I spent 3 years living in one of the co-ops briefly mentioned in the article ("In 2013, the administration took over the student-run anarchist house and painted over the old murals."). I wouldn't call it an "anarchist house" but it sure as hell was a lot of fun to live there. I painted some of those murals that are now apparently gone. We built a giant illegal loft in our room to make it two stories (which we would disassemble for a day every year when the fire inspection happened). We did some stupid and illegal shit, sure. But the sense of community was unparalleled. The alumni association owned the house, so we had to deal with all the maintenance. We came back to campus a week before everyone else every year to work on the house. We cooked and cleaned for ourselves. I've never since experienced anything close to that same feeling of communal pride. It was a mess, but it was our beautiful mess.
I was in the co-ops and also a frat in the early 2010's. I knew about XOX, SAE, and KA but not theta delt or sigma chi -- let alone french house, slav, haus mitt, or casa italiana. Aside from undergrads, the school will miss out, too -- my pledge class founded thirteen companies in the few years after graduation, and I hired several friends from EBF for my own -- but the administration will probably never realize what they've done to the undergraduate culture. This is really sad news; I hope the rest of the co-ops escape -- most of the housing options are extremely uninspiring to actively anti-social and not great for mental health, as the article points out.
I like how we're immediately jumping to "this is going to ruin the financial success of future graduates and thus hurt future fundraising."
"Thing I like must be directly responsible for this other thing that happened later" is sad to see from someone from what's supposed to be one of our nation's best schools.
Turning high school into middle school and college into high school, etc, in terms of adult supervision isn't my favorite thing in the world, but it's also something that been happening since long before you made it to a college campus in the early 2010s. So it's not very clear that it's going to cause corporate or economic pain. The social arguments are much more compelling, but also far harder to unwind. Parents have been both complaining about but also calling for this sort of thing for decades.
It was a (possibly-overly-blunt) attempt to tie this cultural shift to outcomes the bureaucracy cares about, but absolutely the biggest loss is to the undergraduate culture and future students' experiences. Both future grads and the university will obviously be fine financially.
My theory is that the root cause is the financialization and rat-race-ification of everything.
You gotta go to college to make a good living.
You gotta go to a TOP college especially.
You gotta work your ass off in high school to get in.
And so everyone just is told their whole childhood to compete harder and harder in this race to the bottom and there's no more room for interesting experiences since a truly interesting experience isn't guaranteed to sound as good on an application as a boring "interesting experience" run-of-the-mill extracurricular schedule.
Leaving in room for insanity and creativity is counter to what this money-above-all-else societal push for undergrad education wants.
But hey, we gotta do that because if we don't, China will!
It's not the students who benefit from having to work twice as hard to get the same degree.
The funny/sad thing is that mostly our society doesn't actually work that way -- we just believe that it does.
You can absolutely have a highly successful career and life, for a wide variety of definitions of successful, without attending a top college, and while having "interesting" life experiences for all sorts of definitions of interesting.
There are many paths through life even in our current bureaucracy-ridden society -- it's just that we very heavily oversell one specific one to the point that we make it destructively competitive.
(There are some paths, mostly in medicine and law, which actually+/- require the Standard Elite Collegiate Life Path, but many other happy and successful outcomes do not actually)
It really depends on your definition of success. If you know enough Stanford grads - you’d know that many of them will consider themselves failures in life if they haven’t founded and IPO/sold a company for $100m+. I know quite a few like this… I also know quite a few who did it and only think they’re a success in life because of said event.
If you want to IPO a tech company and make a minimum of 9 figures, then going to Stanford is probably a part of the most reliable (or, at least, "least unreliable") path to doing so.
Or, at least, it was back when Stanford was the kind of place that it is in the process of not being anymore.
Even then, though, realistically if you're not already part of the "Stanford Set", following that path probably doesn't radically change your chances of success at that specific mission.
Most people aren't successful for the reasons they imagine, but more importantly - most people aren't unsuccessful for the reasons they imagine. The increasingly democratic views of what is and isn't successful are our society's greatest I'll, as much as I do hope people keep supporting the things they love and wish to be.
Indeed. You don't need "a good, respectable career" to have a good life. Even if you wish to have a life containing moderate wealth, you still don't need that. (Up to you whether you believe that moderate wealth is either required or desirable for a "successful" life)
And even if you want "a good, respectable career", there are many paths to achieving that goal as well.
I feel that we have allowed too much "program thinking" to control our school-age children. We put them in the best preschool program we can afford, then run them through a carefully managed elementary program, finally we push them into an elite-college-prep high-schools program and then enroll them in a university degree program.
Afterward, is it a surprise that these kids graduate and expect to find pre-mapped "programs" to follow for the next part of their lives?
And bigger companies know this and will oblige -- intern programs, of course, and then new-grad programs and well-tended career ladder progression with a performance review program.
None of this is bad by itself, but it is unnecessarily limiting to look at life as a series of programs. It is allowing others to define success for you. Which is easy -- because deciding what the eff you want out of life is hard -- but it is so limiting.
Even if what you end up doing looks kinda like one of the programs, choosing the path yourself is so valuable.
> You don't need "a good, respectable career" to have a good life.
Unless you're willing to live as a hermit in the wild or as a hobo/beggar on the streets - which if it suits you is fine, not taking that away - you don't have another choice because you all but need a very well paying job simply to afford a shack to live in.
The number one thing that forces young people into the crushing grinds of big corporate life is the enormous explosion of cost of living, particularly cost of housing and corresponding with it the complete disconnect between the minimum wage and the cost of living.
And yes there are "the trades" aka manual labor which also pay somewhat well, the problem with these is that you won't make it to retirement in these jobs and enjoy your retirement. The trades are brutal on your body and that brutality is rarely acknowledged.
There are other paths. You can operate all sorts of small independent businesses (not just "the trades"). It's a challenging path that requires lots of hustle and produces less reliable (but not necessarily lower) economic results.
I wonder what those 'democratic views' are where you live.
Here, there are many distinct views by the many political parties that are part of the democracy and can't really be lumped into one 'view'. The few commonalities between them (here) seem to be around the concept of "bad situations in life shouldn't mean you're screwed forever" and "if we work together when we can, it generally turns out better for everyone". I don't think those concepts (which might also be views) generally dictate the value of success, or describe what that success must be.
> there's no more room for interesting experiences
So people will become infantile and inexperienced. Between this and atomisation of society, the bill will come due. Aociao connections have massive value, beurocrats just dont know how to measure ir
Is it possible this is a consequence of proportionally fewer economic opportunities (i.e. increasing income/wealth gap)? Maybe the combination of low hanging fruit having been picked, and automation and technology allowing for massive economies of scale inevitably lead to a “big getting bigger” scenario. And because the lower hanging fruit has been picked, the risk and hence barrier to entry is very high for non conventional routes.
I think there's a really interesting question in there of "is it a cause, or an effect," that I honestly don't have a strong opinion on currently.
I would lean towards cause instead of effect, though.
So where you say, "low hanging fruit has been picked resulting in high barrier to entry," I say, "this zero-sum-game of maximizing academic profiles starting in preschool has resulted in higher barriers to entry because the less well-off you are, the harder it is to both know what to maximize and have the time to do it."
I see it as a "everyone's defecting in a prisoner's dilemma resulting in everyone having a worse time" game theory problem.
If you try to be "merit" based but don't have reliable ways of separating "merit" from "grinding" then you're gonna end up with a lot of grinders as people figure it out.
When I write the low hanging fruit has been picked, I mean things like online marketplaces and digital communications expanding the competition to the whole country or world even.
Whereas before, there were regional arbitrage opportunities due to difficulties in scaling, these arbitrage opportunities are greatly reduced because information flies fast and far, and bigger players can take advantage first.
In a situation like this, people may notice that the decreasing probabilities of “getting ahead” via non traditional means and stick to obtaining the “elite” signaling and joining the big entities that are growing.
Most people in the US don't go to college. If you believe the theory that jobs get less valued by society when women join them, this is going to happen here as well, since college is increasingly something women do more than men.
> If you believe the theory that jobs get less valued by society when women join them, this is going to happen here as well, since college is increasingly something women do more than men.
I don't believe that theory, but I do believe a theory that has similar results: adding more workers to a field increases the supply of workers and thus reduces the market value of their work, and the main way that new workers have been added to existing fields in the past 100 years is to encourage women to join those fields.
Edit: Actually there are two theories that explain this pattern. The other theory is basically that feminism encourages young women and girls to pursue glamorous, high-status careers, but if you're choosing a career based on how glamorous it is, and it takes a long time to get into it, by the time you're there, the glamor has moved on. This also explains why low-status male-dominant careers can remain male-dominant for just as long as they remain low-status--these fields are consistently even lower status than fields that are predominantly female.
> adding more workers to a field increases the supply of workers and thus reduces the market value of their work
This is the lump of labor fallacy. If you don't have "enough" software engineers, then adding more makes them all more valuable; some of them can work on productivity tools for the rest, some of them can attract new customers, some of the juniors are needed to turn into senoirs, and so on.
It's similar to Henry Ford paying his workers more so they could afford to buy the cars.
It is not related to either the lump of labor fallacy, nor how Henry Ford payed his workers. It’s simply the laws of supply and demand. If you increase the supply of something, the equilibrium prices decreases. This is true in basically all cases, except where there are highly unique confounding factors.
If your argument is based on the premise that the laws of supply and demand are wrong, then you can pretty much guarantee that it’s actually your argument that’s wrong every single time.
They aren’t useful for analyzing labor as if it’s an inanimate object. Labor is what produces demand in the first place, so you get partial equilibrium results if you don’t acknowledge that.
It’s very common to do it wrong, it’s one of the most common excuses people have for saying immigrants take your jobs. Strangely, they don’t say having children takes your jobs.
> Strangely, they don’t say having children takes your jobs.
Because if you have children, you have about 20 years to progress far enough in your career that a brand new hire isn't going to take your job. Also, as a society, somebody needs to be working after the old people retire.
Immigration is more complicated, but it is possible for immigration to depress pay or even deprive people of jobs, if you had enough immigrants with all the same qualifications. In the early years of Israel, for instance, Israel had far more physicians per capita than they actually required and many of them had to take other jobs.
> In the early years of Israel, for instance, Israel had far more physicians per capita than they actually required and many of them had to take other jobs.
That'd be a good problem for the US - we don't have enough of them because we restrict immigration and licensing so strictly. But yes, some of them do end up taking other jobs and starting businesses and it works out in the end. More people = more economy.
Of course, adding more of some inanimate objects can increase demand for them because of things like network effects, and there's nothing surprising about that. A phone or a gold bar isn't very valuable if there's only one of them in the world; nobody's going to want it.
> That'd be a good problem for the US - we don't have enough of them because we restrict immigration and licensing so strictly.
As a consequence of regulatory capture by the AMA, who don't want their pay to go down. Which furthers my point that their pay would go down, assuming that the AMA aren't total idiots ;)
Maybe that is a red herring and what Ford got from higher wage was workers that cared about the work they did and made sure the quality was good, as the workers would otherwise end up in a lower-paying job.
When you make "revolutions" such as the first good assembly line, workers that care make a big difference. Faults on assemble lines can be much more expensive than high wage.
Paying your own employees enough for them to buy your product is the perpetual motion machine of business models in the sense that it doesn't actually work. You need other sources of revenue to survive.
Cars used to be luxury goods and the idea of common people like factory workers driving cars absolutely blew people's minds, even if they were the best paid factory workers. The majority of Ford's innovation here was in reducing the cost of manufacturing rather than by paying his workers more. Another point is that assembly line work can be alienating, and being able to own the finished product is probably a decent remedy for that type of alienation.
What Ford got from his well paid people is they didn't quit. Even though assembly lines are easy to train, he still was losing a lot of people because working the same station for months is boring, and so he was constantly having to recruit and train people.
Don't let the above take away from the other factors you mention. The total situation is complex.
Yeah degree inflation is really hard on you if for whatever reason you buy into that. The Meritocracy Trap is a good read if you want to witness the existential horror of someone that realizes it's a thing when they come out on the other side.
I don't know where you're going with "if for whatever reason you buy into that" or whatever.
But it's just mathematics. Normalization, basically. If there are X high school seniors in the country, and Y incoming seats in Stanford's next class, you can't take everyone. So if everyone works harder on their profile it's the same as if nobody does.
I don't think it's in question that this has happened. I would also go a bit further and say that I believe that assembly-lining more "directed" academic effort into every bit of students' time is going to be counter-productive for innovation and creativity, since those are by nature more spontaneous.
The word "meritocracy" itself was invented for a book about how it's a bad idea that can't work, so it's a surprise to see anyone legitimately trying to do it. See: Goodhart's Law.
I put it up to the helicopter-parenting mentality on the part of administrators. Make things safe and predictable, treat 18-22 year olds like either children or 50-year olds
I think his point was more along the lines of "While you are at an elite school you should socialize and build your social network. That social network will become your starting professional network after school. Less opportunity for socialization will reduce the potential size of this network."
> Communal living houses (“co-ops”) encouraged casual nudity, while fraternities threw a raucous annual “Greek Week”
If the access to professional social network requires participation in the above, then I see why people see issue with that. In an ideal world, your professional future would not be dependent on your willingness to walk around naked or your enjoyment of raucous party. (Neither should damage your future, but should not be the key to access either.)
And in particular, I find it completely inconsistent with idea of meritocracy.
If you are extroverted, you DO NOT need a curated or arbitrary system to social network - you are simply going to do it anyway.
If you are introverted, you WILL NEVER take advantage of even a curated system to "create" a social network - it's simply not in you to do that.
So that leaves a tiny domain of people for whom it might help. But the reality
is that it's the peak of the Bell curve but it's also the peak of mediocrity which is antithetical to startups or creativity. Yet unexpected and creative connections are supposed to be the point.
Cheaper to buy a golf club membership quite honestly.
Yeah I never joined one of those bro clubs at university. The hazing humiliation is not my thing. There are 3 people who get to yell at me for no reason and one of them is a cat.
I have to admit that university was a bit of a let down. Supposedly the best young elites society had to offer? Oh boy.
Yeah, hazing is another thing. It sounds like professional social network biased toward people with weak personal boundaries. Also biased AGAINST people who show independent thinking and ability to not go with crowd. People able to resist peer social pressure are more likely to say no to hazing.
This "merious" definition of "fun to hang out with" is exactly the problem. It selects normal and non jerks who are plenty of pleasant and fun to hang around with, but avoid puking after parties and nudity.
Not op, but I interpreted it as the fact that world is not fair. People dont go up purely on merit, skills, talent, you name it. As in, the nepotism described and defended in these threads is not the only kind of merit breaking factors.
