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Stanford’s war on social life

palladiummag.com

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Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#391

Post by themeiguoren »

namlem wrote: post #207
ketzo wrote: post #43

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…

29 dead in 12 years is not bad at all. What's the issue here?

People have no idea what a base rate is. And they don’t realize that the world for young people who didn’t go to college is even sketchier - those numbers just don’t get held up as a spear to attack institutions with.

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#392

Post by Zak »

watwut wrote: post #353
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…

Interesting aspect of this is that in Stanford survey, overwhelming majority of students (83%) want to see Greek life reformed, de-housed, or abolished. This is not administrators against students in general issue. This is administration doing moves that are broadly supported by majority of students.

I was wondering about the other side of this issue. Thanks for providing a glimpse of it.

Reformed, de-housed, and abolished are very different. "Reformed" in particular could encompass a wide range of measures which don't necessarily involve heavily policing student organizations.

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#393

Post by watwut »

Zak wrote: post #392
watwut wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting aspect of this is that in Stanford survey, overwhelming majority of students (83%) want to see Greek life reformed, de-housed, or abolished. This is not administrators against students in general issue. This is administration doing moves that are broadly supported by majority of students.

I was wondering about the other side of this issue. Thanks for providing a glimpse of it. Reformed, de-housed, and abolished are very different. "Reformed" in particular could encompass a wide range of measures which don't necessarily involve heavily policing student organizations.

Yes they are much different. Here are two articles about survey (they are similar but contain bit different details). What I remember in addition is that the longer student was on campus, the less favorably he/she looks at Greek life.

- https://stanforddaily.com/2021/09/28/official-greek-life-sur...

- https://stanforddaily.com/2021/11/04/abolish-stanford-greek-...

The unhousing is actually pretty big thing and closer to abolishing then anything else. It would put greeks to more similar position as ordinary clubs. The ability to have the same house consistently is one of big advantages these organizations have against other students group. Other students had to draw where they will be with no consistency. (There are plans for reforms to allow other students being able to keep same neighborhood across years too. So that might change next years. )

The buildings assigned to greeks are in highly desirable area and have features other buildings don't. And obviously, access to that is controlled by these student groups. And obviously to keep living there you have to follow rules - like for example participate on set amount of social activities weekly, paying membership, buying stuff, wearing right cloth to fit attractiveness criteria (this is more for girls) etc. If you fail to visit pre determined amount of parties, you can't stay or have to pay fine or whatever.

----------------

These groups social life is not infinitely free and spontaneous, they have their own pressures (freedom to not party for two months not necessary being available to members). Including systematic wrong incentives. Standford favors greeks that have national affiliation and that comes with more rules. Most absurdly, for sororities, they can't host parties with alcohol to keep insurance cheaper. Making them dependent on fraternities for partying. Can't make own party with own rules, have to look and act in a way that will make fraternity want you in theirs. Which is mind boggling setup.

I mean the above is concern of the group primary. But in terms of unrestricted freedom and experimentation, they don't actually have that.

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#394

Post by lmm »

watwut wrote: post #389
lmm wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is astonishing entitlement. No, just because you used something for fun does not mean the owner can't start using it differently. If your logic is "the university is the owner and can do whatever they like", pretty soon students will be living in pods like one of those Japanese hotels. The university supposedly has the welfare of its students as one of its priorities (and gets tax breaks and donations on that…

> Then why was it necessary to close the lake to students in the first place? To protect salamanders who at the time lived in the lake. Even during draught, the university did periodically filled water in to keep them alive. That biome upstream got restored between original closing is super cool, but does not negate anything. Also, students are not 2 years old. Overwhelming majority of them is able to process the abo…

> Even during draught, the university did periodically filled water in to keep them alive.

According to the article the lake is now gone.

> That biome upstream got restored between original closing is super cool, but does not negate anything.

If that meant the lake was no longer needed for the salamanders, surely the university should have turned it back over to students at that point.

> Also, students are not 2 years old. Overwhelming majority of them is able to process the above without having emotional meltdown over sandpit.

> This is quite massive logical leap from "university is entitled to close lake or part of campus despite single fraternity having made sand hill years ago". Students wont and did not had any lasting trauma from not having lake accessible.

> This is in no way contradictory with single fraternity loosing their sand hill or artificial lake not being available to students in general.

Of course one isolated incident means nothing on a larger scale. But the article is clearly making the claim (and supports it with examples) that this is representative of a broader pattern of the university taking away unstructured student-run fun, banning distinctive student communities, and turning those spaces over admin-run systems that are less effective. And it points to things that suggest this pattern has ultimately been quite harmful: feelings of isolation among the current student body, and ultimately elevated suicide rates.

