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Stanford’s war on social life

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Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#191

Post by robwwilliams »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #162
codefreeordie wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Your comment reminds me of Steve Jobs amazing commencement address to the Stanford Class of 2005.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM

I try to watch it once a year, especially with grad students and postdocs. Gets better each time.

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#192

Post by musicale »

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.

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#193

Post by musicale »

ztaira wrote: post #156
sanj wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was wonderful to read. I lived in a similar beautiful mess, but it still exists! https://pika.mit.edu/

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 mi…

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.

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#194

Post by musicale »

derevaunseraun wrote: post #176

> 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 init…

> making students pay in person tuition for online school

Bad enough at any school, but imagine borrowing $60K or more to pay for 9 months of Zoom university.

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#195

Post by ryandrake »

cs137 wrote: post #68
hemloc_io wrote: post #33

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 reac…

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 les…

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.

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#196

Post by musicale »

Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #79
mensetmanusman wrote: post #35

“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. Ca…

> 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…

> the administrators changed both the makeup and mission of the campus police

So no more KISS makeup then?

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#197

Post by astrange »

philwelch wrote: post #174
astrange wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#198

Post by sanderjd »

derevaunseraun wrote: post #176

> 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 init…

The optimistic side of this is that the backlash is inevitable.

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#200

Post by musicale »

hyperbovine wrote: post #111
dougmccune wrote: post #15

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 d…

Meanwhile, the coop system at Berkeley is alive and well.

Stanford may have the Axe, but Cal still has student-run housing.
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