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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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

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.[/quote]

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?[/quote]

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