Stanford hates fun
johnhcochrane.blogspot.com
johnhcochrane.blogspot.com
> Samuel Santos Jr., associate vice provost of inclusion, community and integrative learning within the Division of Student Affairs, says the school is working to address students’ concerns about Stanford’s social atmosphere. “The party-planning process will be streamlined and more administrators will be hired to help facilitate student social life.” “We want events to be fun, inclusive and safe and those things can happen,” Mr. Santos says. “They just require collaboration and honesty.”
I couldn't agree more with Cochrane that the real problem lies in the fact that Stanford's bureaucracy has gotten so bloated that it now has an apparatchik with the title of "associate vice provost of inclusion, community and integrative learning" (not a provost, not a vice provost, but an associate vice provost... WTF?), who promises that "the party-planning process will be streamlined" (WTF?) and that "more administrators will be hired" to do so (WTF?).
... What kind of "fun" is that? The only thing that I can think of that would be off limits to non-students is literally illegal activities that students shouldn't be doing either.
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy
Pre-registration of large (“level 3”) parties has been a thing for a long time. But when I was there, one pre-registered a party, one did so online, and I imagine a single administrator could keep up with the entire workload.
This made sense for a few reasons, including:
Parties can be dangerous affairs, and campus security needs to know where to direct its attention. (There is no need for campus security to be hostile to parties, but a good campus police force should help ensure everyone’s safety.)
Student groups throwing parties generally want good attendance, and pre-registration allows them to coordinate dates.
Pre-registration helps avoid facepalms like throwing a party during finals.
For what it’s worth, the actual policy:
https://vaden.stanford.edu/super/education/parties/party-pla...
Isn’t that crazy.
Something feels really off when I read that for 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrators.[a]
[a] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-stanford-guide-to-acceptabl...
As sad as it may be, Poe's Law[0] really is a thing:
Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture saying that,
without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any
parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers
for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
Of course, there seem to be a lot of administrators these days if all the articles are right, so perhaps there are now extra ones doing nothing particularly useful or administrators whose job is to make policy.’
There is no administrator that actually helps students with daily tasks.
I'd say an alternate time[0] (up to ~50 years ago) rather than an alternate world.
That said, domestic servants are still common today in some parts of the world.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/liaise
amluto notes: >"There is no administrator that actually helps students with daily tasks."<
We graciously thank you for pointing out this oversight and shall take measures immediately to correct it and ensure it never happens again!
Major universities aren't primarily about educating undergraduates, and of course graduate students (about half of that student population at Stanford) are essentially "employees" from a economic production perspective. So really it's about 8k kids paying to learn near the activities of 10k researchers and academics, and the 16k administrators are just the staff needed to keep those 10k workers productive. Which... sounds about right to me?
PS. I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. Even though I disagree with you, I find your comment valuable.
That's the same logic you see on Fox Business when guests demand that we defund the entire federal government because something they don't agree with got funded. Whether or not you personally see value isn't really the issue here. You get that, right?
Even granting that the post is likely to ineffective and silly (something I'd agree with, FWIW) lots of people at the school value things like inclusion, community and "integrative learning" and want to see the school prioritize it in its staffing decisions.
Also post-secondary tuition has been beating general inflation, but lagging many other areas. This link says it's been growing at 4.63% for the last decade, which is less than most real estate markets. The idea of tuition being "out of hand" is mostly just a meme.
It makes it trivially easy to bait mainstream liberals into seeming to embrace wacky ideas. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
That may be true, but why would you do that here?
There is literally no genuine reason why any of this has to exist at the scale it does. Standford's 16,000 administrative staff are not solving problem core to what a University does; they are solving problems they invented, or they're simply not actually solving problems at all, but will nonetheless defend their paychecks with their life.
Diversity & Inclusion is a totally reasonable thing to want. What impact have they had? In 2021, Stanford's admissions statics were: 28% white, 25% asian, 18% hispanic, 7% black. Compare that to US-wide statistics: 75% white, 19% hispanic, 14% black, 6% asian (its multiple choice). 65% of Stanford's admissions did not come from California, so this is a more fair comparison than just California's population.