Isn't that pretty much definition of nepotism? Those jobs would go to someone, they wont disappear out of economy. However, they should go to "the best person for the company" rather then the school friend. I can understand giving jobs and promotions to friends, it is tempting. I am surprise over it being treated as a "something to strive for".
I lived there too! What a wonderful mess it was lol
One of my friends from high school was in Stanford's LSJUMB and while visiting him I got to briefly visit a couple of the Stanford co-ops. What struck me most was how similar the co-ops were despite being on literal opposite sides of the country. If there had been a magic wormhole-esque[0][1] portal that _actually_ linked the houses together, I would've only been mildly surprised
I believe there used to be a "wormhole" static video conference linking cafés at MIT and Stanford. You could sit down at a table at MIT and talk with people at Stanford or vice-versa.
It's a great idea that should be deployed not just at universities but other places as well.
Collegehouses is still going strong, 21st went through some renovations a couple years ago :)
Something different from what is mentioned in the article is that the Austin co-ops are not owned by alumni orgs and are not officially affiliated with any school or university.
God bless the USCA (or BSC, or whatever they call it now).
It breaks my heart that other students don’t have that opportunity for community. It’s not for everyone, but by far the most interesting years of my life were living in the Berkeley coops 2002-2005.
But you were still too late for the infamous Barrington Hall[0]. When I first arrived in Berkeley in the early 1980s, a hitchhiker from Europe who had traveled across the country with me somehow immediately found Barrington as a place where he could crash for a week while he visited the area, this was pre-internet times of course.
One of the stated reasons one of the houses in the article was eliminated was because it let a nonstudent crash there, and my own house constantly had issues with the administration over the same thing.
Hey, I lived in a very similar system at Michigan State University. It was a ton of fun and I made some of my best friends in that house. Really sad to hear that Stanford painted over the murals.
> We built a giant illegal loft in our room to make it two stories (which we would disassemble for a day every year when the fire inspection happened). We did some stupid and illegal shit, sure. But the sense of community was unparalleled.
Sounds like toxic “bro” culture.
First of all, fire safety regulations are one of those things that are written in blood so speak. Casually bypassing them is not something to be celebrated.
Second, is it any surprise that people who come out of this environment then end up creating startups which skirt regulations, sell out their users privacy, and do “stupid and illegal shit”.
In fairness, this sort of transformation has taken place in every station of American life. My dweeb chemist parents regularly hosted and attended parties with their dweeb chemist colleauges. My wife and I have hosted 3 parties in the last 17 years.
We had to fight for the modicum of freedom our kids had growing up. Our oldest now has a car but his licence forbids him taking friends along.[1]
Our youngest built his first model rocket this week, to find it's only feasible to launch with a club. The nearest club, which used to host monthly launches at Moffett field, is closed until Fall. So it'll take as long to drive to and from the launch site as to buid a rocket, and the maximum launch cadence is monthly. Not a viable hobby for a 13-year-old, unless it's your only hobby and your parents help with everything.
Churches have disintegrated, workplaces are toast. The loss of "third places" was measured by Putnam.[2] Somebody on twitter suggested companies should have sports teams, aparrently unaware it was quite common until recently.
On my first day of work in California in 2001, my boss asked me if I'd tried ecstasy yet.[3] Nowadays you must be mentally ill to take it, under a doctor's supervision. Hope you get better like us!
Freedom is wonderful because you can go out and build what you want to see more of in the world. Chances are, if you're missing "third places" in your life, then other people are. Or, just as likely, there is a reason you gave it up, and maybe you weren't aware of the trade-offs at the time, and now it's time to correct it. Universities are (somewhat) unique in that they are microcosms, with very central control over a relatively small population. But the public, the world at large, is far more chaotic and free.
The problem is, as usual, a fundamentally corrupt justice system that serves only the parochial, low-intelligence, low-curiosity instincts of it's law enforcement officers ("that don't look right. Time to put a stop to it, and if they don't stop I'll beat and arrest them under one of the many pretexts available to me." Lots of things don't look right when your IQ is 90.) Time, of course, is the enemy, since the court defaults to "no". The court is not interested in speeding anything up. Ever.
Still, scrappy entrepreneurs hanging a shingle and offering a "third place" for profit are somewhat respected by the establishment. Hence 3rd wave coffee shops with live music, microbreweries, and so on. Otherwise the need to keep a low profile with physical exploration puts a serious damper on real world experimentation, much to the detriment of society as a whole. This is, perhaps, the most positive light in which to see the conservative side of the gun debate: if dying kids isn't enough to motivate gun control, then its also not enough to prevent them from launching rockets or mixing up explosives in their kitchen for fun, or working on cars in their front-yards. At least if they die doing one of those things, they'll die happy. And if they don't die, they'll know something about the world.
I think the availability and type of "3rd places" largely depends on where you live. I live in Denver and a buddy of mine lives in Miami, both cities I would consider pretty high on the amount "3rd places"; however, they reach this stat in very very different ways.
Denver is a very outdoor oriented place, so most of our "3rd places" are literally carved into nature. Pick just about any outdoor sport here, and there will be a group that will happily take you in. Even if you aren't in a group there's a certain community all around liking to go outside. We also have a ton of other "3rd places" like Microbreweries, bars, etc.
Miami is a very different place, very very different. I visited my friend there and the culture I got at least was that people just liked to party. The clubs there would open at 10:30PM and close Noon the next day. Overall very fun place, part of the fun was seeing just how different people were. The folks I met there couldn't believe that I didn't find clubs all that fun and I couldn't believe that they didn't find hiking and camping fun. There was this mutual respect there that we were just very different people and sorted ourselves appropriately.
I totally understand the feeling if you live outside of these areas that have a ton of "3rd places" where options like this might not exist. I used to live in a place pretty devoid of "3rd places" that I liked, so I moved to a place where I liked the "3rd places" better.
It's a small bronze age now - the age of weak and fearful, with sloppy morals. The 40s will be a small iron age - when strong and amoral will run things, they will wreck freedoms with competence. The 50s will start another golden age.
Indeed, I think we have too many laws on the books. However in this climate I am afraid of unscrupulous legislators who are looking pare down on hard fought freedoms for ideological reasons.
> Stanford students live in brand new buildings with white walls. We have a $20 million dollar meditation center that nobody uses. But students didn’t ask for any of that. We just wanted a dirty house with friends.
From my experience, covid exacerbated this significantly. I don't know if it's just the universities or a broader cultural shift. And as the article says, the administrators introduced more "community initiatives" to exonerate themselves of gleefully destroying campus life and letting it atrophy for two years straight (while making students pay in person tuition for online school)
It feels like in the past couple years we've gone from a culture of spontaneity and grassroots initiative to one of bitter obsequiousness that's obsessed with taking itself seriously. The only way to subvert it is by turning it into one big joke
edit: thanks to OP for posting this magazine, it's the first thing I've seen in a while that actually has something to say
We moved early-covid to a neighborhood in my wife's hometown. Got twice the space inside and outside for the same price we sold (moving from major metro -> minor metro). In a few short months, our bff neighbors were gone, meeting new neighbors was hard, bars closed and spontaneity was gone, so we settled into Covid life. I was watching a lot of Monty Don and so I did the most logical thing to do to a new backyard: I ripped up a huge chunk of grass on the southern side of the house, built soil with lasagna gardening techniques, and hand-laid a bluestone path.
Sure, gardening is some privileged shit in this day and age, but I basically put myself down a 5 year path determined by seasons, weather, microbiology and how much I was willing to learn in my spare time. It's beautiful chaos half the time, but it's starting to surprise and delight everyone who visits.
It's also a place to be less serious about life. You need some humility. Sometimes being off by two weeks can ruin a plant. LOL let's try again next year. No biggie.
Americans need more of that. It doesn't have to be gardening of course, but please go out of your way to find something that can introduce more surprising and rewarding variables into your life that you enjoy figuring out.
Interesting aspect of this is that in Stanford survey, overwhelming majority of students (83%) want to see Greek life reformed, de-housed, or abolished. This is not administrators against students in general issue. This is administration doing moves that are broadly supported by majority of students.
I was wondering about the other side of this issue. Thanks for providing a glimpse of it.
Reformed, de-housed, and abolished are very different. "Reformed" in particular could encompass a wide range of measures which don't necessarily involve heavily policing student organizations.
Yes they are much different. Here are two articles about survey (they are similar but contain bit different details). What I remember in addition is that the longer student was on campus, the less favorably he/she looks at Greek life.
The unhousing is actually pretty big thing and closer to abolishing then anything else. It would put greeks to more similar position as ordinary clubs. The ability to have the same house consistently is one of big advantages these organizations have against other students group. Other students had to draw where they will be with no consistency. (There are plans for reforms to allow other students being able to keep same neighborhood across years too. So that might change next years. )
The buildings assigned to greeks are in highly desirable area and have features other buildings don't. And obviously, access to that is controlled by these student groups. And obviously to keep living there you have to follow rules - like for example participate on set amount of social activities weekly, paying membership, buying stuff, wearing right cloth to fit attractiveness criteria (this is more for girls) etc. If you fail to visit pre determined amount of parties, you can't stay or have to pay fine or whatever.
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These groups social life is not infinitely free and spontaneous, they have their own pressures (freedom to not party for two months not necessary being available to members). Including systematic wrong incentives. Standford favors greeks that have national affiliation and that comes with more rules. Most absurdly, for sororities, they can't host parties with alcohol to keep insurance cheaper. Making them dependent on fraternities for partying. Can't make own party with own rules, have to look and act in a way that will make fraternity want you in theirs. Which is mind boggling setup.
I mean the above is concern of the group primary. But in terms of unrestricted freedom and experimentation, they don't actually have that.
Its not. Stanford and other elite schools know their brand name is immensely valuable and students will keep enrolling even if campus social life is bleached of all fun. The only real force pushing back at all are alumni whose donations fall (briefly) when a university squashes something too explicitly that had an unusual amount of sentimental value. But that just slows things down a bit.
I can't see why. People won't stop hiring elite university grads, or being impressed by them at parties, because they hear the university social life has become less enriching.
I think what gets missed about greek life in general is that its just a group of students. It's not inherently more dangerous or not than any other group of college age students. In my experiences in undergrad, organizations like club rugby or even the marching band were where you seriously got hazed or had risky partying going on. Greek parties in contrast were regulated. Representatives from the interfraternity council would walk through and inspect that you had people staffing the party and supplies like water and food. Pledges would work as bouncers or watch out for people getting too ill. People who were misbehaving would get tossed out routinely for the parties open more to the public, and members showing poor behavior would also get removed from the fraternity entirely.
Its a much safer environment to party than at some random off campus house where there's no rules, no inspections, no one deciding not to party and be a bouncer, and therefore anyone is potentially wandering in off the street into the party. Ironic that the university would go so hard after these student orgs that actually do a good job managing things like underage drinking or keeping drug use from getting too out of hand, while turning a blind eye to the fact that most partying isn't even happening withing student orgs but just from random people throwing big parties in their off campus houses. Just goes to show they care more about optics and how easy it is for the media to write a hit piece on greek life than actually being pragmatic about safety.
I can totally see the logic of why the admin would want to remove them. Popular school, always in the news, greek life poses a liability, even if that liability is so small. The DEI Office is screaming because greek life is a diversity nightmare to the casual onlooker (the one writing the hit pieces, which is what they are really scared of).
The logic makes perfect sense from one line of thinking, but it's stupid because it overlooks the benefits of these places. I almost can't describe why they are beneficial, part of it is the community and part of it is just having to deal with problems and conflict.
I look at greek life as "partially structured community building". This is where a university gives you a piece of land and a building, some funding, and tells the students to figure the rest out with a framework to guide them. Inevitably there will be messy moments, but that's kind of the point, because greek life is basically a giant class on figuring out life. You drink on a tuesday afternoon on the front lawn when you're a greek so you can realize that's not a worthwhile thing to do as an adult.
> "while turning a blind eye to the fact that most partying isn't even happening withing student orgs but just from random people throwing big parties in their off campus houses"
This is overall a good argument that Greek parties aren't necessarily unsafe, but I question this reasoning. Would universities have jurisdiction to intervene in off-campus houses?
If not, even if they can't stop all potentially dangerous parties, wouldn't it still be progress to improve safety at alcohol-heavy events where universities can? In the 2020s in the United States, three deaths were related to fraternities due to overconsumption of alcohol, with many other cases in the 2000s to 2010s (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hazing_deaths_in_the_U...). It is plausible that off-campus parties could be more dangerous, but it looks like it's still an ongoing issue at Greek parties too.
Current scrutiny by universities and the media have directly led to Greek societies to want to introduce safety measures to reduce this from happening, and the scrutiny is justified by past deaths.
At my university IFC did have authority off campus. You would register your off campus address with the university. Even by the early 2010s the rules were downright fascist which made them completely unproductive imo. The univesity argued any gathering of more than 3 people in a student org constituted a student org event. Therefore, a sober game of smash bros with four greek players in a single bedroom in an off campus would be considered an event worthy of registration and inspection from IFC (obviously the letter of this law would never be followed because it couldn't practically be followed nor even enforced, but served to shift liability should anything happen at the smash bros match). IFC would have hearings for incidents that would happen at places like bars all the time too (mostly underage drinking but the occasional fist fight as well).
It is absolutely impossible to take this article seriously, because the author refuses to acknowledge the un-fucking-believably fraught legacy that the Greek fraternity system has, at Stanford and at every other school.
> Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus
Oh, yeah, Stanford’s really afraid of “student spontaneity.”
They’re definitely not afraid of organizations that:
- ritualize physical and mental abuse
- force people to consume dangerous amounts of drugs and alcohol
- institutionalize racism, classism, and misogyny
- protect - and encourage! - sexual assaulters
Fraternities aren’t all bad. Fraternity brothers aren’t all bad. I was one, and I met some of the best friends of my life. But that also means I know just how fucking bad it gets, even now (2016-2020).
Yeah, sucks, you don't get to live in a big fun house and pull Animal House-style pranks any more. You lost your privileges after killing a fucking kid.
This might be a slightly more trenchant critique if Stanford weren't simultaneously declaring war on houses devoted to everything from French culture to cooperative vegetarian meals.
But, as little as I liked the frats, I'm not going to throw them under the bus and push the idea that they were some kind of dens of misogyny and rape. They're not. If Stanford really wanted to combat those ills, perhaps it should focus more on the more general culture of binge drinking.
In my sophomore year, my roommate came back at 7am after being out all night with his thighs literally purple from paddling. He couldn't stand up for a day - I had to bring him meals.
He was in the professional society for international relations students.