Now I'd be the first to argue for more quantitative journalism in general, but using a single example to express a narrative is what virtually any article does; frankly this one is better than most in terms of putting it in a context.

You've made your scorn for anyone who disagrees with you quite clear, but are you actually claiming something substantive? E.g. that the case the article is presenting is unrepresentative? (e.g. can you point to other cases where the university is changing in the opposite direction, into more unstructured fun and student-organized social structures?) Or that the broader pattern exists but does not have the downsides the article thinks it does?

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#395

Post by brailsafe »

carapace wrote: post #390
brailsafe wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I forgot to add here that if danger itself was the factor, you probably wouldn't see many black skateboarders, but you do, and causally or not skateboarding isn't on the same level of cost as skiing

Skateboarding too. When I was a kid black skateboarders were hella rare. To the point where today when I see a black kid skating I think, "Hey! We're making progress!" I just did an image search for "skateboarding" and every skater on the first three pages (that's as fer as I looked) was white, except for one who was a bulldog. - - - - Not to spell it out, but the "danger" my friend was talking about wasn't just the…

Ya I maybe didn't consider that last bit in cintext with a different time as much, but if it's logically sound, then more black people in those various disciplines would probably signal some amount of progress.

Idk how much a google search of anything is all that representative of the demographic, or for that matter any media algorithm's results. Except for the bulldog, that's legit, they love skating for some reason. Presumably those results would be informed by a number of factors.

In my local spot, for sure I know a fair number of white people, but there's just as many if not more people of different apparent visual characteristics. Very diverse no natter how you cut it, gender, ethnicity, income level, sexual orientation, skill level, age, fashion sense

Take a skim through this video that includes those spots if you're curious, though admittedly it's somewhat specific to the city

https://youtu.be/m5MJQsPeMIo

I'm super proud of where things are

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#396

Post by vianneychevalie »

musicale wrote: post #192

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 s…

VLC was born out of the need of Centrale students to share videos efficiently on-campus. Centrale being one of the top French engineering schools.

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#397

Post by jspa »

caltech is seeing a similar sort of thing. admin has progressively killed social life and house events (with covid as an excuse) and has implemented draconian key card systems and the like. bref little to no freedom. the fear of risk has increasingly killed the undergraduate experience. Seems a bit counterintuitive to promote since the greatest scientists, entrepreneurs have been risk takers.

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#398

Post by jessriedel »

sanderjd wrote: post #326
jessriedel wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not. Stanford and other elite schools know their brand name is immensely valuable and students will keep enrolling even if campus social life is bleached of all fun. The only real force pushing back at all are alumni whose donations fall (briefly) when a university squashes something too explicitly that had an unusual amount of sentimental value. But that just slows things down a bit.

Oh I don't mean at Stanford specifically necessarily, I mean backlash in the culture broadly.

I can't see why. People won't stop hiring elite university grads, or being impressed by them at parties, because they hear the university social life has become less enriching.

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#399

Post by Claude_Shannon »

imgabe wrote: post #312
mschuster91 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this case, all that Standford had to do was nothing and let the emergent social life continue uninterrupted. And keep watching as students were routinely subjected to hazing, excessive drinking and sometimes outright criminal behavior such as overt discrimination, hate crimes, sexual assault up to rapes? Fraternities had more than enough chances to rein in the worst of the bad behavior and they failed ridiculous…

Nobody is subjected to hazing or “excessive“ drinking. These are voluntary activities you can choose to engage in or not. For criminal matters there’s the police. It was not limited only to fraternities either.

Mhmmm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hazing_deaths_in_the_U...

Re: Stanford’s war on social life

#400

Post by cryptophreak »

The typical rebuttal to this kind of article, seen in some of the comments here, is that the author is necessarily wrong because X happens to Y people per year. Does he want students to die? In other words, "Some number of kids have probably died playing with a stick, so we absolutely must ban or regulate sticks, unless you want kids to die. Are sticks really worth the lives of children?"

The first problem with this argument is the use of thought-stopping language. It seeks to neutralize all reasonableness and good judgement by appealing to the badness of outlier events. Opponents of totalitarianism are painted to be bad people because without totalitarianism uncontrolled things might happen, and that's just irresponsible.

The second problem is that life is inherently risky, so the quest to eliminate risk thus necessarily trends toward eliminating all of life. 100% of people die no matter what choices they make. What should we do about that? Should we divide up the proximal causes and ban them all until no human activity is permissable? Or should we accept that yes, X people per year will die doing Y, maybe the number will even go up over time, and we're okay with that?

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