What someone with a title in that department would say is: well, we've made progress, but there's clearly still more work to do. Internally; they're likely just as frustrated as anyone; because they'd know better than anyone that the system is wholly rigged against their ability to make equity a priority. The system, in any organization, optimizes only for one thing: Revenue. Any change which could hurt revenue (in Stanford's case: maybe reducing international admissions) will never be given serious consideration.
That's the critical piece: when a Fox News rightwinger says they want to defund the federal government, or a leftwinger says they want to defund the police: Absolutely, they're overreacting with respect to the scope of their specific issue with the system they're criticizing. But our systems have become too big within which to create meaningful change and these systems' reward functions are so perverted to any generally optically good goal that what little people can influence them is always implemented through the lens of that reward function (in nearly every case, the reward function is revenue, but there are cases like the Police where the reward function is more-so something like "keeping officers safe"; ultimately this is the same reward function though, its "keeping the system's insiders happy").
Its worth being abundantly clear about this: these giga-systems like Stanford or the Federal Government are another symptom of the low interest rate environment. Its always macroeconomics. Every good and bad thing that has ever happened has macroeconomic causes. If we end up entering a decade+ period of more expensive money, you'll slowly start wondering if your statement that "the school should staff someone dedicated to inclusion and community" makes sense. The fact that they are capable of hiring people to review the guest lists of parties is a problem of excess; not a symptom of the system approaching an ideal state.
Universities are a tremendously interesting case study on what impacts cheap money has had on our macroeconomic system; because there's literally nowhere else with cheaper money. Students bundle up on loans, which they can't default on, and thus there's zero acceptance criteria for loan eligibility. What isn't paid for in loans comes from donations and investment returns, during the largest bull market in the history of economics. All of this will come crashing down in the next five years, and Universities which let themselves balloon up to solve problems that few of their customers (students) actually care about will have a substantially harder time adjusting than one which, say, never hired twenty people to review the guest lists of parties in the first place.
My point was exactly the converse: let's look at evidence for the "general problem of systemic bureaucracy" instead of using ridiculous job titles as a stand-in straw man to beat up.
Laughing at a woke job title is a logical fallacy. If you want to make a broad point that Universities spend more on administration than necessary, I'd want to see numbers comparing them to similar private organizations, etc...
Over the past four decades, the rise in the cost of post-secondary education has outpaced everything else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_tuition_in_the_United_...
The cost attending a comparable elite university in other countries is often multiple times lower. For example, tuition at Cambridge University for British citizens is ~$9K/year: https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.undergra...
The only people I personally know who think bureaucratic bloat isn't a big problem at elite universities in the US are themselves members of that bureaucracy. All the college professors I personally know think bureaucratic bloat is a problem. All the college students I personally know (mostly relatives) also think bureaucratic bloat is a problem.
Because the costs are hidden. Ask them if they'd continue to fund that bureaucracy if they knew that cutting it would cut their tuition in half. I think you'll see a very different result.
> The idea of tuition being "out of hand" is mostly just a meme.
You're in a bubble. US tuition is the most expensive in the world.
Probably true. Although you might find considerable disagreement as to what, exactly, “community” means.
> and want to see the school prioritize it in its staffing decisions.
Prioritize how?
If you mean that hiring for unrelated positions should be require DEI statements, I think you’ll find this is an unpopular view.
If you mean that one should choose one’s hires inclusively such that one preferentially hires people of specific races, ethnicities, etc, then you may find that this is unpopular, or illegal, or dubiously legal, or maybe even unproductive for the purpose of improving the degree to which one’s staff is a representative sample of the population.
If you mean that a university should hire such that the student community feels like a community, then I bet many people agree but may feel that the universities are not actually succeeding.
At the department level, there were of course deans, provosts, counselors, admissions people, etc etc etc, but even that departmental overhead wasn't more than maybe a 1:8 ratio compared to the number of grad students.