> the un-fucking-believably fraught legacy that the Greek fraternity system has
And now it seems you've expanded to every independent student organization, which apparently are all too brutalizing to students and must be abolished, to be replaced by the perfect all-seeing vision of university bureaucrats and administrators.
I can say that my house (which admittedly was explicitly themed around nonviolent activism) never beat or hazed any member of it in the three years I was there. And yet it still has fallen under the eye of Sauron.
I was in a fraternity, and we never laid a hand on a person. Extremely strict zero-tolerance towards even suggesting that someone was required to drink. The worst hazing that we ever allowed was asking new members to go get us some coffee -- if they had time.
But just because your house is ostensibly "devoted to French culture" or whatever doesn't mean you can't get up to some horrible shit. It doesn't give you a free pass just because you're missing the Greek letters.
I mean, do you think fraternities are "devoted to" hazing? That it's on their mission statement?
Hazing happens anywhere in college. Your own roommates could haze you in your dorm, you don't need a student org or an off campus house. I'm not sure there is much of an easy solution. You ban all the student orgs you want and force people to live in a dorm for 4 years, and people will still party and get drunk and do stupid things and be terrible people at times.
This is not true. I was in college and there was no hazing.
Your own roommates could bully you and then you can ask to change rooms. You might not be able to get new one, but it is not nearly the same institutionalized hazing.
You could also willingly leave any fraternity whenever you want even easier than the room change process. You just walk out and never show up again. Hazing can happen in all sorts of student orgs, thinking its limited to greek life is shortsighted. I've heard stories from everything from club sports to professional organizations. There was even a religious cult that arranged marriages between members all living in the same overcrowded home.
This is a characterization of fraternities that reeks of stereotype. What can you offer to substantiate the list of negative claims you're making about Stanford fraternities? Eitan Weiner died due to fentanyl laced drugs. This death occurred in the new year, outside of the rush time frame so hazing is not a likely cause.
Furthermore, it also ignores that plenty of other theme houses outside of greek life were also eliminated.
To be clear, these are all things that I personally watched happen and had happen to friends in fraternities. Not technically any Stanford ones, so I guess you got me there - maybe they were all squeaky clean.
Google "hazing death" if you want to learn about the fun-time rituals of drinking, drugs, and abuse.
Google "fraternity sexual assault" to learn why girls I knew avoided the "handsy house" -- careful, your computer might not be able to handle that many search results.
As for institutionalized discrimination -- what exactly do you think goes on at rush deliberations? Why else would fraternities be so overwhelmingly white and rich?
And Greek houses aren't the only ones who do these things. See my other comments.
> To be clear, these are all things that I personally watched happen and had happen to friends in fraternities. Not technically any Stanford ones, so I guess you got me there - maybe they were all squeaky clean.
Not technically any Stanford ones? Can you elaborate on what you mean by "technically"?
Because it sounds like those statements you wrote are not based on any experience whatsoever with the fraternities and other group houses covered in the article. Just your own personal experiences with other fraternities, and an assumption that they're all the same.
"technically not Stanford" meaning I have heard horror stories from 15+ fraternities at 5+ schools -- but not Stanford.
So hopefully you'll forgive me if I generalize. Especially when one of the most widely-storied campus sexual assault cases in recent years happened at the Stanford Kappa Alpha house [1] -- the first fraternity house mentioned in the linked article.
Please read your sources, Turner did not carry out the assault at KA. He and the victims met at a part at KA and Turner assaulted after leaving the fraternity. The article writes that it was "just outside" but it was out of sight of the fraternity house, some ways away.
The fact that the rape didn't occur at the fraternity makes no difference? The previous commenter makes it sound like a rape was perpetrated inside the fraternity in clear view. In reality no one at the fraternity would have been able to observe the crime.
Imagine someone says, "a man was murdered at your house and you did nothing!" when in reality the murder took place a couple minutes walk away, where you had no ability to observe the crime. Seems like a very big distinction to me.
Turner allegedly tried to sexually assault other people AT the frat house party. It’s also where they both consumed large amounts of alcohol (isn’t turner under age in the Us?).
Also, you argue that didn’t take place at the frat house but as far as I can tell, it took place behind a dumpster RIGHT next to house, and maybe still on the house’s property (hardly a couple of minutes walk away)
And, in response to your last point (“no one at the frat would have been able to observe the crime ”), he was literally stopped by two grad students cycling by.
Regardless, I agree with the other commenter — distinction without difference.
Aside from the factual problems here, which others have pointed out, I can't help thinking that the unfocused, angry, self-righteous tone of this post is related to the problems described in the article. It's as if people and organizations have bent over backward to appease the loudest, most furious, least reasonable zealots. I mean, OP has been made fucking sick! How can we not listen?
To be explicit about this: I think many people have discovered how to progress through life by being as angry as possible. I very much doubt this anger is real, and when it is, it more often reflects the writer's personality than the flaws of the world around them. This is bad, and has seriously harmed society and culture in the past 10 years. We should develop social norms that very clearly and pointedly discourage it.
From what I've seen a lot of this comes from two trends; a fall in popularity of frats and sororities, and a sharp rise in reported on campus rapes. I don't know if you recall, but there were stories about this just about every week a few years ago. If your biggest argument is complaining about that makes me sound shrill and self righteous, then I guess that's what I am. But there are some real problems that have for a long time been excused by "its just kids being kids, don't ruin the fun".
That's not even getting into the fact that it's only certain groups of people who even have the ability to engage in such shenanigans and get away with it. I may not sound like much fun, but I don't know why everyone would be expected to overlook these things for the sake of someone else's fun
If you'd written in this tone originally I wouldn't have complained. I have zero knowledge about the prevalence of campus rape and no experience of frats - I'm in England and there were similar things called drinking societies, but much less developed. So, you may very easily be right. I absolutely wouldn't dismiss campus rape, and I'm pretty sure that there has been a lot of obnoxious, entitled behaviour by rich young men over the past many years.
Agreed, OP's comment is a perfect example of moralizing that saps energy and interest from generic everyday life, the exact type of conservativism that would rather live in a safe, boring world than an interesting but flawed one.
Even if OP's comment is made in good faith (which I don't think it is), it shows a growing trend in the position that everyone shares collective responsibility for all wrongs committed.
That's less than 3 students per year, nationwide? If that's at all representative of the scale of the issue, universities would be better served promoting physical activities or healthy eating so as to reduce student fatalities due to heart disease (~2 deaths/100,000/yr in the 20 to 24 demographic).
These sort of incidents are possible in any student org or group of young people in college. Going after fraternities is just a knee jerk reaction because it seems right to go after fraternities given the notoriety we've given them in the culture, but I can tell you that some of the worst examples of hazing I've learned of when I was on college took place in orgs like the club rugby team. Those sorts of student orgs also have like zero oversight over any social activity from the university. There is no IFC checking these parties, the parties aren't registered with anyone. The university doesn't even know of the off campus houses where these groups live and party in.
Its easy to react emotionally, but rationally, there is no reason for fraternities to be inherently worse than any other student org or even just a random group of people living off campus and hosting parties. The problems you cite are really broad college problems, and if we continue to just assume that they are solely fraternity problems I don't think we will ever make meaningful progress on any of them.
It's like mass shootings are possible in any country. Well, they are, The Onion is right that there is no 100% way to prevent this. However, all countries but one can prevent 99% of them.
> You lost your privileges after killing a fucking kid.
If a person is in a frat and did none of these things you mentioned, then that person can absolutely not be held responsible for any of the ACTUAL COGNIZABLE IN LAW CRIMES that you have mentioned no matter how dramatically. "You lost your privileges?" WHO the F are you?
Hmm, did they kill a kid, or did the kid OD'ed THEN declined medical attention?
> According to Weiner’s family, the sophomore overdosed two days before his death. Paramedics were called to the frat house, but Weiner declined medical attention. Two days later, he was found unresponsive in a bathroom by a janitor
> And the author makes this out to be some fucking stick-in-the-mud administrator trying to take away their toys. Makes me fucking sick
I don't know, but you certainly did a ninja-fast edit of your post to find more chopwood for the axe you're grinding.
Life is dangerous. Unfortunately, given the glacial pace of research, odds are you may even die in the end.
If you can't accept the risks, don't ruin the fun for the rest of us.
Do we really need Lord of the Flies to tell us that in certain environments, at certain ages, around certain people, people can be pressured into doing things that they would never do otherwise?
Lord of the flies is not an argument for or against anything. Its pessimism is unwarranted, it does not reflect reality, just the mind of a depressed man
People have no idea what a base rate is. And they don’t realize that the world for young people who didn’t go to college is even sketchier - those numbers just don’t get held up as a spear to attack institutions with.
Sometimes it feels like we're living in the second Victorian age. Living sanitized lives and speaking sanitized language, with recurring bouts of moral panic.
Even in the early 00s when I was in college everything seemed to have become lamer than it was just a decade prior. 20th century libertinism peaked in the 70s and has been in retreat since then.
20th century libertinism peaked in the 70s and has been in retreat since then.
This is certainly true, but it is also not the only source of the problems outlined in the essay (and by others in this discussion). It's this:
Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting.
And this isn't just university life. Read Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head and Why We Drive to get a sense of the ways that safety-ism is the new American way. As humans, we develop cognitively and emotionally when we are placed in risky situations (whether emotionally or physically). Perhaps it's college kids doing dumb things, or perhaps it's kids building bike jumps in the local park or homemade zip lines in the local park.
> 20th century libertinism peaked in the 70s and has been in retreat since then.
I agree with the 70s. The AIDS epidemic began in the 80s, which could have been a big reason. The wild and free way of life has been in retreat, and epidemics cause big chunks to be lost all at once. Maybe we'll look back on 2020s the same way: "Wow society was so wild and free up until the 2010s."
but were you a social actor(above age 18, etc.) in the 80s or 70s? I'll agree, it could've been pretty great but perhaps not as free as beforehand. I'll invoke the allegory of the cave
> Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting.
Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon now, but this sounds like the direction the entire country has been heading for a long time now. For each individual choice between risky joy and safe ennui we have chosen the safe option, starting with the riskiest (or at least perceived to be riskiest) behaviors and continuing on. It's hard to argue against most of these choices in isolation, but the final result seems clearly undesirable to me.
The amount of control American universities exercise over their students is mind-boggling to me. I went to Uppsala University in Sweden, which has a rich and varied student life. But none of that has anything to do with the University (any of them, there are 3 in town). The universities provide education, period. Housing is not run by the University, and it certainly has nothing to do with student social life.
What stops a bunch of Stanford students from starting whatever club they want in their spare time? Obviously it can't be on Stanford property, so maybe that's the difference, they have their students over a barrel because they can deny them access to housing which I guess is hard to find otherwise?
American universities are not at all like European universities. Think summer camp for young adults, with classes in the background. Campus life and sports are just as important as academics. European universities are much more bare-bones and focused on their core mission of education. That's mostly good, in my opinion, as university is way cheaper in Europe and students tend to be more focused on their studies, but it also means that as a student, you're much more on your own. At an American university, there are always dozens of administrators or counselors you can go talk to about any issue you have, from "How do I register for this class?" to issues in your personal life.
The difference is that most of Europe considers adulthood to start at 18, whereas the US considers true adulthood to start at age 21.
In most European countries, universities do not have these invasive policies because it’s culturally unacceptable to control the lives of other adults.
> What stops a bunch of Stanford students from starting whatever club they want in their spare time?
Nothing, but greek system was advantaged over random non-greek friends groups or clubs. If you start own random non-greek club, the university wont guarantee or give you house for it. For the record, Standford always had plenty of students who were not members of Greek clubs. They created and participated in own spare time activities too.
In Europe, if your spare time club rents a house, it will have street number and no one will act as if it was great injustice. Based on article, that is destruction and homogenity. In Europe, if you fill the entire floor with sand and bulldozer it away to property you dont own, through property you dont own, the house owner will object - but in article university administrators are the bad guys for objecting.
> Nothing, but greek system was advantaged over random non-greek friends groups or clubs. If you start own random non-greek club, the university wont guarantee or give you house for it.
For what it's worth, the university I went to (UT Dallas [0]) didn't provide on-campus housing to any organization, including the greeks. I had a friend who was in a frat, and I didn't realize it for a long time because he just lived in an apartment on campus like anyone else. Some of the greeks bought off-campus houses, and the rest didn't have any housing at all, just an office somewhere on campus.
The only privilege I remember the greeks having was they were the only organizations who were allowed to post up flyers advertising their events anywhere on campus, while non-greek organizations could only advertise in spaces relevant to whatever department sponsors them and a couple of shared spaces (which is something I remember clubs I was part of being really grumpy about).
[0] caveat: I graduated 15 years ago, so for all I know things may have changed since
Stanford did provided housing to them. Not just office, but they had reserved dorm houses in best part of the campus. The loss of those houses is what article complains about when it complains about "generic, unmarked houses". The house used to be reserved for fraternity members only. Now, the unaffiliated students can be assigned to live there too. Alternative spin is that fraternity does not get to decide who lives in those dorms nor what rules should they follow anymore.
Also related, Standford did survey over what students think about Greek life on the campus and its future. Most students 83% preferred to reform, de-housing them, or abolishing it. Two articles about survey:
> The only privilege I remember the greeks having was they were the only organizations who were allowed to post up flyers advertising their events anywhere on campus, while non-greek organizations could only advertise in spaces relevant to whatever department sponsors them and a couple of shared spaces (which is something I remember clubs I was part of being really grumpy about).
Isn't this pretty large advantage if the topic is social life? As in, when it comes to events and social life, this is University giving them pretty massive advantage.
What I've concluded over the years is that this is actually what the American people want. In other words, the policing is not "happening" to us - it is requested by us. The same way people like to watch those viral videos of monkeys being bullied.
It only takes a few of these types of people in a community to make it feel policed (and that overall, people are neutral towards this happening).
Also, I want to point out it's not just in the US. I live in Germany now, and it's far worse here (people are seriously out for blood regarding minor indiscretions), but the legal system is more neutered/fair. You can see this in threads where people will post a cool thing they built, and people will chime in reminding them that they are breaking the law by not having an impressum (in Germany and Austria you're forced to put your name + address on almost everything):
Imagine doing the same thing for people talking about smoking pot on HN: "Just so you know, marijuana is illegal... so yeah, I'm gonna report you, sorry to ruin the fun".
My main point is that it often feels like the policing institutions exist outside of us, but in reality it's just our next door neighbors.
I heard a cybersecurity instructor remark once that “the more complete surveillance tools are, police become wardens, crimes become infractions, and citizens become inmates.”
His previous job was as a guard at a federal prison.
> What stops a bunch of Stanford students from starting whatever club they want in their spare time?
