What do people think of this essay? “Stanford Isn’t Fun Aanymore.”

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Wow, that article really was depressing. Interesting that there's been quite a bit about Stanford in the news lately - including their idiotic "harmful language/forbidden words" nonsense. Too bad. I always thought Stanford would remain independent of all the liberal nuttery, but I guess not.

The forbidden language thing was for the IT people who wrote official content for their website. Stop letting clickbait get you worked up!

PP here and I’m well aware of that. That doesn’t change the fact that the “official content” was indeed, officially for Stanford. How about you stop being an apologist for idiocy?

In other words, even a minimal amount of clickbait will cause me to set my hair on fire.

"Clickbait"? Didn't realize the actual Stanford newspaper was "clickbait." Sorry this embarrasses you - as it should.

https://stanfordreview.org/house-of-cowards-stanfords-harmful-language-initiative-update/

It’s a student run paper at Stanford and yes it’s click bait. From the article:

The update from Stanford’s Chief Information Officer, Steve Gallagher, states “the website does not represent university policy. It also does not represent mandates or requirements.” Gallagher’s post also reads the “website was created by, and intended for discussion within, the IT community at Stanford.”

It’s a discussion piece - but sure go nuts.

That's Stanford covering their butt after this got out - as anyone who can read can discern. You must be either a Stanford alum or have a kid there to be taking this so personally.

what are you then? You're trying to turn a random Stanford blog in the "actual Stanford newspaper" and it's pretty clear this was never a mandate and it was never "officially for Stanford". You're the one desperately trying to make it into something it isn't because you need to engage in some bizarre conflict.

How about this investigative article from the Stanford Daily, the student-run newspaper? https://stanforddaily.com/2022/10/24/inside-stanfords-war-on-fun-tensions-mount-over-universitys-handling-of-social-life/

Is this enough of an “actual Stanford newspaper” for you?

+1
Exactly. Now we wait while the PP dismisses it for one bizarre reason or another.

Two different articles. One was about the stupid IT internal memo and the is one is about the lack of fun at Stanford. And if you include the WSJ article listed somewhere else we have three articles floating around on this thread.

And it wasn’t AN actual Stanford newspaper, they were making it THE actual Stanford newspaper. The Stanford Review is the student right wing paper. And they accomplished their goal getting people like you to think that memo was an actual problem.

Right on cue!! Go away, troll. With every post, you're looking more and more absurd. Everyone else is able to follow along and understand what the conversation is about. Also, if you consider The Stanford Review "right-wing," that just speaks volumes about you.

I’m surprised you don’t consider it right wing. Have you read the Stanford Review? They want to be considered right wing and it speaks volumes that you think it’s a pejorative phrase.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think people always glamorize a part they didn’t experience. It’s complicated. I will rant about how enforces dining halls and administrative interference ruined my Alma mater’s dorm culture if you want but the idea that creativity, happiness, and self expression can only be found in the Greek system is so much BS. Also the fact that the author thinks that students who live in dorms are inherently lonely and miserable is so much projection.

Is it though? There are many posters here claiming their freshman are finding the dorms to be lonely places.

Sure, dorms can be bad. They can also be great. I loved my college dorm and still keep in touch with people who lived on my hall. Frats can be great, but they can also be terrible. One of my good friends in colleges loved their frat and made lifelong friends there. One of the babysitters growing up got two broken legs from a sorority initiation ritual.

My point was that the author of this article is saying, "the 80s/90s/olden days were so great and wonderful and everything has gone downhill since then" which is an attitude I'm inherently distrustful of. My alma mater (MIT) has closed down two of the most "problematic" dorms (read, the two with the most pronounced drug cultures) and I think they did a disservice to school culture in so doing. But I also think that when people glamorize how MIT was in the 80s they miss the rampant sexism that ran through the culture at that time, that I only hear of when I talk to alumna and faculty who were there then -- they're so pleased to hear what a good experience I and my female classmates had in the early 2000s. So while I think the author of this article may have some valid points (I'm not a Stanford alum or student so I can't say for sure) I think she's missing some of the extremely valid and possibly good reasons the culture is changing. Building an island is great until you're the kid who has to have life-altering surgery at 19 because someone didn't over-engineer the loads on the zipline sufficiently. Open frat parties with tons of free alcohol are great until you're sexually assaulted at one of them and your rapist only gets six months in jail.

NP. Right, it’s complicated. I don’t think anyone (including the author) is saying that they want the worst of frat culture to return. There were aspects of it that were indeed really terrible, including the sexism and sexual assaults.

