261–270 of 402 posts
I don't see why it is being complained about. University has no moral duty to provide social life, their only goal (and, the goal of the students!) should be to teach / learn.
In this case, all that Standford had to do was nothing and let the emergent social life continue uninterrupted.
Did they have a moral duty to interfere with the students' right to free association?
It is absolutely impossible to take this article seriously, because the author refuses to acknowledge the un-fucking-believably fraught legacy that the Greek fraternity system has, at Stanford and at every other school. > Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus Oh, yeah, Stanford’s really afraid of “student spontaneity.” They’re definitely not afraid of organiza…
How does that compare to the number of student deaths falling off ladders, slipping on ice, or bathing over the same time periods?
(or drinking, which I know would be orders of magnitude larger...)
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It really depends on your definition of success. If you know enough Stanford grads - you’d know that many of them will consider themselves failures in life if they haven’t founded and IPO/sold a company for $100m+. I know quite a few like this… I also know quite a few who did it and only think they’re a success in life because of said event.
Does nobody tell them that they are being ridiculous?
What stops a bunch of Stanford students from starting whatever club they want in their spare time? Obviously it can't be on Stanford property, so maybe that's the difference, they have their students over a barrel because they can deny them access to housing which I guess is hard to find otherwise?
The only problem with this article is that it tries to tie the loss of culture and fun with increasing diversity or something. As if including black people is gonna make it less fun? No, the loss of fun is due to financialization and lawyers getting involved with everything and trying to make everything about maximizing profits and fear of lawsuits. Got nothing to do with equality. The DSA for what it’s worth, throws…
Of course, the end result is what you pointed out: in a litigation-happy place (like the US) everything that offends people is going to be dragged into the courts by someone, and is going to cost actual money, and everyone wants to avoid that.
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Imagine how boring the world would be if everyone made responsible, adult decisions at all opportunities!
On the other extreme end of the scale, consider a young person with lots of potential entering university, who then decides to rebel by trying increasingly harder drugs, and ends up with drugs tainted with fentanyl and dies of an overdose. Similar situations have happened before, such as this report of a physics senior dying of fentanyl [1]. Consider young people who try black hat hacking as a prank or for illicit me…
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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 b…
perhaps because everyone is actually on camera all the time now, at least when they're in public-- and almost all the space at a university is public enough for that purpose.
The amount of control American universities exercise over their students is mind-boggling to me. I went to Uppsala University in Sweden, which has a rich and varied student life. But none of that has anything to do with the University (any of them, there are 3 in town). The universities provide education, period. Housing is not run by the University, and it certainly has nothing to do with student social life. What s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was in the co-ops and also a frat in the early 2010's. I knew about XOX, SAE, and KA but not theta delt or sigma chi -- let alone french house, slav, haus mitt, or casa italiana. Aside from undergrads, the school will miss out, too -- my pledge class founded thirteen companies in the few years after graduation, and I hired several friends from EBF for my own -- but the administration will probably never realize wha…
I like how we're immediately jumping to "this is going to ruin the financial success of future graduates and thus hurt future fundraising." "Thing I like must be directly responsible for this other thing that happened later" is sad to see from someone from what's supposed to be one of our nation's best schools. Turning high school into middle school and college into high school, etc, in terms of adult supervision isn…
Seems reasonable to me.
The amount of control American universities exercise over their students is mind-boggling to me. I went to Uppsala University in Sweden, which has a rich and varied student life. But none of that has anything to do with the University (any of them, there are 3 in town). The universities provide education, period. Housing is not run by the University, and it certainly has nothing to do with student social life. What s…
At many universities, the rules apply to you even off campus.