Thoughts on Stanford's War Against Its Own Students
Our elites are deeply weird
It's a quiet Saturday morning, and I just got around to reading Francesca Block's excellent piece for the Free Press, Stanford's War Against Its Own Students. It's a chronicle of busybody administrators run amok at Stanford, focusing on two students in particular: Decker Paulmeier, a fraternity president, and Katie Meyer, an athlete. Both were caught-up in Kafkaesque disciplinary proceedings in which the process was the punishment, regardless of the formal outcome. Meyers eventually committed suicide. The piece is well-researched & well-written: I highly recommend it (and the Free Press altogether).
There were just a few things that went unmentioned in the article that jumped out at me. Firstly, in this long chronicle of wrongs & injustices done to Stanford's students, there was no mention of the most obvious solution: quit and go elsewhere. Nowhere is it noted that the put-upon students are paying for this. Stanford charges twenty thousand dollars per quarter for tuition alone– why not simply take that money elsewhere? A weird, implicit compliance permeates the piece. "…you have to be literally perfect to get there; and when you get here, if you don’t stay perfect, [Stanford] will punish you with every administrative resource they have for embarrassing them," said Paulmeier.
Secondly, Block traces all this to a desire on the part of Stanford to avoid bad press, especially after the Brock Turner case. Fair enough– no organization wants bad press. But… Stanford's president is under investigation for academic fraud. Their best-known former student, Elizabeth Holmes, is about to start a lengthy prison sentence for fraud. Their two best-known professors are the Bankman Frieds. One of their employees was just arrested for falsely accusing another employee of rape. In light of all this, Stanford is worried about… Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages at parties?
The larger lesson here is the difference between administration & leadership. Bureaucrats merely implement policy: leadership is based on principles. Without the latter, intitutions inevitably degenerate into these sorts of tragicomic disasters.
Updates 2023-11-01:
I missed this ("Stanford professor pays $29M in fraud case") in my litany above. Thanks to the Stanford Daily for that.
The Intelligencer has cottoned to the fact that something's very wrong with Stanford: "What’s the Matter With Stanford?". Unsurprisingly, blame is laid at the feet of Silicon Valley "culture". Didn't they get the memo: Silicon Valley is cool now that they're helping censor the deplorables?
Update 2023-11-13:
It barely stands-out among the emerging stories of campus insanity, but Stanford students say lecturer called Jews in class ‘colonizers,’.
Update 2024-02-19:
The hits just keep coming: Stanford prof who sued critics loses appeal against $500,000 in legal fees (H/T to the awesome site Retraction Watch).