What do people think of this essay? “Stanford Isn’t Fun Aanymore.”
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Anonymous
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. |
Anonymous
I love how this dope ^^ keeps gaslighting that the above essay is somehow about frats. It’s not - not at all. Please do quote any portion of it that discusses frats in any way. You can’t so run along. |
Anonymous
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Without the nudist co-ops and wild parties, Stanford is not a campus more focused on its core mission. Those things were the fruits of an environment built around student agency and attempting to create your own, better social norms. Fostering that creative environment was Stanford’s core mission, and what made it distinctive from other elite schools.
We have so many words to describe the ways an institution can be problematic. It is easy to find faults, scrape crests off walls, and feel like you have done a good deed. But there are far fewer stock phrases to articulate what is lost when an organization is destroyed. There are no parties anymore. I want to live with my friends. It’s hard to name the pain of absence. An empty house is safe. A blank slate is fair. In the name of safety and fairness, Stanford destroyed everything that makes people enjoy college and life. Today, I live across the street from Sigma Nu, the largest fraternity house on campus. Whenever I look out my dorm room window, I can see them playing beer die on their front lawn. They never stop. I think they are trying to make a point. They play like the world is ending, blasting music across the empty Row. |
Anonymous
Writer seen oblivious to some of the bad stuff going on at some of the sigma nus of the world. |
Anonymous
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. |
Anonymous
first paragraph: "JP’s favorite college story is the night he built an island. In the fall of 1993, JP was a junior in Stanford’s chapter of Kappa Alpha. The brothers were winding down from Kappa Alpha’s annual Cabo-themed party on the house lawn. “KAbo” was a Stanford institution, a day-to-night extravaganza that would start sometime in the morning and continue long after midnight. The girls wore bikini tops and plastic flower leis, and the boys wore their best Hawaiian shirts." Is Kappa Alpha not a frat? |
Anonymous
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? |
Anonymous
A "random Stanford blog"? The Stanford Review is an independent, student-run Stanford newspaper. All contributors are current Stanford students and alumni. You can downplay it as much as you like, but it is indeed a credible, online newspaper. |
Anonymous
Oh, wow. We're talking about the WSJ link presented at the top of THIS POST. Please try to keep up. |
Anonymous
+1 Exactly. Now we wait while the PP dismisses it for one bizarre reason or another. |
Anonymous
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. |
Anonymous
| If kids want to have fun in college now, apparently they should go to the University of Chicago, not Stanford. Sounds like the overbearing Stanford administrators have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and made it a substantially less happy and interesting place for students. |
Anonymous
This thread is about the essay on Stanford. Paste the wsj article here if you want to discuss it. |
Anonymous
University of Chicago isn’t fun either. Actually none of the top 20 or so schools have students that are quirky, creative, or fun anymore, for the most part. The way admissions now works has largely eliminated the quirky smart applicants. The result is exceptionally boring and rigid college campuses. |
Anonymous
The comment about kids at the top 20 schools being boring is an overstatement and not every top school has gone as far as Stanford in apparently trying to regulate social interactions among students. I do understand where you’re coming from. The big pushes among admissions departments were (1) diversity and (2) admitting students with a demonstrated “passion” for some activity that aligned with the communities the schools were trying to construct. So many ended up with students who were more racially and economically diverse, but more maniacally focused on building the types of resumes that would demonstrate their “passions.” In trying to reward the quirky and the creative, they unintentionally incentivized students to be even greater people-pleasers at a rather young age. It’s no surprise more of them end up suffering from “imposter syndrome” on campus because the admissions departments have sent the message that their true, less curated selves might be less welcome. |