I'm sure there was similar or even greater proportional administrative staff once you got to the university level, but even if you include every single employee in big departments like Research and Graduate Admissions, it wasn't anywhere close to even half the number of students. I know this because the entirety of the administration fit into a few old buildings in half the campus, while the rest of the buildings on that half and all of the buildings in the newer part of campus were filled with labs and classrooms.
So in the ensuing twenty years, administrators have either gotten massively worse at their jobs and required far more of them to accomplish the same things (running directly counter to the general trends in worker productivity in that time), or they've created an immense amount of new make-work for themselves and their colleagues. Articles like this point pretty strongly at the latter explanation.
I feel that since they have no shortage of money, they don't feel the pinch of hiring more admins. Thus the number of admins has increased.
Only if you close your eyes and shut your ears and not count any of the facilities, HR, finance, legal, admin, media, procurement, and janitorial staff.
I personally haven't seen a lot of SWEs spending much of their time paying the power bill, laying out offices, cleaning toilets, or sending out W-2s.
Outsourcing the tail doesn't mean it doesn't exist (it might make it slightly more efficient, or it might just be a convenience bevause it gives you someone else that is liable in the event of a mistake.)
In another place we had maybe 30-40 two person offices, and 3 of them were occupied by HR/finance/admin/facilities etc...
So 1/100 does not sound very realistic (maybe for all-remote orgs?), but 1/10 I can easily believe.
There guest list two weeks in advance seems useless for that.
Only if a "bad year" is one where the majority of college-age students in the world are precluded from applying to college due to natural disasters or the like. A realistic "bad year" would mean that the same number of students are admitted, but Stanford breaks some informal non-poaching agreements with Harvard / Yale / Princeton, or perhaps admits some students at a lower bar than the administration was hoping.
But https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts shows somewhat different numbers.
https://reason.com/2022/12/01/students-at-yale-faced-mental-...
But digging in it seems they may have been a little sloppy in their statement.
From memory (the last time this came up) That number includes staff at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (a National Lab, Stanford University Medical Center (which runs two hospitals and a bunch of clinics), Stanford University Press, and all of the research administration needed to manage the (many) grants Stanford gets.
These are admin-intensive things: federal contracting involves lots of paperwork, healthcare + insurance is a nightmare too. Plus, many of these involve staff that aren’t students (nurses at the hospital, scientists at SLAC, etc), all of whom still need “normal” admin things like parking, HR, and payroll, so the per-student denominator is a bit misleading.
And they have their own police force, own thousand of houses, and all the infra too (including streets, roads, sewers, etc).
Stanford is immensely rich, just considering their land holdings alone...
Are administrators exclusively for administrative work? Or does this also include people like teaching aides, lab assistants, etc. which aren't exactly "faculty" but also aren't doing, well, administrative work?
On the face of it, this number sounds completely bonkers. So bonkers that I suspect that there's some nuance to it and that these "administrators" are doing more than just "administrating". Maybe not, but really needs some more detail than this.
These schools really are bureaucratic monsters. They need to make more money so they can hire more fundraisers so they can make more money etc.
1. https://malcolmgladwell.bulletin.com/princeton-university-is...
Um, lots.
Very much not niche, not tiny firms catering to the even more stupidly wealthy than any individual human: customers aren’t always natural persons.
It’s the faculty that are replaceable. Students go to a university because they like the administration. It’s like a resort.
(The faculty may be adding value by being in academia at all, but it doesn’t matter for students which particular ones you meet. It could if you wanted to enter academia yourself, but you definitely don’t want to do that.)
Students and administration will always disagree.
Ergo, any requirement that can be abused by administration eventually will be abused. Exactly as apparently happened here. The only check is to prevent that lever from ever existing.
Anarchy has many problems, but its foremost strength is standing in direct opposition to outside control.
And that's an unfulfilled and critical need in our modern society, as liberties are bricked up bit by bit.
(And before someone tosses it in, we can have the militia vs police end debate some other time, because "a bunch of college kids getting in trouble" is far short of anything that serious to themselves or the surrounding community)
> How the student group will prevent members and guests from bringing in their own alcohol and what they will do if they observe someone bringing in their own alcohol.