In my country, nothing - but if your club is willing to submit to the university authorities, they will provide some resources that will help the club survive your graduation.
For example, spaces at new-member-recruitment events when the university gets a new class of students, usage of university rooms outside of teaching hours, some storage space, maybe some money, and so on.
And because clubs for students have to completely replace their membership every 3-4 years in order to survive, that help can be the difference between a club that continues to exist and one that doesn't.
> What stops a bunch of Stanford students from starting whatever club they want in their spare time?
Technically nothing, but often times its funding. If it's a university sponsored club, the school will give you money in certain cases. Often times students rely on that money to keep the club going, depending on what they do.
I think I'm close to an outside observer - I didn't go to Stanford and don't have a dog in that fight, as the saying goes. I don't trust the conclusions of this article.
It starts with a story about a frat which filled their building's first floor with sand, so much that they had to rent a bulldozer to relocate it to the campus lake. Then they call the Stanford admins killjoys for not supporting it. But... of course Stanford wouldn't support that! That would try anyone's patience.
What kind of impact does dumping all that sand have? What about running the bulldozer over the Stanford campus? What if someone is injured by the bulldozer? I wouldn't trust teenagers renting an after-party bulldozer who never cleared that with anyone, never notified anyone, and have no proof of training.
Then, the article talks about Stanford letting the lake "go dry." I live in California and I can tell you what happened: the drought. There's a killer drought, nonessential water use is discouraged, and a manmade lake in a little-used corner of a campus is the definition of nonessential. Stanford did the right thing by not artificially pumping it up. There's no malice involved; a lake like that, in 2022, is destined to dry up.
So based on those things, I don't think I can trust the article to be taking a balanced, sensible position. My "middle of the road" position wold be that, yes, sometimes adventurous college kids can get away with something - once in a while. But over the long term, it's the institution's job to prevent one-off events from turning into ongoing disaster generators.
You might live in California and have certainly seen the drought, but the lake didn't go dry due to drought.
The lake was fed by diverting water from nearby San Francisquito Creek. The university chose to stop filling the lake for recreational use in 2001 to protect the endangered California tiger salamander as the article notes. The lake was still sometimes artificially filled to support salamander breeding, but it was not maintained to a level suitable for (most forms of) recreation (though I still saw members of KA attempt to take a raft out on 1-2ft of water during a rainy week -- I think their raft was more full of beer than the lake was of water, though my memory is hazy).
The university has since removed the dam used to divert water to Lake Lag as part of a process of habitat restoration upstream. I'm not sure how that will affect the population of salamanders that depended on that water in Lake Lag, but I believe they also breed upstream and will have more sustainable natural habitat. Also, water from Searsville Dam just upstream from this project is used to irrigate Stanford's golf course, and that is cited as a reason not to remove that dam (the other reason is that removing it would change habitats that formed from the lake it created).
The school has sometimes turned off its campus fountains during periods of drought. They shut the fountains down for 2 years while I was there. During that same time I didn't see them shut off water to the golf courses though, and that consumes substantially more water than the fountains. They did restore water in the fountains for the weeks leading up to our graduation, and I can recommend grabbing a pitcher of beer or two from the CoHo and walking it straight down to the fountain outside the bookstore for a soak, if the school still allows it.
To summarize, if we are to infer Stanford's priorities based on how it has approached the complex dynamics around Lake Lag and its (former) tributary, I believe that would look like: golf course > endangered salamander > students.
> What kind of impact does dumping all that sand have? What about running the bulldozer over the Stanford campus? What if someone is injured by the bulldozer? I wouldn't trust teenagers renting an after-party bulldozer who never cleared that with anyone, never notified anyone, and have no proof of training.
That's exactly the attitude that causes this problem - there's always a reason to say no. These are supposed to be adults, they (presumably) legally rented the bulldozer, they got the consent of the groundskeeper.
There's no possible fun so innocuous that you can't come up with one more bureaucratic requirement to slap on it if you really try. Thought experiment: if it turned out the bulldozer driver did in fact have some kind of training/license, would that change your mind? Or would you just look for another reason to say this was bad?
Now do the consent of house owner and especially lake owner. And also, just because you convinced groundskeeper does not mean the ground-owner have to be agree with it too. Acting like adults involves also NOT dumping your trash in an artificial lake. And yes, that sand was their trash.
Edited to add: That is what rubs me really wrong here. The only "crime" university committed here is that they did not treated the sand hill as special thing worthy of protection forever. Instead, they closed the lake due to salamanders which is hardly outrageous action. And then apparently later on did not kept lake during drought (and note that they did took some pro-salamanders actions even during that drought).
At no point is this the case of university ridiculously restrictive or doing something wrong. But, frankly, the entitlement in the article is astonishing. You dump your trash into lake and then have fun with it, that somehow means this should be treated as cultural monument worthy of forever protection.
> Now do the consent of house owner and especially lake owner. And also, just because you convinced groundskeeper does not mean the ground-owner have to be agree with it too.
The groundskeeper is their duly authorized representative.
> Acting like adults involves also NOT dumping your trash in an artificial lake. And yes, that sand was their trash.
Dumping would be if you leave it somewhere and never go back. They upcycled it into something positive (an artificial island that they apparently then enjoyed for many years), which is surely something we should applaud.
> The only "crime" university committed here is that they did not treated the sand hill as special thing worthy of protection forever.
No one is demanding that - I don't think anyone would be complaining if the next year's students had demolished the sand island so that they could have more boating space or whatever. The issue is that they took away an area that the students were able to use for unstructured fun, for the sake of something that was evidently not very important to them (they care about the salamanders enough to take away the students' lake access, but not enough to keep the lake filled), probably because they don't attach any value to students having unstructured fun.
> Dumping would be if you leave it somewhere and never go back.
This is not true. It is dumping trash whether you go back or not.
> The issue is that they took away an area that the students were able to use for unstructured fun,
This is astonishing entitlement. No, just because you used something for fun does not mean the owner can't start using it differently. In particular, it does not mean owner can't start protecting animals there.
This level of entitlement is probably one of reason why majority of Stanford students 83% were for abolishment, dehousing or at least reform of these groups.
> for the sake of something that was evidently not very important to them (they care about the salamanders enough to take away the students' lake access, but not enough to keep the lake filled),
This is both lie and manipulative. It was massive California wide draught. There was also restauration of biome upstream going on (biome better for salamanders). They did periodically let some water in to allow them breeding, it was not good for people.
But, even if the salamanders became victim to that drought, that would not imply what you said.
> This is astonishing entitlement. No, just because you used something for fun does not mean the owner can't start using it differently.
If your logic is "the university is the owner and can do whatever they like", pretty soon students will be living in pods like one of those Japanese hotels. The university supposedly has the welfare of its students as one of its priorities (and gets tax breaks and donations on that basis).
At the very least people applying to universities on the strength of their reputation deserve to know the extent to which Stanford has destroyed the student experience that built that reputation.
> There was also restauration of biome upstream going on (biome better for salamanders).
Then why was it necessary to close the lake to students in the first place?
> But, even if the salamanders became victim to that drought, that would not imply what you said.
Yes it would. You can say that water in a drought would be a bigger expense and only allocated to the highest priority uses, but per this thread they apparently found it worthwhile to keep the golf course sprinklers running.
> Then why was it necessary to close the lake to students in the first place?
To protect salamanders who at the time lived in the lake. Even during draught, the university did periodically filled water in to keep them alive. That biome upstream got restored between original closing is super cool, but does not negate anything.
Also, students are not 2 years old. Overwhelming majority of them is able to process the above without having emotional meltdown over sandpit.
> If your logic is "the university is the owner and can do whatever they like", pretty soon students will be living in pods like one of those Japanese hotels. The university supposedly has the welfare of its students as one of its priorities.
This is quite massive logical leap from "university is entitled to close lake or part of campus despite single fraternity having made sand hill years ago". Students wont and did not had any lasting trauma from not having lake accessible.
> The university supposedly has the welfare of its students as one of its priorities (and gets tax breaks and donations on that basis).
This is in no way contradictory with single fraternity loosing their sand hill or artificial lake not being available to students in general.
> Yes it would. You can say that water in a drought would be a bigger expense and only allocated to the highest priority uses, but per this thread they apparently found it worthwhile to keep the golf course sprinklers running.
The complain that university should have stop wasting water on golf course is perfectly valid. They should. That does not imply that closing lake for salamanders or during that draught is an outrage.
> Even during draught, the university did periodically filled water in to keep them alive.
According to the article the lake is now gone.
> That biome upstream got restored between original closing is super cool, but does not negate anything.
If that meant the lake was no longer needed for the salamanders, surely the university should have turned it back over to students at that point.
> Also, students are not 2 years old. Overwhelming majority of them is able to process the above without having emotional meltdown over sandpit.
> This is quite massive logical leap from "university is entitled to close lake or part of campus despite single fraternity having made sand hill years ago". Students wont and did not had any lasting trauma from not having lake accessible.
> This is in no way contradictory with single fraternity loosing their sand hill or artificial lake not being available to students in general.
Of course one isolated incident means nothing on a larger scale. But the article is clearly making the claim (and supports it with examples) that this is representative of a broader pattern of the university taking away unstructured student-run fun, banning distinctive student communities, and turning those spaces over admin-run systems that are less effective. And it points to things that suggest this pattern has ultimately been quite harmful: feelings of isolation among the current student body, and ultimately elevated suicide rates.
Now I'd be the first to argue for more quantitative journalism in general, but using a single example to express a narrative is what virtually any article does; frankly this one is better than most in terms of putting it in a context.
You've made your scorn for anyone who disagrees with you quite clear, but are you actually claiming something substantive? E.g. that the case the article is presenting is unrepresentative? (e.g. can you point to other cases where the university is changing in the opposite direction, into more unstructured fun and student-organized social structures?) Or that the broader pattern exists but does not have the downsides the article thinks it does?
If you can physically manage it I'll be impressed (it's not easy to get to, and I hope you'll understand I'm not going to doxx myself by giving details). Don't damage anything, don't make noise after 10PM, leave it as you found it. Other than that knock yourself out. Wouldn't be surprised if some of the local kids already do tbh.
> What kind of impact does dumping all that sand have?
The sand gets wet and sits in the water. It's sand, i.e. dirt. In case you weren't aware, there's already dirt at the bottom of all lakes.
> What about running the bulldozer over the Stanford campus?
The ground would get slightly compacted and maybe some grass torn up. That's why they got clearance from the person responsible for that, the groundskeeper.
> What if someone is injured by the bulldozer?
They will learn an important lesson about bulldozer safety.
> I wouldn't trust teenagers renting an after-party bulldozer who never cleared that with anyone, never notified anyone, and have no proof of training.
If you ever find yourself running a bulldozer rental place, you're free to not rent to them.
> What if someone is injured by the bulldozer? I wouldn't trust teenagers renting an after-party bulldozer who never cleared that with anyone, never notified anyone, and have no proof of training.
You, sir, would have an absolute conniption if you knew half the stuff we got up to in the airborne…
This article fails to provide some necessary context that is being brought up elsewhere in the thread.
KA, the house whose demise served as an emblem in this article for the demise of Stanford’s social scene: the house associated with the Brock Turner rape.
The mile-long lake whose recreational utility was neglected by Stanford administration: unnatural municipal lake whose dam simply stopped operating.
The author doesn’t have to be explicitly “dishonest or egregiously wrong” to warrant some skepticism on the part readers.
My interactions with Stanford administrators convinced me that I didn't need a graduate degree and that I would never donate to the school.
Beyond that, I also got totally fed up trying to figure out how to get definitive positive permission to do anything. At one point I asked facilities if I could build an oven to cure composites. They reviewed and approved the plans. But when some other group within the school saw the result, they flipped out and hired a consultant to trump up false hazards. I was only clued in because a sympathetic dean leaked an email to me. I invited the fire marshal out to take a look, and I got a thumbs up to operate.
I eventually moved the oven to rented space elsewhere since I was told I couldn't keep the thing on campus. I was then told my student group would be dissolved if we used off-campus facilities. We agreed that if I brought it back that my group could use it for its intended purpose for a year and then find another solution next year.
I found a crew demolishing it at 4 AM the following morning. A deal's a deal, I guess. We went back to heating our composites with propane heaters aimed into a collapsible wood-and-plastic box, rather than our electrically heated concrete and flame-resistant foam box. The propane solution has been used every year since.
Stanford is self-insured and has weirdly inconsistent ideas around riskiness of various activities. And no risk appetite, tolerance, or ability to reevaluate once something has received its scarlet letter.
As far as I can tell, the only way to do anything is to have it tied to a grant or sports. That profit motive provides back-pressure against risk aversion. That means non-research, non-sportsball activities are doomed to being sanitized to the point of boredom.
There are hundreds of stories like this out of Caltech as well. Ultimately it makes one believe the saying that it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission, and that getting things done relies on this.
And we're told the reason China is rocketing ahead is because of IP theft.
Meanwhile, we can't train competent engineers, technicians, and tradesmen, in the West, because everyone is too caught up in this type of gatekeeping and pigheadedness.
When I was in college the science building had a machine shop. Old-time professors remembered when the department hired technicians to build experiments. Students would build crazy things there for classes, like 2 meter high tesla coils.
After I graduated they built a new science building for $X00M. It was very eco-friendly, had its own cafe, lots of natural lighting, lots of nooks for small groups of students to gather and study ... but no machine shop. (Although since then they have added a 3D printer service.)
But when you look at places with high rates of innovation like Shenzhen or SV, one of their strengths is that the people with knowledge of techniques are nearby to readily avaiable facilities for production. I wonder how much production knowledge has been lost from the West (c.f. the rust belt), and how much that will cost us in the long term.
As long as these bean counting MBA bloody management pigs get to decide where our money goes, we will all end up doing absolutely nothing of value. When I was in HS, we had one of those MBA principals incharge for a while, and it was absolute hell-couldn't do anything at all of value, lest it be an unforgivable sin. and then we had a technical principal who didn't care about the BS, and we were able to do some amazing projects, get funding for whatever crazy idea we could elaborate on and ended up ranking really good nationally in a few competitions.
Seems like someone forgot to tell the designers they needed a machine shop.
Stanford's physics building has a machine shop. I did an undergraduate in physics at Stanford and used it once or twice. They have full time machinists working there too.
They could a very safe enclosed CNC milling machine and lathe for a few hundred grand. No one wants to have grubby machinery around anymore though. That's for offshoring.
There has been a vast increase in the proportion of administrators to faculty and students on college campuses throughout the US [1]
The result of this is greater administrative political power versus faculty and students, which leads to campus and academic culture being reorganized to suit administrators over faculty and students.