But kids are also being harmed by this rigid control that had replaced the frat culture. They got rid of the frats at Stanford, but they also got rid of the other places where the brilliant alternative thinkers would congregate. They got rid of places where students could find and build community, particularly the independent thinkers (who they aren’t even really admitting anymore).

My guess is that the number of sexual assaults related to drinking is indeed very down on the Stanford campus, but the number of suicides and critical mental health interventions is up sharply. And I think it’s reasonable to ask: is this actually an improvement? Has Stanford just traded one serious problem for another? Is the Stanford community better off now?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think people always glamorize a part they didn’t experience. It’s complicated. I will rant about how enforces dining halls and administrative interference ruined my Alma mater’s dorm culture if you want but the idea that creativity, happiness, and self expression can only be found in the Greek system is so much BS. Also the fact that the author thinks that students who live in dorms are inherently lonely and miserable is so much projection.

Is it though? There are many posters here claiming their freshman are finding the dorms to be lonely places.

Sure, dorms can be bad. They can also be great. I loved my college dorm and still keep in touch with people who lived on my hall. Frats can be great, but they can also be terrible. One of my good friends in colleges loved their frat and made lifelong friends there. One of the babysitters growing up got two broken legs from a sorority initiation ritual.

My point was that the author of this article is saying, "the 80s/90s/olden days were so great and wonderful and everything has gone downhill since then" which is an attitude I'm inherently distrustful of. My alma mater (MIT) has closed down two of the most "problematic" dorms (read, the two with the most pronounced drug cultures) and I think they did a disservice to school culture in so doing. But I also think that when people glamorize how MIT was in the 80s they miss the rampant sexism that ran through the culture at that time, that I only hear of when I talk to alumna and faculty who were there then -- they're so pleased to hear what a good experience I and my female classmates had in the early 2000s. So while I think the author of this article may have some valid points (I'm not a Stanford alum or student so I can't say for sure) I think she's missing some of the extremely valid and possibly good reasons the culture is changing. Building an island is great until you're the kid who has to have life-altering surgery at 19 because someone didn't over-engineer the loads on the zipline sufficiently. Open frat parties with tons of free alcohol are great until you're sexually assaulted at one of them and your rapist only gets six months in jail.

NP. Right, it’s complicated. I don’t think anyone (including the author) is saying that they want the worst of frat culture to return. There were aspects of it that were indeed really terrible, including the sexism and sexual assaults.

But kids are also being harmed by this rigid control that had replaced the frat culture. They got rid of the frats at Stanford, but they also got rid of the other places where the brilliant alternative thinkers would congregate. They got rid of places where students could find and build community, particularly the independent thinkers (who they aren’t even really admitting anymore).

My guess is that the number of sexual assaults related to drinking is indeed very down on the Stanford campus, but the number of suicides and critical mental health interventions is up sharply. And I think it’s reasonable to ask: is this actually an improvement? Has Stanford just traded one serious problem for another? Is the Stanford community better off now?

I think we need the actual data here to assess: if your assumption that catastrophic injury and sexual assault have decreased while suicides and critical mental health interventions have increased is true, then that is definitely an issue. Kids should be able to attend college without either type of risk, ideally. Perhaps it is my own personal experience with the dangers of frat culture vs the author's admiration for it that is coloring my reading of the article, but I didn't get the impression that she was was considering the bad parts of the good old days at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I grew up in California and still live in California, after having moved away for some years. I am in my 50s. When I was in high school, Stanford was seen as a place for the extremely bright, quirky, and creative. If you were rank-obsessed or considered an “east coaster” at heart (and that was not a positive), you would apply to the Ivies, but people here thought that was largely for the students who would eventually populate the large law firms of the world. I still remember being a kid and overhearing some of my mom’s friends talking about a kid who had (inexplicably, in their view) decided to go to Harvard and them clicking their tongues mournfully because the girl was “so creative!”

There is a real sense of loss in California over what happened to Stanford. It used to be a Californian university at heart, with a personality that rewarded creativity and daring. Now it’s largely indistinguishable from Harvard or Princeton. And this college ranking machine is now turning on USC, which also used to be a quintessentially Californian school. Even UCSC is falling into line.