Also
> The party planning course must be completed prior to registering a party.
> A party may last a maximum of four hours. Moreover, student groups cannot host or co-host back-to-back parties, pre-parties, concurrent parties, or more than one party per day.
(Note: I am not suggesting the university isn't trying to protect their own interests. I am suggesting they are doing more than protecting their own interests.)
> All undergraduate student groups and residences may host only alcohol-free parties or events during Admit Weekend.
> Beer, wine and packaged pre-mixed alcoholic beverages (e.g. wine coolers, pre-mixed cocktail or seltzer drinks under 20% alcohol by volume, etc.) are the only alcoholic beverages that can be present at on-campus undergraduate student parties
> Shots of hard alcohol are prohibited at all parties.
> Games and activities that promote high-risk drinking or rapid alcohol consumption are not allowed on campus.
> While California has legalized certain recreational cannabis usage among persons aged 21 years or older, cannabis still remains illegal under federal law. […] For the avoidance of doubt, the possession, use, storage, delivery, cultivation, distribution and sale of cannabis in any form is prohibited on all Stanford University property, including university-owned and leased buildings, housing and parking lots. Cannabis is also not permitted at university events or while conducting university business.
> All undergraduate student groups and residences may host only alcohol-free parties or events during Admit Weekend.
Not sure what point you’re trying to make.
Underage Stanford students getting drunk is one thing (and one can quite reasonably debate the merits of the university trying to prevent it, trying to make it safer when it happens, etc m). Stanford students supplying alcohol that gets high school students drunk is another issue entirely.
When I was an undergrad, we took this extremely seriously. You do not drink with the prospective students. You do not host a party where you might mistake a prospective freshman for a Stanford student.
Even ignoring safety and liability, the purpose of going to a school like Stanford is not to get drunk. The prospective freshman have about 48 hours to learn what Stanford has to offer, and doing so drunk or hung over benefits no one.
Here’s an article about it. This policy apparently dates to 2001:
https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/03/students-reflect-on-adm...
(Other groups were surely less responsible.)
From the link you shared:
- The Party Review Committee will meet Tuesday each week during the Autumn, Winter and Spring quarters to review party requests submitted via CardinalEngage.
- The Party Review Committee will consist of representation from the following units/departments including, but is not limited to:
- Office of Substance Use Programs, Education & Resources (SUPER)
- Office of Student Engagement (OSE)
- Residential Education (ResEd)
- Fraternity and Sorority Life (FSL)
- Residential & Dining Enterprises: Housing Operations (R&DE)
- Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS)
- Stanford University Fire Marshal’s Office (SUFMO)Jesus Christ. Kill it with fire before it spreads!
College students are adults, why the fuck is the college managing what they do off campus at all? You go to school for education, not for the school to manage your entire life. None of us would be okay with our employer telling us when and how we can have parties at our own homes, why is it fine for a school to do?
That Americans have become increasingly okay with colleges being surrogate parents for literal adults is just bizarre.
It’s not. Stanford’s campus is huge, and almost all undergrads live on it. The parties in question were generally held on campus, often in university-owned and managed buildings and often on the front lawns. The university had insurance (I don’t remember the precise details).
And, to be clear, the university was generally fairly supportive. You could host a party in university space. You could coordinate with student who were not part of the hosting group to throw genuinely interesting parties. You were allowed to serve alcohol on university property under a fairly uniform set of rules, and guests knew what to expect. If the police showed up, the hosts wouldn’t get in trouble if they followed the rules. If an out of control guest set of the fire alarm, the host would generally be treated quite favorably. If a guest was out of control and the host needed to call the police or medical services, they would come and not bust the host. (And hosts were strongly encouraged to send excessively drunk people seek medical care if needed.)
Part of the point of preregistration was to make sure that everyone was prepared. If you’re going to buy wristbands, post flyers, etc, filling out a quick web form is not a great hardship.
Of course there were obnoxious parts of the policies, but overall I think the university did fairly well here.
When the students themselves are coughing up the $80k/year then you will see a permissive atmosphere. Or you'll find them reallocating their resources to $40k colleges and the rest on alcohol?