The cause of this is lots of available money needing to be spent, from huge tuition increases over the decades, in turn driven by government policy. Guaranteed student loans and their inability to be discharged in bankruptcy had unintended consequences.
> I eventually moved the oven to rented space elsewhere since I was told I couldn't keep the thing on campus
I can understand this. The US has a very litigious society. If someone gets sick from being exposed to something that can even be loosely associated with your oven, the school will have to spend a lot of money defending itself.
My last university is in the throes of getting rid of Greek Life. First it was crackdowns on dangerous hazing behavior, but you know how the slippery slope goes: next was alcohol, then just vague accusations. Meanwhile, there's a strong attempt from the usual suspects to convince students that Greek life is inherently racist. The sororities seem to have bought this concept more than the fraternities and some have closed their own chapters.
Now, I have no love for Greek life but I think it ought to be an option. Some people really benefit from it.
I lived in one of the co-ops mentioned in the article in '93. None of us lugged a camera to KAbo, Exotic Erotic, or any band parties that year. The author doesn't seem to consider it, but I wonder if a better title for the article might be, Our Phones' War on Social Life.
UChicago also set to bulldozing the fun and quirky parts of its undergraduate residential life towards the tail end of my time there. A very similar sense of nostalgia, loss, and rage at the anonymous administrators hell-bent on whitewashing everything pervaded the campus. Perhaps it’s a phenomenon of our cultural moment. Or perhaps, like with Burning Man, it’s just part of the way that the communities of these institutions define themselves.
I'm sure there's a reason (probably related to lawsuits, liability, or negative publicity) for universities cracking down on student-run housing options, but it flies in the face of the idea of "residential education" - that students could actually learn something by being in charge of their residences.
Since university administrations can just wait for undergraduate cohorts to graduate, it's up to alumni, graduate students, faculty and staff to push back, but they rarely do. The point about eliminating certain houses during the pandemic makes sense - the administration had the advantage of undergraduate turnover (and loss of institutional memory) as well as pandemic stress and amnesia.
If we look at Yahoo! or Google, which originally were hosted on Stanford's network (though Excite was hosted off campus?), or Cromemco, a computer company that was actually started in a graduate engineering dorm at Stanford in the 1970s, we can see that ultimately it may be in the university's (financial) interest to sometimes let students do what they want.
Then again Facebook originated as an abuse of Harvard's undergraduate face book, so maybe some cracking down isn't entirely a bad idea.
A lot of these high-end schools have been working to crack down on forms of risk, at the cost of a huge amount of fun and personal discovery. The issues is, this has happened for kids all the way down to when they are toddlers. People need to be able to be in risky, crazy, abnormal situations; it's part of growing up and figuring out who you are. This will only push it later in life, when the risks are far higher, and/or will just have even more uncreative drones.
I read the whole article, and it seems to be entirely about the push to remove Greek / Frat / Sorority life from campus and convert these houses to more traditional dorms.
I know that some people who got a lot out of Greek Life equate it with Social Life, but most college students don't pledge/rush and it doesn't get in the way of social life. There are plenty of ways to socialize without frats.
The point being made is not that the Greek system is being pushed out and that worsens the social atmosphere. It's that Stanford is losing its atypical social community (which includes not only the Greek system but also co-ops), and that will hurt the uniqueness and advantage of Stanford as a breeding ground for interesting thinkers.
Not to mention these are just symptoms, there are more problematic things that are not ostensible.
In the 2000s you constantly saw the Google connection talked about. NBC even made a TV show, Chuck, centered around a guy who got kicked out of Stanford unfairly so Stanford itself is a huge part of the show.
I can't speak for Stanford, but Santa Clara University has gone through a similar transition. It started while I was there ('11-15), where the "party street" was full of frats, sororities, and just loosely themed houses. The school and the police really started to shut down parties on that street hard my second year there. What used to be just every house open to anyone became closed doors, you had to know someone who actually lived there.
I think the school has started to buy the actual property on that street now to control it more.
I won't apologize for the behavior of the frats, some of them did some truly awful stuff, and I never was a part of any of them, but I watched the university expand from educational to trying to manage the entire student experience.
Most of the houses affected weren't Greek. Many were themed houses oriented around a particular experience: an Italian dorm, a Slavic dorm, a... druggie co-op, for lack of a better phrasing.
One thing that wasn't clear to me was whether most students can still choose who they live with in their sophomore, junior and senior years.
It sounded like perhaps the answer was "no." The author describes all his friends living in different bureaucratic "neighborhoods," neighbors not knowing each other, and seniors wondering whether anyone would find their bodies.
To me this, as much as the loss of Greek and co-op housing, would have completely destroyed my university experience. Yes, it would absolutely have turned into a soulless triangle of dorm -> lecture -> dining hall.
It was a rich private school for over a hundred years without the administration acting this way. You might expect the status quo, not that they would suddenly get a massive case of bureaucratitis.
Why would you make your housing or social life, or indeed your weird edgy experiences of whatever kind, dependent on the same institution teaching your classes? That's the actual root cause.
And I understand that some of these institutions require living on campus, at least in the first years, which is absolutely insane.
I had another comment about university involvement in student life higher up, but I wanted to address the residency thing specifically.
Lots of these colleges require students living on campus for money for inflated rent, b/c students rent money can come from student loans (It's guaranteed income.). Same with mandatory dining plans.
My college particularly hated cheaper dining options that opened up around there and used the local govt to try and shut them down, b/c it made the rent for commercial properties less desirable and made students switch off the uni plan lol.
Sometimes they even engage in mutually beneficial arrangements with development companies like American Campus which will build a building, that the college then forces students to live in!
Since the Uni owns the land that building is on it is tax advantaged. Rent money goes to American Campus so they build the building for cheap since it's guaranteed income. I believe they even give the building over to the college after X years.
This was standard in all the colleges in that area btw, no escaping it.
Another thing is you can't do things with another student org thats on campus with an off campus student org, so if you try partying with a sorority they could be sanctioned too. You can't advertise or recruit around campus because that's unauthorized. Can't post flyers in the dorm elevators, the RAs will rip it down. Can't rent classrooms out for recruitment events or participate in anything at the beginning of the year when students learn of these things. Universities typically make it easy to kick you out of the school if something goes wrong at an unregistered org event and make sure you are fully legally liable. Something going wrong could just be a freshman stumbling back a little drunk and getting in trouble with an RA, doesn't have to be a serious thing to ruin your life.
Because most of the people who are going to college are getting there via life paths that will not have had them on the wrong side of big bureaucratic institutions very much so they don't see the danger.
I think student housing is common because university takes up a lot of time and it's convenient to live on campus. One often goes to university away from where they were previously living, and often plans to live somewhere else afterwards, so it's easier to join a community of transients, than to transiently enter a community apart from the university. While there are certainly some issues with lack of outside perspective, living with a community of your peers that are relatively well aligned in daily activities can be a really positive vibe. Of course, it can also be a negative vibe if you're feeling out of sync with the rest of the community and it feels like the rest of the community is in sync.
I transferred to a small engineering school to get my BS, and it was easy to meet people and share common interests and experiences in a way that wasn't possible when I went to a larger, non specific school, without residences and where people had vastly different courses.
I think a lot of schools force (or at least strongly push) for on-campus living during the first years because it makes it easier to build a network of relationships that will hopefully help students navigate the institution. You're not going to spend nearly as much time with as many other students if you're living off campus and only commuting in on days you have classes.
The thing you are getting at Stanford, or any place like it, is immersion in the campus community. If you want to view it as a transaction where you pay for access to lectures and someone to grade your work, then yes, a lot of things about it are going to seem dumb. Community colleges and commuter branches of state university systems serve those needs better.
I wonder if there is a connection with smartphone culture.
In the old times you lived in your physical environment and did not spend an inordinate amount of time in social network or the internet.
Students would have been more defensive with regards to their bastions of freedom against the administration if this felt closer to them- that's my guess
I live over by MIT at northeastern(go ahead, make fun of me for not getting in), and all my life I've dreamt of being part of the MIT "hacker" culture. It simply does not exist at northeastern, as I know of only 4 people or so who share in the ethos I know of. Also of note at my wonderful college are the police around every corner, with their cars parked everywhere watching us, the massive network of security cameras, and the insane access control. To give you the idea of what it's like to come home after classes, I walk towards the lobby of my building, with a camera facing outwards, it sees me and unlocks door 1. Then I scan my card and a guard sees my face and door 2 unlocks. I walk under a camera which looks at my face. I then tap my keycard on my lock and punch in my code. This lock is also inside of my room, and I have been locked out of my room, while in my /own/ room twice. Back to the beginning of the digression, I am part of my university's radio club, and the MIT hacker scene. From what my friends say, MIT clamps down more and more by the day. Increased cameras, draconian universal keycard systems and obstructive bureaucrats galore. Additionally, the alumnus among them are now seen as weird outsiders ever since the pandemic shifted the access norms on campus(it used to be open and now everything is keycard controlled). I can certify I would have gone absolutely _bonkers_ without knowing these people, I can say with certainty that before I knew them it was perhaps the most miserable year of my life. I hope in the future we can be kept even safer, perhaps in little cubes with cameras on all the walls and a little screen and keyboard to take classes with. I think that will lead to a healthy dialogue on global inclusion themes and mindful wellness.
I wonder if this has anything to do with a difference in demographics and college selection behavior of applicants.
No data here, but maybe parents are taking an increasing roll in college choice, and the beaurocrats are simply catering to the wishes of those parents.
Do they get parents coming on college tours saying “hey look at that awesome anarchist house?” Or are they getting parents saying “wow, look at all the new, clean, fancy building conducive to studying?”
Honest question here. I’m can’t also help but think of Dead Poets Society. Which if you haven’t watched you should !
Turner wasn't a member of Kappa Alpha, I don't think the fraternity had any impact on the case other than hosting the event that led to the crime. They lost their house in 2019, the case happened in 2015 and the reason they lost their house is because apparently they let people live in without paying rent to the university.
I also chased down a few others that had pretty solid justification: the band seems to have had a reputation of both hazing and trying to cover for or silence sexual assault accusations.
I'm not saying the article has no point to make, but I'm not sure Stanford is the hill to die on for this cause. When many of the examples the article gives fall apart on inspection it starts to look like Stanford had a lot of truly fucked up shit going on in a very systemic way.
Yea I went to a different top 20 school and the frat system was absolutely full of sexusal assault. Doesn't really surprise me that universities are trying to shut them down.
I wonder if this is just the march of "accountability" that comes from ubiquitous cellphone cameras, cloud photos and the general erosion of student privacy (both self-inflicted and external)
The same people who (rightly) criticize draconian campus administrators will go out and yell about “law and order” the next day. You can’t have it both ways. There’s a reason things have gotten like this, and it’s all those people who sue the campus every time someone breaks a finger and all those investors who demand maximum profits from the university. Those same people are the ones demanding more police, more cameras everywhere, and so on. That would be the wealthy and powerful. Got nothing to do with diversity, nor will having less minorities on campus make the joy come back- if anything it’s the parents of the rich kids who are the problem.
The insidious thing about an article like this is that it mixes truth with lies. And of course, the overpolicing not just on campus but all through our society is real! But it’s not caused by racial equity. That’s stupid.
> "The official explanation from Stanford for eliminating the house was that the Outdoor theme “fell short of diversity, equity and inclusion expectations.” The building formerly known as Outdoor House was added to Neighborhood T.
> Next year, Outdoor House will be reinstated, but only because house members promised to refocus their theme on “racial and environmental justice in the outdoors.” Upholding diversity, equity, and inclusion is the first of four “ResX principles” that now govern undergraduate housing."
What a sad story. I can really imagine being there and have fun, be creative and „grow up“ to be an adult with a purpose in life.
But now, this sounds like a soulless place, replaceable, replaceable like myself. Every student should be the same, no variations ... for what. I don’t get it.
Soulless is the essence of postmodernism. I have no doubt if the admin can remove the traditional buildings, they will replace them with all cubical buildings. Yelling for diversity and at the same time replacing everything with grey color rectangles and squares is their cultural revolution.
It is silly that we naively define diversity by what is trivially measurable, which tends you can determine of a person without knowing anything of their person. Give me a campus with humanistic diversity. Let us lower the entropy of the intellectual space.
"Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting."
Dolores Umbridge must have assumed the office of High Inquisitor at Stanford.
Has anyone interviewed anyone in the administration to figure out what their thinking was with the enactment of these policies? More importantly, who was responsible, and how did they get put in that position of authority? Our world seems to be about seizing power and then doing whatever you want with no clear explanation as to why. Everything is opaque these days or nonsensical. Just do what we tell you or get cancelled.
What is the obsession with college campuses and what happens on them? I feel like there is a circuit of people obsessed with producing content claiming that random campus scandals say something about society at large.
It's a perennial bone of contention because people who have a good experience in college want it to stay the same for everyone, and people who have a bad experience want to burn it down. Makes for good clickbait and everyone loves to see some b roll footage of greek letters on local news.
> I feel like there is a circuit of people obsessed with producing content claiming that random campus scandals say something about society at large.
The people who organize the scandalized behavior used to be the ones that went on to the leadership roles of society and normalized that sort of conduct in their companies.
So yes, tackling the problem on the root was necessary, and we will see the fruits of that over the next decades as the "old guard" retires and workplaces will become at least somewhat better as a result.
Reading these comments and the article, I have to wonder if the Internet and social networks are to blame.
So much of what we do described here is about skirting the rules in a healthy way, in doing things everyone knows happens but can allow to keep happening by plausible deniability.
Now, everything is online. Not only is everything documented and shared, but Twitter et al amplifies anything that any aggrieved and motivated group doesn't like.
It seems impossible to have any kind of semi public organization "just do fun things" any more, because some rule jockies or outsiders will scream about it, making it impossible for councils and administrations to turn a healthy blind eye.
Wow, this reads just like the story of the internet. And even California itself.
Started out as a strange, insular place that attracted a bunch of exuberant people who cultivated a unique and highly creative culture.
But once the capital class realized that all of these clowns created a huge opportunity, the place was occupied by powerful and unaccountable players who choked all of the joy and creativity out of it in their quest to transform it into a finely tuned and perfectly predictable money making machine.
"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it."
Don't blame the administrators. They have simply given the students exactly what the students wanted.
> Stanford’s decision to sanction the Band was a sign of things to come. ... Once, the Band mocked Stanford’s rivals with crass marching formations; today, the Band designs all their pranks based on pre-approved themes from the university and clears the final plans with a panel of administrators.
