and researching are entirely beside the point. Demonstrate moral superiority and hire your friends if you want to stick around. This insular, spiraling, incenstuous dynamic produces artifacts that are tremendously embarrassing and discrediting when exposed to the outside world.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    > This was not some random internal IT document. This was an official, public Stanford policy, advertised as part of a specific PR strategy. You're just projecting that you don't really understand how universities are organized. Universities are towns more than corporations, and we share a lot of things in public because we are very open. Unlike corporations which use a veil of secrecy to hide their operations, universities operate more freely. This is a good thing. That is of course until the public and provocateurs come in and start misrepresenting things, as was the case here. It was a policy proposed by a subcommittee of a department, and the document described itself as aspirational and a guideline. Was it a good idea? No. But it was misrepresented by outsiders as "official, public Stanford policy, advertised as part of a specific PR strategy." This is a flat mischaracterization of what that document was. It's a mischaracterization of the literal words on the document explaining what it was. You may say that its nature on the Internet made it a defacto public PR strategy, but again that shows ignorance of how University PR works (lol, what's a "PR department"? That's corporate speak), but the subsequent hiding of the document behind the Stanford network should make clear it was never for you in the first place. The fact that you're still mischaracterizing the document today tells me you are intentionally pushing misinformation. I'm not sure why, but don't you think you should stop? > speaks volumes to their incompetence. Okay, and what was the fallout really? A bunch of conservatives and right wingers had a field day complaining about wokeness gone wild. And? Stanford continues to be a world-class institution producing cutting-edge research. The world continues turning. Stanford enrollment continues to grow.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > You kinda are. You seem to be trying to shift blame to a scapegoat, which is a pretty common defense tactic. Placing the blame on the literal people who caused the problem instead of generalizing it to people who didn't cause the problem is the opposite of scapegoating. I can't think of the right term for what you're doing: taking something a small part of the whole did and using it to push an agenda against the larger organization. Because what you're doing here definitely smells of agenda pushing, especially because you seem to have no relationship whatsoever to the Stanford community, yet you seem to have very strong opinions about what they should be doing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm getting from your posts is that you're from the outside looking in, and what you see inside makes you really mad (or I guess, amused?), but otherwise you have no real relationship to Sandford or academia whatsoever, is that true? > That's an obvious mischaracterization of what they would have been asked to do, or what would have happened. Not sure how one can mischaracterize a counterfactual. You imagine it would go one way, and I use my experience to note I think it would have gone another way. As a professor who didn't get to eat lunch until 4:00 yesterday because people were in my office until that time asking for random help, I can easily see how an English professor would not have time to do a grammar and spell checks for for the whole campus. It seems you have very limited experience on college campuses and in academia in general, so maybe you could just admit that you opinion is based in ignorance instead of saying people are mischaracterizing the situation. What real experience do you have on the slack capacity of professors to manage the technical output of various campus departments? It's okay if the answer is "none" but we should just be clear about that.
  - tivert 4y ago
    > Because what you're doing here definitely smells of agenda pushing, especially because you seem to have no relationship whatsoever to the Stanford community, yet you seem to have very strong opinions about what they should be doing. Yeah, I thought that list was really stupid (to the point of being amusing), and that's where it would have ended if you hadn't rushed in with the vigorous agenda pushing, defensiveness, projection, etc. I also get the impression you're probably also conflating me other others. > Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm getting from your posts is that you're from the outside looking in, and what you see inside makes you really mad (or I guess, amused?), but otherwise you have no real relationship to Sandford or academia whatsoever, is that true? I'm a literal dog on the internet. Honestly, you seem to be the one who's "really mad." It feels a lot like a police apologist who insists it must be "just a few bad apples," and everyone must also understand it that way as well. > As a professor who didn't get to eat lunch until 4:00 yesterday because people were in my office until that time asking for random help... So, in other words, based on your example, there's a decent chance they'd be open to help, at least a little. > I can easily see how an English professor would not have time to do a grammar and spell checks for for the whole campus. That's a weird bit of black and white thinking, and seems to be based on the assumption that one must be totally closed to outside requests for help or open to helping literally anyone with any trivial thing.

tivert 4y ago

> I'm not defending anything (I called them clueless!), I was stating the actual scope of what we're talking about. It's true that subcommittees compose the whole organization, but at the same time, what happened was that the whole organization was judged as if it were the small subcommittee. You kinda are. You seem to be trying to shift blame to a scapegoat, which is a pretty common defense tactic. If you shoot someone, you can't claim you're innocent because it was only your finger that pulled the trigger. Obviously things are a little blurrier with organizations, but certainly not totally disconnected. >> I'd expect if someone stops by your office with a problem, you'd give them at least a few minutes of your time to help. > And when your day ends up filled with spell checking documents when you have a Ph.D. in English, maybe you might rethink that open door policy. That's an obvious mischaracterization of what they would have been asked to do, or what would have happened. People are usually pretty respectful of other people's time, especially in these kinds of situations.