Well, college students are mostly not adults. They are young, inexperienced and incompletely developed intellectually and emotionally. This is nothing new and colleges know much more about this than HN does.
It was the same way when I was in college and it will remain so as long as we have colleges. Colleges have always had to keep an eye on students and rein in problematic behavior.
They are young, inexperienced and incompletely developed intellectually and
emotionally.
Except we know this is not true, because plenty of other countries don't expect universities to micromanage their students' personal lives.
Your comment is a great example of, "well this is how it currently works in America, therefore it must be this way universally for all time." Please try to account for other countries existing before issuing sweeping generalizations about human nature. There's more to the world than just the US.
TulliusCicero says >"Your comment is a great example of, 'well this is how it currently works in America..."<"
Yes, this is part of what I was saying. Another part (also implied) is "that is how it was when I went to college (in USA)...". There are many underlying unspoken implications in speech, I haven't the time to tell you all of them for this particular sentence nor do I think that you would be interested.
>"...therefore it must be this way universally for all time.'"*<
No, this is NOT what I was saying. YOU implied this and YOU said this.
You are more eloquent and communication speeds up when you speak for yourself. Do not speak for me.
The above are all features of greek life at Stanford. You know why sorroties dont allow alcohol parties? Because adults who finished college long time ago run the larger organization and these are rules they impose. This has nothing to do with spontaneous self organization of students.
In what adult world do adult throw temper tamptrum for years because salamander took precedence over sand hill build during drunken party years ago? In what adult world is "social life" equated with fraternities? Like, in adult world, lakes on institution property do get sometimes close for public for whole host of reasons, without that being framed as "war on fun".
Unimportant side not is, if you go to university primary for education and do not want have large part of life mandated by institution, you stay out of greek life (as majority of students do).
As far as "level 3" is concerned, are you referring to this scale[0]?
Festivity Level 1: Your guests are chatting amiably with each
other, admiring your Christmas-tree ornaments, singing carols around
the upright piano, sipping at their drinks and nibbling hors d'oeuvres.
Festivity Level 2: Your guests are talking loudly -- sometimes
to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all, rearranging your
Christmas-tree ornaments, singing "i gotta be me" around the upright
piano, gulping their drinks and wolfing down hors d'oeuvres.
Festivity Level 3: Your guests are arguing violently with
inanimate objects, singing "i can't get no satisfaction," gulping down
other peoples' drinks, wolfing down Christmas tree ornaments and
placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when
the little hammers strike.
Festivity Level 4: Your guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over
their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around the burning
Christmas tree. The piano is missing.
You want to keep your party somewhere around level 3, unless
you rent your home and own Firearms, in which case you can go to level
4. The best way to get to level 3 is egg-nog.
My fraternity and half a dozen other groups would host parties with 2-300 people each weekend. Most groups hosting these large parties had practices in place to ensure everyone was safe (e.g. sober drivers, cutting people off who were too intoxicated, etc.).
Attendance was more valuable when events conflicted because it became a social status symbol. That being said, prominent groups coordinated with each other. I also disagree with characterizing throwing a party during finals as a “facepalm”. My friend group always prioritized studying and grades, and I believe others should as well. I believe to a greater extent that they should be given the freedom to make mistakes, or have fun if they believe themselves able to manage both their studies and their social life.
I doubt that diligent campus security could do a better job than responsible and respectful hosts and friends. Giving students resources to host safe parties would be more effective since they are closer to the source of issues and can stop small issues before they become bigger issues. The same resources could encourage other safe practices like not over-imbibing, traveling with trusted friends, etc., and would keep students safer than any campus security could, while giving students more freedom and responsibility.
I base this assessment in part off of personal experience. At my school one year, a girl went to a frat party with her friend, and got too drunk. The fraternity made sure she and her friend had a ride home. Her friend made sure she got to her dorm room safe. After getting home, she wandered out of her building to the nearby fire department, which neighbors the famous police office. She fell asleep in front of the bay door and was run over and killed by a firefighter responding to a call who did not see her.