> The University sent a clear message with its treatment of the Band. Spontaneous organizations, particularly when they could become chaotic, controversial, or otherwise a space for breaking rules, were now something to be controlled. Rather than treating freedom and spontaneity as strengths, the dynamic became one where students had to justify their projects and ideas while under suspicion from administrators. Student life was becoming dominated by restrictive bureaucracy.
>
According to FoHo's sources, Band's traditions are the focus of the investigation. These include Band's annual Dollie Day, where each potential Dollie (essentially a Band dancer) is interviewed by Band (picture that for a second). Questions apparently included “What’s your favorite sex position?” and “Who in this room would you hook up with?”. Other aspects of the Investigation (obviously) focus on parties "organized alcohol consumption" and reasonably explicit "bus chants," including such choice lyrics as “a whale she wanted, harpooned she got,” and "he walked into the store, batteries he wanted, my double D’s he got.”
The report is withheld, and the statute of limitations ignored, so it's likely to be something mundane that couldn't really get them into trouble if shown in broad daylight
> The university initiated the joint inquiry after learning of concerns regarding several band events, including off-campus trips, that the band held for its members between 2012 and 2015. The investigation found that, on several occasions, the band violated university policies regarding alcohol, controlled substances, hazing and/or sexual harassment. Violations included a tradition in which a band member was given an alcoholic concoction intended to make that individual vomit publicly; an annual trip in which some band members used illegal substances; and a band selection process in which individuals were asked a number of inappropriate questions on sexual matters.
Some of the last places where there is real freedom are public places, the commons- national parks. Wild places. There are trails I’ve climbed where I had to drag myself over a ledge next to a 200 foot drop. And you feel alive. Imagine if that was privatized, how fast they’d put a barbed wire fence around that spot. Freedom is found in the places where money hasn’t infected yet- sadly that’s not college campuses, not anymore. We need to reclaim freedom, and taking risk, as a left wing value- something you are left with when the cops and bean counters go away. Those nude houses and communal parties were common spaces- where people could be free without anyone being in charge. That’s the beating heart of anarchism. Again, you can’t have both freedom to experiment and also demand law and order at the same time.
You would not be allowed to make a hill out of sand or use bulldozer in national parks. In national park, salamander habitat takes precedse over your wish to swim. Loud parties are not allowed either.
The typical rebuttal to this kind of article, seen in some of the comments here, is that the author is necessarily wrong because X happens to Y people per year. Does he want students to die? In other words, "Some number of kids have probably died playing with a stick, so we absolutely must ban or regulate sticks, unless you want kids to die. Are sticks really worth the lives of children?"
The first problem with this argument is the use of thought-stopping language. It seeks to neutralize all reasonableness and good judgement by appealing to the badness of outlier events. Opponents of totalitarianism are painted to be bad people because without totalitarianism uncontrolled things might happen, and that's just irresponsible.
The second problem is that life is inherently risky, so the quest to eliminate risk thus necessarily trends toward eliminating all of life. 100% of people die no matter what choices they make. What should we do about that? Should we divide up the proximal causes and ban them all until no human activity is permissable? Or should we accept that yes, X people per year will die doing Y, maybe the number will even go up over time, and we're okay with that?
The only problem with this article is that it tries to tie the loss of culture and fun with increasing diversity or something. As if including black people is gonna make it less fun? No, the loss of fun is due to financialization and lawyers getting involved with everything and trying to make everything about maximizing profits and fear of lawsuits. Got nothing to do with equality. The DSA for what it’s worth, throws great parties.
To be honest, I often felt that a lot of Diversity and Equity campaigns lead to more sterile environments: when I (Not American) joined my current (American) corporation, DEI training hammered down the point to cut out any type of joke and remark unless it was super sterile. This was definitely not something I was used to before. I can see that such things are a necessity unless you want to end up in litigation all the time, because a joke or prank that might seem harmless to 99.9% of people will still offend that one outlier, and at the scale of huge corporations (or huge college campuses) you will find that one person who perceives this as yet another micro-agression at their expense. So everything that isn't bland and non-offensive gets increasingly outlawed, or at least discouraged. It definitely leads to a lot of self-censoring. Am I even allowed to poke fun at my own geekness, or make fun of stereotypes of my own nationality (obviously I wouldn't make fun of other people's traits these days), or will that offend any bystander that also shares these features with me?
Of course, the end result is what you pointed out: in a litigation-happy place (like the US) everything that offends people is going to be dragged into the courts by someone, and is going to cost actual money, and everyone wants to avoid that.
> because a joke or prank that might seem harmless to 99.9% of people will still offend that one outlier
Are you sure about that 99.9% figure? I think not.
Also part of the problem is that when you're that outlier, it's not for one joke, it's for a whole category of jokes. That gets tiring, to say the least.
Diversity is not anti fun. Black people, Hispanic people, Asians, everyone else, lots of them are fun. Judgmental people are not fun. Woke scolds are not fun. People who get diversity jobs are not fun. The same personality type that were judgmental Christian censorship happy party haters in the 1950s are judgmental censorship happy party haters now.
Let us hope that just as the 1960s followed the 1950s or the Roaring Twenties followed Victorian prudishness these people see their values trampled underfoot. Let freedom reign.
It’s a totally cynical excuse though. Just a cover for their real goals, which is to have less liability and a more reliable profit stream. The problem with this article is that it seems to take everything these administrators are saying at face value, as if they genuinely are shutting down campus life in retaliation for black people not getting invited to the parties. I mean come on.
> Lake Lagunita was closed to student activities in 2001, ostensibly to protect an endangered salamander that had taken up residence in the artificial waters. Eventually, Stanford let the lake go dry.
Simple: Stanford should be held responsible for the impact their actions, that here directly caused harm to an endangered species.
Either they did lie before, about the salamander (then they're on the hook for lying for material gains) or showed negligence after, causing the draught.
In either case, neither the truth nor endangered species are acceptable casualties in Stanford ongoing war against its own students.
Also, if you dig down to other events mentioned in article, what article calls spontaneity involved actual documented pretty heavy issues like sexual harassment and violence. And some of the events even as taken exactly as written in article strikes me as "I totally get why other students and people don't want to put up with this".
I believe there's a fair bit of complexity regarding the salamanders, including where they actually breed, and which areas are best for them. Points is, I wouldn't spout off on this topic quite so confidently, given a one-paragraph description in a very subjective opinion piece.
Since it keeps getting trotted out onto this site: Palladium is a far-right magazine masquerading as an independent publication. It's bankrolled by Peter Thiel, and its founders and editors are a veritable "who's who" of reactionary (and explicitly white supremacist[1]) thought leader types.
Articles like this seem to be increasingly common and make me very sad. The sanitization and white-washing of social life and culture across the country is depressing.
Nothing could possibly elicit less sympathy from me than forcing frat bros to follow the normal rules that everyone else already lives by. The entire institution of college Greek life exists to enable and conceal sexual assault and unmeritocratic career networking. If you need that kind of toxic infrastructure to feel like you have a social life then that's pretty pathetic.
It's not clear to me that US/Western Universities continue to be worth the money, resources and mindshare that they occupy. Should we continue to bother? Is the world turning to Asia? Are we not better off sending our kids to Singapore's Universities (the instruction is in English), for example?
I don't see why it is being complained about. University has no moral duty to provide social life, their only goal (and, the goal of the students!) should be to teach / learn.
> In this case, all that Standford had to do was nothing and let the emergent social life continue uninterrupted.
And keep watching as students were routinely subjected to hazing, excessive drinking and sometimes outright criminal behavior such as overt discrimination, hate crimes, sexual assault up to rapes?
Fraternities had more than enough chances to rein in the worst of the bad behavior and they failed ridiculously at that. At some point, adults had to take over since self-regulation failed.
Nobody is subjected to hazing or “excessive“ drinking. These are voluntary activities you can choose to engage in or not. For criminal matters there’s the police.
caltech is seeing a similar sort of thing. admin has progressively killed social life and house events (with covid as an excuse) and has implemented draconian key card systems and the like. bref little to no freedom. the fear of risk has increasingly killed the undergraduate experience. Seems a bit counterintuitive to promote since the greatest scientists, entrepreneurs have been risk takers.
It's funny ... the article makes a great reading about creeping authoritarianism, but all I get from each paragraph is "do not hire Stanford graduates that left after 2013".
These organisations exist in their splendour because society gives them a higher perceived status than the community college next door. This status will quickly drop if graduates become unhireable.
“Stanford's new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat's vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting.”
This is true at MIT as well. Can’t imagine the hacks of old being allowed.
> This is true at MIT as well. Can’t imagine the hacks of old being allowed.
Indeed, at a time the admissions process was advertising MIT's hacks of old, and they were featured in the museum, the administrators changed both the makeup and mission of the campus police. From experienced and wise older officers who were looking for a calmer post before retirement into younger aggressive sorts, and they started arresting and charging people doing non-destructive hacks, harassing parties that would previously have been tolerated and so on.
The administrators have gotten insufferable. In 2019 I co-ran an event for student-alumni bonding that invites alumni from all years, mostly families, to come back to the school and share a large historic feast with students. The administrators did not like that this would include alumni from a dormitory that was closed for 'policy violations' (note: most of these alumni are perfectly functional parents and adults! they have no interest in debauchery with undergrads) so they tried everything to sabotage this student-alumni gathering.
At one point they claimed, verbatim, that 'preparing and serving potato salad presents a liability to the Institute' when discussing the tradition of students and alumni preparing side dishes together. Potato salad liability... we built a wooden rollercoaster in the courtyard the previous year!
Was it a vinegar-based potato salad? If so, that’s a liability to good taste, but probably not something the school administration should concern itself with.
Its a trend spanning all of academia, I’m sure. Princeton essentially eliminated frats years ago and keeps the eating clubs on a very short leash; the clubs doubtlessly would have been killed too if it wouldn’t have cratered alumni donations.
There are relevant parallels: anyone can say no and no-one can definitively say yes, everyone is forced into the same living situation rather than allowed to choose one for themselves, a sense of control for the sake of control...
I can see why there's a push to eliminate Greek life given all the unfortunate events associated with it. But I'm extremely confused this example:
> One such case was the end of Outdoor House, an innocuous haven on the far side of campus for students who liked hiking. The official explanation from Stanford for eliminating the house was that the Outdoor theme “fell short of diversity, equity and inclusion expectations.”
They can't even organize around a common interest unless it passes some bureaucrat's standard of diversity?
I've seen a quiet but persistent thought pattern that outdoor / nature activities- hiking, camping, etc- are endemically white and that any attempt to organize around it without making overt, aggressive attempts to include minorities is a sign of white supremacy.
This is the main thrust of the "anti-racist" movement. If you aren't talking about being inclusive in every aspect of any social interaction you partake in, you are automatically racist. Just wanting to be around other people who like hiking and camping makes you a white supremacist.
Nature activities are "endemically white"? Is this a serious comment?
Even if we buy into the ridiculous naturalistic fallacy here, it's completely ahistorical: our modern history is primarily the history of white countries colonizing and industrializing nonwhite countries and alienating them from nature in the process. Suburban white America is arguably even more alienated from nature than city dwellers, in its redefinition of "nature" to be curated dogwalking trails and monoculture lawns.
This is so ridiculous. I spend a lot of time hiking the mountains around LA. White people are not a majority and I'm not even sure a plurality. I'm not Latino but still somehow wound up in a mostly Latino hiking club. I hear so many different languages on the trail. I see people of every ethnicity.
This really could be as simple as minorities tend to be more working class, and don't have the wherewithal for a big road trip to the national parks. But put hiking trails near their communities, and they utilize the heck out of them.
Some of these are paywalled but I don't see where the ones that aren't support the claim re: hiking that "...any attempt to organize around it without making overt, aggressive attempts to include minorities is a sign of white supremacy"
Observing that, say, parks are being patronized by certain demographics is far from condemning those parkgoers as white supremacist.
The only bits you link about white supremacy seem to be about climate change which has a whole different angle (marginalized communities being first in line for ill effects in many areas) and isn't particularly relevant to the original claim here.
> Observing that, say, parks are being patronized by certain demographics is far from condemning those parkgoers as white supremacist.
I suspect that this is the point GP was trying to make. A criticism of anti-racism I've encountered many times is that most arguments for something (e.g. parks) being racist or white supremacist are unfalsifiable and based solely on a specific demographic outcome (e.g. national park visitors are disproportionately white) while ignoring other factors.
>The URGC also wrote that Outdoor House should pursue “meaningful engagement with faculty and staff in the important areas of equity and inclusion to more fully address the cultural concerns of the previous outdoor house that you included so explicitly in your application.” The house’s theme applicants focused on shifting its framework to address issues inherent in centering a house around outdoor culture — a traditionally white and wealthy space. In a Letter to the Community, Outdoor House community members wrote that “Centered on expensive hobbies, the house has not shown enough regard to the people we exclude, the land we recreate on, or perspectives outside the mainstream interpretation of outdoor recreation.”
> Suburban white America is arguably even more alienated from nature than city dwellers.
I doubt that. Suburban people are more likely to have cars, making it easier to get to get to more natural places.
For nature activities that need equipment I would expect suburban people are more likely to own such equipment because they have bigger houses with more room to keep things. City people are more likely to need to rent such things, adding more hassle to getting away to nature.
Leaving aside the inanity of zdragnar's broad-bush painting of "anti-racism," it's worth noting here that this is somewhat falling victim to some historical propaganda of other races being "inferior" - e.g. "we're bringing civilization to the savages."
There were pretty substantial urban civilizations in Central America and around the Indian Ocean that Europeans (Portugal, first, I believe) waged war on early in the colonial era for reasons like religion, prior to industrialization, and this had a lot to do with shifting the economic center of gravity of the world to Europe from Asia in the first place.
(At a meta-level, this is the sort of thing - pointing out bits of history that often get left out of Euro-centric history lessons in the US - that my understanding of "anti-racist" would include; not stopping attendance in a hiking club... any school administrator who believes a hiking club couldn't be compatible with diversity is wrong... but the existence of wrong people who think they're fighting racism is not the same thing as it being wrong to fight racism.)
You're completely right, which is why I took pains to avoid the word "civilizing." Colonization created an industrial base in its victim countries not as an end in itself, but as a means towards wealth extraction.
Yeah, in that case the nit I'm picking is just that it started a few hundred years prior to industrializing in the name of religious conversion + greed even without any ability to bring meaningful technological quality of life changes.
(It's a fun way to back yourself into being pro-military-spending, this history... the technological advantage of the Europeans was really just in military tech, because the continent had been far more war-ridden than the states involved in the more-recently-quite-peaceful trade around the ocean. And so if you don't have the weapons, you might get screwed by another country that does.)
OP's referring (I think) to how black people in the USA were discouraged from "white" recreational activities like camping, hiking, skiing, and beach-going.