michael_j_x 4y ago
If an IT department of a major organization has both the time and motivation to construct and publicize such a document, that speaks volumes of the incentive structure and cooperate priorities of their organization. The fact that they released such document in the public domain without first running it from the PR department speaks volumes to their incompetence. This was not some random internal IT document. This was an official, public Stanford policy, advertised as part of a specific PR strategy.
- ehvatum 4y ago
  If you saw a chart of Stanford administrative overhead growth, you would be aghast. All these useless busybody administrators sucking down $100k+/yr compete for visibility in order to grow their compensation and hire yet even more of their dipshit buddies. They are a cancer. Learning, teaching, and researching are entirely beside the point. Demonstrate moral superiority and hire your friends if you want to stick around. This insular, spiraling, incenstuous dynamic produces artifacts that are tremendously embarrassing and discrediting when exposed to the outside world.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > This was not some random internal IT document. This was an official, public Stanford policy, advertised as part of a specific PR strategy. You're just projecting that you don't really understand how universities are organized. Universities are towns more than corporations, and we share a lot of things in public because we are very open. Unlike corporations which use a veil of secrecy to hide their operations, universities operate more freely. This is a good thing. That is of course until the public and provocateurs come in and start misrepresenting things, as was the case here. It was a policy proposed by a subcommittee of a department, and the document described itself as aspirational and a guideline. Was it a good idea? No. But it was misrepresented by outsiders as "official, public Stanford policy, advertised as part of a specific PR strategy." This is a flat mischaracterization of what that document was. It's a mischaracterization of the literal words on the document explaining what it was. You may say that its nature on the Internet made it a defacto public PR strategy, but again that shows ignorance of how University PR works (lol, what's a "PR department"? That's corporate speak), but the subsequent hiding of the document behind the Stanford network should make clear it was never for you in the first place. The fact that you're still mischaracterizing the document today tells me you are intentionally pushing misinformation. I'm not sure why, but don't you think you should stop? > speaks volumes to their incompetence. Okay, and what was the fallout really? A bunch of conservatives and right wingers had a field day complaining about wokeness gone wild. And? Stanford continues to be a world-class institution producing cutting-edge research. The world continues turning. Stanford enrollment continues to grow.
ModernMech 4y ago
> You kinda are. You seem to be trying to shift blame to a scapegoat, which is a pretty common defense tactic. Placing the blame on the literal people who caused the problem instead of generalizing it to people who didn't cause the problem is the opposite of scapegoating. I can't think of the right term for what you're doing: taking something a small part of the whole did and using it to push an agenda against the larger organization. Because what you're doing here definitely smells of agenda pushing, especially because you seem to have no relationship whatsoever to the Stanford community, yet you seem to have very strong opinions about what they should be doing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm getting from your posts is that you're from the outside looking in, and what you see inside makes you really mad (or I guess, amused?), but otherwise you have no real relationship to Sandford or academia whatsoever, is that true? > That's an obvious mischaracterization of what they would have been asked to do, or what would have happened. Not sure how one can mischaracterize a counterfactual. You imagine it would go one way, and I use my experience to note I think it would have gone another way. As a professor who didn't get to eat lunch until 4:00 yesterday because people were in my office until that time asking for random help, I can easily see how an English professor would not have time to do a grammar and spell checks for for the whole campus. It seems you have very limited experience on college campuses and in academia in general, so maybe you could just admit that you opinion is based in ignorance instead of saying people are mischaracterizing the situation. What real experience do you have on the slack capacity of professors to manage the technical output of various campus departments? It's okay if the answer is "none" but we should just be clear about that.
- tivert 4y ago
  > Because what you're doing here definitely smells of agenda pushing, especially because you seem to have no relationship whatsoever to the Stanford community, yet you seem to have very strong opinions about what they should be doing. Yeah, I thought that list was really stupid (to the point of being amusing), and that's where it would have ended if you hadn't rushed in with the vigorous agenda pushing, defensiveness, projection, etc. I also get the impression you're probably also conflating me other others. > Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm getting from your posts is that you're from the outside looking in, and what you see inside makes you really mad (or I guess, amused?), but otherwise you have no real relationship to Sandford or academia whatsoever, is that true? I'm a literal dog on the internet. Honestly, you seem to be the one who's "really mad." It feels a lot like a police apologist who insists it must be "just a few bad apples," and everyone must also understand it that way as well. > As a professor who didn't get to eat lunch until 4:00 yesterday because people were in my office until that time asking for random help... So, in other words, based on your example, there's a decent chance they'd be open to help, at least a little. > I can easily see how an English professor would not have time to do a grammar and spell checks for for the whole campus. That's a weird bit of black and white thinking, and seems to be based on the assumption that one must be totally closed to outside requests for help or open to helping literally anyone with any trivial thing.