I don’t disagree with the criticism of the frats — nobody should mourn the loss of Brock Turner culture — but I don’t think that’s really what is going on here. I think at heart, California schools used to have room for the quirky and creative, but the college admissions monster has weeded all of those kids out. What is left is a culture of achievement, box-ticking to the extreme. The students who make it it to Stanford now have one unifying characteristic: they have disproportionately high levels of executive function. But no one would describe them as “wildly creative” or “free thinkers” anymore. And that loss of freedom to explore their creative side — to allow room for mistakes — is driving a depressive culture that at the worst leads to suicide. It’s not that the university would disallow the building of an island (though of course it would). It’s that Stanford has chosen to build a student body that wouldn’t even think about trying to build an island, because that wouldn’t fit into their schedules.

I don’t know what the answer is. I feel like this homogenization of university cultures is part of a larger trend. For instance I think that’s why big Southern state schools are so popular now — they’ve managed to keep ahold of some of their unique culture in a way that California schools have not, though the machine is coming for them now too. I feel like the UCs might be able to possibly change the homogenization trend over twenty years by sharply limiting access to OOS students, which they’ve started to do here. But I don’t know that Stanford and USC will ever regain the creative student body they used to be known for.

I am from Chicago and broadly, this is (sort of) how I feel about UChicago, too. Used to be a world unto its own- very, very unique culture; full of brilliant, quirky, weird kids who were proud of their geekiness and their school that embraced them. It was a very self-selecting group that went there. It has retained some of that, I guess, but overall it has just kind of become your generic Really Good School filled with kids who are not there because they wanted the unique, proudly geeky culture of the university, but because of the high ranking. In other words, prestige chasing. It is sad.

+1 from a U of C alum. It's also why I'm a little dubious about the PC culture run amok story being told here about Stanford, because that's definitely not what's happening at the U of C. It's prestige and status chasing that's causing those changes and they sound similar to what's happening at Stanford if from kind of the opposite direction. Maybe I'm wrong about Stanford, I don't understand the culture there particularly well*

*Obviously as a U of C alum, I only understand kids having fun at college theoretically

I was going to say when someone claimed that U of C was no longer fun, that my sister (an alum) has a U of C mug that proudly announces that it's "where fun goes to die" so I didn't think that was really a goal?

Fun is relative. It was never "fun" in the sense of frat parties and drunken men filling a house with sand, but if your idea of fun was nerdy stuff, loving academics for the sake of academics, "life of the mind", etc. - then U of C has definitely lost its a good amount of its fun over the years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I grew up in California and still live in California, after having moved away for some years. I am in my 50s. When I was in high school, Stanford was seen as a place for the extremely bright, quirky, and creative. If you were rank-obsessed or considered an “east coaster” at heart (and that was not a positive), you would apply to the Ivies, but people here thought that was largely for the students who would eventually populate the large law firms of the world. I still remember being a kid and overhearing some of my mom’s friends talking about a kid who had (inexplicably, in their view) decided to go to Harvard and them clicking their tongues mournfully because the girl was “so creative!”

There is a real sense of loss in California over what happened to Stanford. It used to be a Californian university at heart, with a personality that rewarded creativity and daring. Now it’s largely indistinguishable from Harvard or Princeton. And this college ranking machine is now turning on USC, which also used to be a quintessentially Californian school. Even UCSC is falling into line.

I don’t disagree with the criticism of the frats — nobody should mourn the loss of Brock Turner culture — but I don’t think that’s really what is going on here. I think at heart, California schools used to have room for the quirky and creative, but the college admissions monster has weeded all of those kids out. What is left is a culture of achievement, box-ticking to the extreme. The students who make it it to Stanford now have one unifying characteristic: they have disproportionately high levels of executive function. But no one would describe them as “wildly creative” or “free thinkers” anymore. And that loss of freedom to explore their creative side — to allow room for mistakes — is driving a depressive culture that at the worst leads to suicide. It’s not that the university would disallow the building of an island (though of course it would). It’s that Stanford has chosen to build a student body that wouldn’t even think about trying to build an island, because that wouldn’t fit into their schedules.

I don’t know what the answer is. I feel like this homogenization of university cultures is part of a larger trend. For instance I think that’s why big Southern state schools are so popular now — they’ve managed to keep ahold of some of their unique culture in a way that California schools have not, though the machine is coming for them now too. I feel like the UCs might be able to possibly change the homogenization trend over twenty years by sharply limiting access to OOS students, which they’ve started to do here. But I don’t know that Stanford and USC will ever regain the creative student body they used to be known for.

I am from Chicago and broadly, this is (sort of) how I feel about UChicago, too. Used to be a world unto its own- very, very unique culture; full of brilliant, quirky, weird kids who were proud of their geekiness and their school that embraced them. It was a very self-selecting group that went there. It has retained some of that, I guess, but overall it has just kind of become your generic Really Good School filled with kids who are not there because they wanted the unique, proudly geeky culture of the university, but because of the high ranking. In other words, prestige chasing. It is sad.