(FWIW, back in high school a black friend of mine explained to me one day that black people don't go skiing, etc., because their lives are so dangerous already that it doesn't make sense to go do dangerous things for entertainment. It kind of blew my mind.)
The financial aspect seems much more plausible. I have to imagine that for skiing in particular, the most likely demographics are going to be whoever happens to grow up near mountains and have very high amounts of disposable income... not just for the equipment, but also to take the financial risk of recovery in the U.S. We could maybe afford some second hand cross-country skis, but we didn't live near mountains either so it didn't seem that interesting.
I forgot to add here that if danger itself was the factor, you probably wouldn't see many black skateboarders, but you do, and causally or not skateboarding isn't on the same level of cost as skiing
Skateboarding too. When I was a kid black skateboarders were hella rare. To the point where today when I see a black kid skating I think, "Hey! We're making progress!"
I just did an image search for "skateboarding" and every skater on the first three pages (that's as fer as I looked) was white, except for one who was a bulldog.
- - - -
Not to spell it out, but the "danger" my friend was talking about wasn't just the danger of the sport itself. It was also the danger of getting beaten, robbed, or killed for being black. Black Americans published a guidebook for themselves the Green Book, to help each other avoid violence at the hands of racists.
Ya I maybe didn't consider that last bit in cintext with a different time as much, but if it's logically sound, then more black people in those various disciplines would probably signal some amount of progress.
Idk how much a google search of anything is all that representative of the demographic, or for that matter any media algorithm's results. Except for the bulldog, that's legit, they love skating for some reason. Presumably those results would be informed by a number of factors.
In my local spot, for sure I know a fair number of white people, but there's just as many if not more people of different apparent visual characteristics. Very diverse no natter how you cut it, gender, ethnicity, income level, sexual orientation, skill level, age, fashion sense
Take a skim through this video that includes those spots if you're curious, though admittedly it's somewhat specific to the city
>unless it passes some bureaucrat's standard of diversity?
That is what was said, but not why the school is attacking student organizations. Any student organization presents a liability to the school. An outdoor club, something with the schools name on it where student go out and teach each other how to ski on glaciers or climb rocks? The schools are listening to their lawyers, their insurance schemes. They are against any and all groups that operate without direct school management.
I was a member of the VOC, UBC's outdoor club and an organization that predates the school itself. Every year I am surprised that the school hasn't moved to to shut them down.
The lawyers part... that's a broader issue with how the American legal system is intentionally adversarial.
The parents part... that could be changed more easily, but reducing risk is absolutely what they're pushing for currently.
So, short of not depending on parents' money... which is of course tough at an expensive private school, but also even tough at public schools that are no longer even close to as affordable as they used to be too... what ya gonna do?
I don’t think so. Stanford has several suicides a year. Any theoretical liability from and outdoor accident is a rounding error on their total liability for student deaths, morbid though it is.
The consequences to the university of being labeled a white supremacist institution would be far greater than a few student deaths per year. Stanford’s reputation would never recover, if that label adhered. The university would shrink to nothing and vanish. Not one whiff of a hint of liability to being labeled racist in favor of white people can be tolerated. If that means a total ban on supporting outdoorsmanship, so be it. The university survives.
For that reason, fighting white supremacy is the keys to the kingdom for despot administrators, and the definition of white supremacy is undergoing an accelerating expansion that will soon extend past the edges of the universe.
>They can't even organize around a common interest unless it passes some bureaucrat's standard of diversity?
At what point do we admit that the people who cried slippery slope and said this power would just be used as a cudgel for their bureaucrats to enforce whims they could not otherwise justify were right?
Have the narratives that would permit swinging back completely paralyzed the students who would want to swing back, along with those who are in control? If so, we are probably 2 generations away.
Long-gone graduates mourn the loss, but I think the student body is cloaked in the righteousness of their culture-less confinement.
> They can't even organize around a common interest unless it passes some bureaucrat's standard of diversity?
It depends upon how the members behave, rather than the common interest they are supposedly organized around. I remember student organizations from my days on campus that sensible students wouldn't associate themselves with. The stated interest may have been some form of outdoor activity, but they were better known for their hard partying. Hard partying being an euphemism in this case. They would fall short of diversity, equity, and inclusion since their riskier activities (activities that had nothing to do with their stated purpose) would drive away those who weren't interested, couldn't afford to take the risk, or were the target of the risk.
For those who think it is worse today than it was 25 years ago, I somehow doubt it. Though, perhaps, that doubt is borne from a hope that it isn't any worse. Crimes as extreme as sexual assault were real, and that was at a time when something that should be taken seriously was taken less seriously. Then there was the common stuff such as vandalism and other property crimes. It happened then and it happens now.
The article makes it sound like the university is being far too heavy handed in its treatment of these student organizations. Perhaps they are. On the other hand, the author is ignoring some of the darker aspects of student life.
(I also cringe at the use of student life in this discussion since a good portion of students, if not the vast majority, avoided it because they knew it was wrong.)
This highlights something I feel like most older people on Hackernews, and generally don't know about modern student life!
the amount of university involvement in what's going on in everyone's personal lives has increased substantially from when you were in school, much to the adulation of a portion of the student population.
Unis now focus on "student welfare", which really just means expanding the universities reach into what everyone is up to. The most obvious of this is campus police depts.
Where I went to school the admin was straight up bolshevikan in mass, complexity, and sense of self importance.
Generally speaking any self governing student org, particularly greek life, was treated as a liability to be carefully balanced against the amount of donations they bring in.
EDIT: One more thing, 99.9% of these dumbass rules are made due to actuaries in insurance companies or lawyers trying to minimize university liability.
I was in college in the 2000s and this bureaucratization was starting already. The class of 2006 having cell phones was a minor scandal--college students were no longer exploratory rulebreakers, but rich kids (back then, the assumption was that someone with a cell phone had money) with helicopter parents. I don't know how much there was an actual change, but the feeling of a shift from a cool Gen X to a decidedly less interesting Millennial college culture (this isn't to say that Millennials are less interesting individually--I don't believe it to be true) happened around 2002. (Fall 2001 was an something different entirely, because the obvious.)
Nostalgia is a powerful disinfectant. The people who pulled off the pranks of yore risked getting in serious trouble as much then as they do now. It's just that hindsight changes one's view of things: the misbehaviors one got away with are now seen as harmless... and this is especially pronounced among people whose social class means they get away with almost everything.
I had the opportunity to go back and visit my undergrad (not Stanford) university recently, where I spent much of the 90s as a student in various states of mischief and sobriety. Maybe I am just remembering things with nostalgia-colored glasses, but it just seems so different now. So bland and vanilla. Everything that was quirky, silly, grimy, dangerous, weirdo, degenerate, beatnik, or irreverent is now gone. Every building, hall and dorm in the place looks and feels like a sterile, gray hospital now. The arcades and dive bars and unique hangouts that used to be down on the city's main road have been replaced with banks, fast food chains, clothing factory outlets, more banks, trendy bistros that spent $1M on just their logo, and so on. Everything is just soulless and cardboard now. Even the students! The guys walking around don't stink like we used to--they all have this weird happy preppy-optimist-i'm-on-camera vibe. Nobody is retching on the sidewalk or sitting in the shrubs high as a kite. Everyone just seems to be kind of nervously hustling everywhere. Feels like a foreign country honestly.
This makes sense, and I imagine I'd have the same feeling if I went back.
The stakes may or may not have been lower, but they felt lower. Today's world is one where if you make a mistake at 18, you're stuck with it for life, and it's not because the university administrators will be out for your head (they probably won't be) but because the internet never forgets. The regulatory apparatuses we need to put between employers/governments and all the information (unreliable as it is) about us that's out there is... 20 years, at least, behind where it needs to be. You can't burn down your past and create a new story anymore, and there's a sense among the young that every minute not spent "hustling" (whatever the fuck that is) is a minute in which the competition is getting ahead and they aren't.
The change of attitude is definitely noticeable. Whether it's a change of social actuality is leass clear. The thing is, bad things still happened to young people who made small mistakes, if they were of low social class. They just disappeared and fell (back) into regular working-class oblivion. And today, the rich kids are still invincible because they'll hire PR firms to fix up their reputations if things go against them. The "feel" (for lack of a better word) of our society is distinctively more oppressive, but I'm not sure if the thing itself has actually changed that much over the past 30 years. I suppose I'd need more data.
perhaps because everyone is actually on camera all the time now, at least when they're in public-- and almost all the space at a university is public enough for that purpose.
The universities seem to have forgotten that there role is to teach and educate, not overreach into their student's lives. College is about learning to cope and manage on your own, as well as learn. Having a different helicopter parent at the university (compared to home) won't help that development.
One factor might be the ubiquity of recording devices. It seems reasonable that people behave differently if they think their spontaneity might expose them to liability down the road due to a recording of it.
It varies by social group. Most humanities students I knew were interested in dating, whereas most engineering students I knew were more focused on studying and graduating. But anecdotally, every computer science student I knew was in a relationship, and also every math major I knew. The most technically and academically-accomplished people I knew who were the presidents of design teams were also in relationships. This was in a top-30 university in North America.
So, in my personal experience, I found dating to still be big in university. I think this is rational, as I anticipate it to be harder to find a long-term relationship through online dating in one's early-to-mid twenties, versus dating people knwon in-person.
However, for students anxious about economic opportunities (e.g. due to COVID), I do see the appeal to focus on studies and work experience at the expense of dating.
A little past college age now, but even people I know in their late 20s have given up on dating and such. I won't pretend to know all the reasons, but I find it funny how much every one I know hates dating apps for good reasons, but always comes back to them.
> "A little past college age now, but even people I know in their late 20s have given up on dating and such."
A major reason is that romantic relationship experience compounds, and so it's difficult to start with relationships later in life. For many people, it's much harder to start a first romantic relationship, than it is to develop subsequent ones. Multiple rejections early on, especially when other people seem to find relationships easy, can lead to reduced self-esteem ("Am I creepy? What is wrong with me?" etc.). It can lead to habits such as having a huge fear of rejection and flirting through physical touch, which leads to a lack of confidence reinforced by further rejection, which further erodes romantic confidence in a negative feedback loop.
Low-quality romantic advice on the internet, such as on Reddit, worsens the problem. Anecdotally, I've found the common, highly-upvoted advice of telling a person "I like you" before you're dating to never once work in my personal experience, while leaning in and pausing while paying attention to social cues to kiss on a date actually led to relationships.
My advice to any guys in their 20s trying to date would be:
1) ignore most internet advice on dating (maybe not this comment, but absolutely avoid incel communities and 4chan),
2) consider an experienced psychotherapist for anxiety if you have rejection anxiety, and
3) try to observe a male friend who is good at relationships who is a moral person, and see what he does (e.g. jokes in a flirty way, and notice how he flirts with touch); if you don't know a friend like this, try to make one (e.g. through a social activity like rock climbing or martial arts).
An essay that thoroughly explores this is called "The Coddling of the American Mind," which was published in The Atlantic in 2015 [1]. The essay presents an argument against the aversion of covering certain points of views in a university course, with the rationale that it might cause emotional harm against students. Another article that shows how student tolerance of opposing views in the US has changed over time was published in Vox [2.]
However, for a diversity of views, a strong counter-argument to the above narrative was published in Times Higher Education [3], which argues that it's quite feasible to teach courses with controversial material, and educators should not be afraid of their students.
These articles include evidence that university student culture has indeed changed, with reports of certain groups of university students being more outspoken about the coverage of certain controversial material in courses. There are arguments for and against about whether or not this change is good for the development of university students as people, but there has certainly been a change in university student culture.
So someone else gave you a well thought out, and sourced answer.
I'll just give you my personal thoughts on the issue, which are incomplete. I try to separate out what is actually going on from generic, "kids these days" bullshit that you hear a lot in the media, and by lots of older people. These are themes in people's lives when I was in school a couple years ago and even today, but they're not the whole story. Lots of good stuff is happening on campuses too, LGBTQ stuff being the best! It's not a big deal to be whatever you'd like.
There's plenty of young people having plenty of fun, so I don't want to paint some kind of completely bleak picture, but here are some of the problems that have degraded peoples ability to be fun.
The things I thing contribute the most are:
- Phone cameras and the ubiquity of recording stuff
- The ability for people to find those recordings if anything goes wrong in your life forever.
- Lack of economic prosperity, and the feeling it's getting worse. So you can't rock the boat.
-Majority of kids in college now were kids when the GFC happened, everyone I know has graduated into a recession of some kind, or knows someone who has.
- Increasing policitcal polarization + extreamism. Everything has sacred tenats. If you're caught violating them you risk getting kicked out of your, economically advantaged, cohort. A small but loud minority who enjoy the political power of "catching" people out. This is true basically anywhere, left or right. This doesn't factor into your day to day, but does have a cooling effect on actual political discussion.
- Rising costs of basically everything that matters. Housing costs are impossible to manage for students and recent grads, the expectation is you will not own a house, and that your quality of life will be worse than your parents. Lots of people move back in with their parents for a couple years post college, assuming they like their family. Inflation, has and will make this worse.
- Extreme annoyance, and sometimes straight up rage about the fact that older people do not understand that things are systemically wrong right now. Mainly this is also related to housing. There is a sterotype of the entitled older white woman, "Karen", that everyone tries to avoid being associated with. Everyone I know has been abused at some service job by them, or in dealing with them for something related to their situation.
- Huge student loan bills on degrees that aren't going to pay for them. In lots of ways this isn't even the students fault, since colleges treat them like cash cows for everything. It's very possible to end up 200-300k in debt, which even a high paying degree will not cover reasonably. People are busy and do not have to time to fight the bureaucratic machine, especially when they will probably lose.
- COVID made everything above much worse. Destroyed basically all of young people's social lives, and empowered the people who were already busy trying to monitor and control people. Most of the people I know developed mental illness of some kind during that time.
There was an incident at my school, where students off campus had a small BBQ and someone jumped the fence to record them and post publicly calling them "plauge rats" and asking the school to suspend them. This wasn't really met with much pushback from the student body, but the admin didn't do anything about it so kind of a wash.
- People I know who didn't go to college generally fall into two camps. Both are mostly male. One camp is in jail, the other camp just stays at home with their parents and plays video games. I suspect it's just my locality thing, but a lot of people's younger male sibilings either dropped out of college, or never went and spend lots of time on twitch + discord etc. Very few if anyone I've met knows people in a trade school, even though I have older family who have worked in the trades.
- For lots of people performativity is reality.[0] Either because they do not have the means to go out and party, or the social media clout is more important. This seems to effect women more than men in my experiance. Lots of places to drink have capitalized on this by adding things like ball pits. Most of these places have huge lines. For me this always seemed pretty anti social.
