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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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 [i]achievement[/I], 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.

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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. [/quote]

+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 [/quote]

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?[/quote]
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. [/quote]

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