+1 from a U of C alum. It's also why I'm a little dubious about the PC culture run amok story being told here about Stanford, because that's definitely not what's happening at the U of C. It's prestige and status chasing that's causing those changes and they sound similar to what's happening at Stanford if from kind of the opposite direction. Maybe I'm wrong about Stanford, I don't understand the culture there particularly well*

*Obviously as a U of C alum, I only understand kids having fun at college theoretically

I was going to say when someone claimed that U of C was no longer fun, that my sister (an alum) has a U of C mug that proudly announces that it's "where fun goes to die" so I didn't think that was really a goal?

Fun is relative. It was never "fun" in the sense of frat parties and drunken men filling a house with sand, but if your idea of fun was nerdy stuff, loving academics for the sake of academics, "life of the mind", etc. - then U of C has definitely lost its a good amount of its fun over the years.

Yes, I think the point is that what was “fun” for University of Chicago has largely disappeared.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think people always glamorize a part they didn’t experience. It’s complicated. I will rant about how enforces dining halls and administrative interference ruined my Alma mater’s dorm culture if you want but the idea that creativity, happiness, and self expression can only be found in the Greek system is so much BS. Also the fact that the author thinks that students who live in dorms are inherently lonely and miserable is so much projection.

Is it though? There are many posters here claiming their freshman are finding the dorms to be lonely places.

Sure, dorms can be bad. They can also be great. I loved my college dorm and still keep in touch with people who lived on my hall. Frats can be great, but they can also be terrible. One of my good friends in colleges loved their frat and made lifelong friends there. One of the babysitters growing up got two broken legs from a sorority initiation ritual.

My point was that the author of this article is saying, "the 80s/90s/olden days were so great and wonderful and everything has gone downhill since then" which is an attitude I'm inherently distrustful of. My alma mater (MIT) has closed down two of the most "problematic" dorms (read, the two with the most pronounced drug cultures) and I think they did a disservice to school culture in so doing. But I also think that when people glamorize how MIT was in the 80s they miss the rampant sexism that ran through the culture at that time, that I only hear of when I talk to alumna and faculty who were there then -- they're so pleased to hear what a good experience I and my female classmates had in the early 2000s. So while I think the author of this article may have some valid points (I'm not a Stanford alum or student so I can't say for sure) I think she's missing some of the extremely valid and possibly good reasons the culture is changing. Building an island is great until you're the kid who has to have life-altering surgery at 19 because someone didn't over-engineer the loads on the zipline sufficiently. Open frat parties with tons of free alcohol are great until you're sexually assaulted at one of them and your rapist only gets six months in jail.

NP. Right, it’s complicated. I don’t think anyone (including the author) is saying that they want the worst of frat culture to return. There were aspects of it that were indeed really terrible, including the sexism and sexual assaults.

But kids are also being harmed by this rigid control that had replaced the frat culture. They got rid of the frats at Stanford, but they also got rid of the other places where the brilliant alternative thinkers would congregate. They got rid of places where students could find and build community, particularly the independent thinkers (who they aren’t even really admitting anymore).

My guess is that the number of sexual assaults related to drinking is indeed very down on the Stanford campus, but the number of suicides and critical mental health interventions is up sharply. And I think it’s reasonable to ask: is this actually an improvement? Has Stanford just traded one serious problem for another? Is the Stanford community better off now?

I think we need the actual data here to assess: if your assumption that catastrophic injury and sexual assault have decreased while suicides and critical mental health interventions have increased is true, then that is definitely an issue. Kids should be able to attend college without either type of risk, ideally. Perhaps it is my own personal experience with the dangers of frat culture vs the author's admiration for it that is coloring my reading of the article, but I didn't get the impression that she was was considering the bad parts of the good old days at all.

I didn’t see her wishing for a return of the full frat culture. She was talking about what was lost with the frats (far more than just the frats). Talking about what was lost (and the grim current reality of mental health on campus) does not mean wishing the past would revive.

Regarding stats, I don’t know the numbers but I believe there is no question at all that mental health interventions and suicides are up sharply from where they were during the frat days. Sexual assaults are much harder to quantify because so many were not reported in the frat days and they are likely still underreported (obviously a problem). That having been said, if kids aren’t drinking or going to parties, it stands to reason that fewer kids are getting assaulted at drunken parties. There isn’t really any question about the rise in suicide and critical mental health interventions, though.