Lots of people want to be influencers, probably the same people that wanted to be actors in previous eras.
Performativity extends to politics since the bar is so low for expressing support for idea X or Y. Lots of people feel like they're doing something when they post a political message, which might be true considering how much time people spend in them. The youth political movements are completely ineffective at all levels in my experiance. They're handily beaten by geriatrics nationally, look at the presidents these last like 8 years, and locally, look at the handful of NIMBYs who have destroyed Bay Area housing for that. I think it's generally harder to commit crimes, and easier to be a criminal than it was before which influences the type of protests you can have.
Lots of people also aren't willing to risk their lives for politics when things are so precarious economically and socially particularly when nothing is expected to change.
- Wealth inequality has lead to rich kids pretending to be poor or underprivileged at record numbers, always been a problem in punk (To the point where it's a meme.) but you see it on campus as well. It adds to the performativity problem above. There are lots of rich kids who say things like capitalism is broken.
- There is an undercurrent of people who explicitly subscribe to Malthusian/Hobbesian ideologies, and they seem to be dominant right now. Generally these break down to "there's only so many resources to go around so we much divide them according to X thing.". Lots of people believe the topline solutions and tenents generally even if they can't articulate where it comes from. This isn't a left vs right thing, both have different, insidious imo, strains of this ideology.
- People in charge have the same ideology as the students. I think this is a big change for a lot of professors who are used to having to fight a right wing admin. (The biggest factor in who you vote for is your college degree.). I think it also incentives following what the admin says, b/c you're on the same "team". There is an expectation of capitulation of the admin to the most vulnerable and "vulnerable" students. The admin also viciously deals with people not in these camps. This is expected by everyone, and if the admin were to respond to everyone equally that would be a shock.
This isn't always a negative! If you actually need help, disability etc, the admin will usually help you. It is a double edged sword since students expect the admin to take care of them in lots of ways.
- Discussion around sexual assault/consent are constant and pervasive. Shared responsibility if you see it happening or potentially happening is expected. It's never considered one persons fault, especially in student orgs. This also is double edged sword imo. It seems like it's had a cooling effect on some peoples sex lives and sexual freedom in general, but sexual assault reporting has become much easier and more expected if something happens. I doubt you could have a co-ed shower room now, or a nudist house etc.
EDIT:
I think campus "free speech" issues are a red herring mostly capitalized on by a multitude of grifters, both professors and political pundits. Things are a lot more nuanced than that on campuses.
0 - Bo burnham actually has a lot of great insights into this! I'll submit some links to HN.
> 99.9% of these dumbass rules are made due to actuaries in insurance companies or lawyers trying to minimize university liability.
I think you're vastly over-estimating the numbers being crunched and vastly over estimating the "well I don't like it and it could lead to some unspecified harm and it's hard to quantify the good that it brings in so we're going to reduce/control/ban it"
I do agree there is not likely to be some sort of mustache twirling excel crunching person in middle management who flips the "anti-party" switch. I do think that a lot of this stuff is the output of working groups who use data to tackle common issues you see in Unis though, generally with good intentions.
However there are certain times when this actually is the case.
For e.g. when it comes to Greek life you'll see many social/party related rules that are made specifically for/by their insurance providers. These often are things like you must keep a licensed bartender to serve drinks, everyone can only bring X amount that have to be checked in and served back them, every social event must be registered with the university etc.
As for minimizing liabilities, my university had many trainings you must go through if you're part of any student org. The trainings are, at least in my experiance, not useful and only serve as something the university can point to in the event of an issue and say "hey we tried". I'd assume it's standard practice for most colleges, and while there may be some level of true belief in the effectiveness of these trainings I really doubt it considering they mostly amounted to motivational speakers who charge obscene speaking fees.
This happened in dorms too, but is less extensive, and frankly more useful b/c it was student (RA) to student and not a speech.
Also see most COVID policy written related to a uni. Particularly in the beginning of the pandemic.
At my school, parents were forced to pickup their children from across the country in crowded dorms all at once. This was back when it was assumed covid had a huge death rate and was already spreading where we lived.
My assumption is this was done to minimize liability for the university, even at the expense of infecting anywhere these kids were going. I fail to see how this was medically the best move. There was no quarantine period, and no-one was given the ability to stay unless you had a valid reason. (This included greek life and other mixed university-managed + student org housing, which doubly makes no sense unless it was about liability, since they were entirely independent from university in terms of maintenance, access etc)
A bunch of orgs on my campus petitioned the university to stay, especially those with vulnerable family and we were universally told to leave or we'd be arrested for trespass.
Another was seeing that our university police department owned riot gear.
Sorry for ranting a bit, I do admit I have a chip on my shoulder about that.
Tho, Greek life could exist only inside universities, because it was facilitated by universities. Actual university uninvolved life would had students renting flats and houses from homeowners around (which would not be bad at all). It would had street numbers on houses and no one would treat it as insult. If you made sand hill in house or in someones garden or wherever, owners would take issue with it.
It is a sad, soulless world in which we live today. I went to an otherwise anonymous state college on the east coast in the latter 1970s. One of the fun things I remember was picking up lunch from McDonalds using my former roommate's Ford Pinto. If you're not familiar with the Pinto, look it up. It was a "great" car. Yeah.
Driving to McDonalds was fun and exciting! This Pinto was a 4 speed manual, where the shifter could easily be lifted out of the drive shaft tunnel. But that was trivial in comparison to the fact the brakes were limited to the parking brake. The drive to MickyD's was five to ten miles, including travel on a highway. You plan your stops. A real emergency would be bad, but regular driving was merely interesting. When I got back to my former roommate's house, we enjoyed a great lunch! The drive was fun.
I'm saddened by what Stanford has become. I look at the list of companies founded by Stanford Alumni, and am duly impressed. I look at what the "edges" of the Stanford population is today, and see the end of Stanford dominance.
Here are your choices about life. It's wobbling on two wheels until you get it right or depending on training wheels and helmets to keep you safe. It's taking risks or saying, "Mommy, may I?" Mommy's gonna say, "No, honey, I don't want you to get hurt or for you to hurt anyone else."
I'm sympathetic to the idea of not infantilizing college students, but not to the anecdote of driving 5-10 miles to McDonald's in a Pinto without brakes. Sounds like it'd endanger others.
Driving a car without functional brakes on the highway is pure stupidity. It's not "fun boyish hijinks" if someone else dies because of you. It's not nanny-stating to think that your cool future story/character-building experience shouldn't involve putting innocent bystanders at risk.
On the other extreme end of the scale, consider a young person with lots of potential entering university, who then decides to rebel by trying increasingly harder drugs, and ends up with drugs tainted with fentanyl and dies of an overdose. Similar situations have happened before, such as this report of a physics senior dying of fentanyl [1].
Consider young people who try black hat hacking as a prank or for illicit means, and getting a criminal record (source of this happening in Canada [2]. Students also cheat on their courses, get caught, and get expelled. Others make TikTok videos on train tracks, touch the electrified rail, and end up hospitalized or dead.
This is the extreme end of the scale, but these cases and personal experience have led me to believe that it's typically far better to follow the law while questioning conventions. I admit there are cases (e.g. Uber) where people and companies succeeded by breaking the law, but I figure the risks are pretty high, and there is still plenty of opportunity to innovate while respecting the law in one's personal and professional life.
Absolutely (such as an ongoing trial project in Vancouver, Canada), but it’s not currently not politically realistic in many regions.
In the meantime for the individual, I believe it’s best to sit down and talk to a young person about the risks of drugs in a realistic way. Not the DARE fearmongering stuff, but talking about how drugs can be an easy distraction and source of drama from the things in life that should be higher priorities (e.g. relationships and career). This should also include specific advice about avoiding pills because of fentanyl tainting.
They didn't ask you :). EDIT: Sorry dad! If every decision was rational and safe we'd be a very uniform and good society. Surprised you did not see the irony, but I guess this is HN.
>When Stanford could not remove a student organization for bad behavior, they found other justifications. One such case was the end of Outdoor House, an innocuous haven on the far side of campus for students who liked hiking.
Stanford Daily writes:
>The URGC also wrote that Outdoor House should pursue “meaningful engagement with faculty and staff in the important areas of equity and inclusion to more fully address the cultural concerns of the previous outdoor house that you included so explicitly in your application.” The house’s theme applicants focused on shifting its framework to address issues inherent in centering a house around outdoor culture — a traditionally white and wealthy space. In a Letter to the Community, Outdoor House community members wrote that “Centered on expensive hobbies, the house has not shown enough regard to the people we exclude, the land we recreate on, or perspectives outside the mainstream interpretation of outdoor recreation.”
I read this whine-piece and it had the opposite effect of what the author intended. I read it and thought, "Well, fucking good."
I don't have anything against most Stanford students. (I mean, the startup bros and spoiled legacy kids can choke, but I imagine many if not most of them are normal people.) However, he's describing a college culture that is racist, classist, and misogynist... and I'm happy to see it get crushed. And sure, the crushing is being done by neoliberal authoritarian capitalists, who aren't my favorite people, but if a side effect of this is the next generation hating neoliberal authoritarian capitalists for whitewashing and degrading their college experience, then I'll take it.
Multiculturalism does work. The way it works is, people with different cultures / wants / ideas form their own communities and mind their own business. And when someone feels part of one community and part of another, they band together with others in the middle and create a third community.
Multiculturalism often fails because people on all sides get offended too easily. Maybe it’s my personality but I really can’t see why some people just hate others with values which are “weird” or “immoral” (but not actually immoral as in they don’t hurt other people / animals / the environment).
Obviously there is tension when there aren’t enough resources, but people get offended even when there are enough resources.
> Multiculturalism does work. The way it works is, people with different cultures / wants / ideas form their own communities and mind their own business.
Nationalism isn't capable of "creating a third community". You can't have an association of nationalists; they can't resolve their inherently opposing interests.
Or in fact the EU itself - an association of distinct national identities. But in a sort of reverse no true Scotsman fallacy, it is popular to ascribe outwardly hostile intentions to nationalism. If a country maintains its borders and national identity, but also peacefully coexists with its neighbors (as much of Europe and indeed the world does), then it's not "true" nationalism.
nationalistic societies don’t keep to themselves. They each consider themselves “the one true society”, and generally try to expand as much as possible and make everyone else second class citizens.
By “keep to themselves” i don’t mean communities should reject outsiders who want to join. They just need to not bother outsiders who don’t support them and don’t want to join. People from completely different cultures can and do exist together, however they share some other beliefs or commonalities; people who are polar opposites generally can’t coexist unless they’re separate.
Even then, a community which rejects all outsiders and secludes itself would be fine. Like that one native tribe who attacks any modern intervention. As long as they’re not subjugating their own citizens and preventing people from leaving like North Korea.
> They each consider themselves “the one true society”, and generally try to expand as much as possible and make everyone else second class citizens.
No, that is imperialism. You're trying to eliminate the option of a society that doesn't try to expand, but also doesn't accept all outsiders, by shifting definitions.
From what I know, this wasn't about multiculturalism and SJW-style "equity" and more about destroying any and all student groups that showed a modicum of independence from the administration line. Though I wouldn't be surprised if someone at some point mouthed some SJW platitudes, since that's a cover for everything nowadays.
When do you think multiculturalism was implemented? Hasn't America been multicultural for...hundreds of years? Different immigrant groups had their own culture, different states had their own culture, different religions had their own cultures, hicks/urbanites had their own cultures, educated/uneducated had their own cultures, etc.
I think it's the main meaning, where people just can't or don't move between groups much.
I don't think why people don't move is important for the wording, is it? (Yeah, historically the word origins from a very bad setup, but that's not how I see that word being used.) Anyway, if the reasons have any importance, it just means I've used the wrong word. Still, it's arguably if many cultures can survive when people move from one group into another freely.
(I guess the alternative is a form of tribalism, where people just pick their tribe independently of the mainstream. This only seems to work for non-impactful values.)
Ehh. I think it sometimes sucks for those for which the past lack of equity benefitted them.
Probably more than anywhere I see this in athletics with boys and girls. Certain Dad’s of boys complain about how when they were boys they could do all these things that are now off limits because they say girls complain about them. I’m not sure the girls feel the same way.
I think viewing this in terms of society-level power dynamics is a little too simplistic, and we can show that by example.
I have a white friend who moved into the Mission District in SF, mostly sight unseen, and hated it. For those not familiar, the Mission is a primarily hispanic community with lots of loud music, partying, street races, and people setting off fireworks at night. My friend from out of town was miserable with all the noise and had to break his lease early, he just couldn't understand how people could value their communal celebrations more than people's peace and quiet. Conversely, my friends who who grew up in the love it and being immersed in that culture is a huge source of their happiness.
While I'm not sure I'd use the phrasing "multiculturalism doesn't work", I think there's a real phenomenon here where people with like values are happier self-segregating into communities of people with similar values rather than integrating more fully and compromising on more of the things that are important to them.
> Ehh. I think it sometimes sucks for those for which the past lack of equity benefitted them.
Absence of multiculturalism is not inherently a "lack of equity", and dismissing any criticism with "you just liked it because you got to oppress people" is, well, dismissive. This excuse might work if you are only familiar with the US perspective, but living in a largely "monocultural" country myself, I can attest that it is not benefiting from "lack of equity" that makes it wonderful to live in. How could it, when, even assuming there is a substantial lack of equity, minorities are so statistically negligible that their oppression cannot significantly benefit the majority.
I think the implication is that multiculturalism is very hard to get right, and that one solution to it is to be very careful all the time. This leads to a sort of vague blandness that has become more prominent in the Bay area over the past few years. If you don't want to be cancelled, just don't say potentially controversial things.
The thing with unique, interesting group identities (like in Stanford social groups) is that they will, invariably, offend and push some people's boundaries. This over the years has been viewed more and more negatively (as a solution to multiculturalism imho). When cancellations abound and price of offense is high, just make everything as neutral as possible. 580, 610, 113, whatever.
So many complaints about how their "social life" is destroyed and cultural freedoms lost for the sake of "financial interests", but then those same "freedom loving", "spontaneous" grads go later and create startups that do exactly that with other people's life, turning everything we value and cherish into one or another form of homologized business, standardizing our interactions and destroying community in city life.
You don't have the "spontaneity" of going to a shop anymore, everything is delivery. You don't share public transport anymore (and what is that if not enjoying living in "community" with other people?), you take an uber (and when it's finally robotized, you won't even talk with a driver anymore). You don't ask for directions or recommendations, you just look at maps or yelp or whatever. Social life is being destroyed by exactly that same people, and I find those complaints quite cynical.