This story demonstrates 1) the effort that other students made to ensure safety and 2) the failure of campus security to catch a massive safety issue right under their noses. I feel terrible for the girl and her family. Their experience was tragic and heartbreaking. That tragedy resulted does not negate the fact that all involved did everything they could (shy of not having the party) to ensure safety and campus security could not have done anything more without tucking her in to bed and watching her all night, which I find unreasonable.
As you said, parties can be dangerous. Hosts and attendees being cautious and responsible will go much further than more vigilant campus security.
Stanford was also known for allowing students to drink with friends in their own rooms, in undergrad dorms, with the doors open. It was quite strongly discouraged to close the doors when drinking. These weren’t “parties” for these purposes. I think this was an excellent policy — it encouraged being social, it helped keep everyone safe, and it steered undergrad drinking in a more mature and safer direction. Sadly, IMO, this is no longer the case:
https://stanforddaily.com/2021/09/20/from-the-community-stan...
I don’t know how the actual bureaucracy and effects of the policies have changed since I was there.
Yes, they will hire a planned parenthood admin who you contact 2 weeks before any “on-campus intimacy”.
I used to think like this, but then I realize that a good portion of the students who are used to this kind of institutionalized infantilizing internalize that it is proper and necessary.
Then they go on to agitate for similar structures “in the real world”. Something to be especially mindful of is the fact that these students are going to “elite” schools and are therefore likely to end up in management or decision making positions.
Well, they only do because people, probably including yourself recruit them preferentially. They don't magically end up in these positions.
Disagree? Make sure you exclude graduates from the top 20 universities in the US in your next recruiting event.
The parents of millennials (boomers) have been lamenting their creation for years already.
America created and raised these children and now seems to have some remorse about it, and history continues to repeat itself.
Maybe the dominant culture is leaving some folks behind.
It's a cultural shift that seems crafted:
Self-fulfillment -> follow your heart -> feelings first -> feelings only.
We have a whole generation of people who excuse bad behavior and failure with "I was having a hard time, I have to have my support peacock on the plane." None of these people heard "No" enough as a child.
There's value in teaching children to ignore name-calling. "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me." This is what we used to teach. People can be mean, don't let it affect you. Show grit, find it in yourself to continue anyway, and you'll succeed.
Now? Achieve power by exploring your victim-hood and collapse in shaking outrage because someone disagreed with you.
We need to start fixing this, and clearing these piles of frivolous administrators from the staff at universities would be a great start.
I think it's fair to say LGBTQ, women and brown folks are being hurt in tangible ways by dominant language (words can in fact hurt when they influence generations of behavior), and like most progress there seem to be some who are experiencing downsides now that things are changing.
Who decides who has sour grapes?
Were these bureaucrats just waiting in the wings for an excuse to pounce with regressive policy?
Blaming the staff without examining the broader cultural shift seems as bad as an emotional support peacock.
Words cannot harm you. Actions harm. Please stop perpetuating that nonsense.
Name-calling or epithet-hurling has not hurt anyone in a tangible way (tangible means "touchable" something physical). Bias, and discrimination based on bias or prejudice does cause economic and sometimes physical harm. It is proper behavior we need to teach, not hypersensitivity to phrasing.
I worry we throw the marginalized baby out with the bath water in discussions like this.
It causes far more harm on average than any minimal help it does in some cases. There’s substantial active harm in the amount of gaslighting and ill conceived redefinition of words going on. It’s exactly the sort of whitewashing of thought that’d lead to the world found in The Giver.
> throw out the marginalized baby
I think that’s just an updated version of the “white mans burden” — the white man has a burden to take care of the poor colored people.
The real way to change such things is over time by hard work and engagement. Dismantling actually oppressive systems in financial systems and laws. Giving opportunities not outcomes. Reducing things like inflation which disproportionately affects poorer people. And a hundred other things, all of which were working over the last decades with improvements in almost every metric for marginalized groups. Still lots of real work left.
Were these bureaucrats just waiting in the wings for an excuse to pounce
with regressive policy?
Of course, they don't do this for themselves. No, of course not. They do it to improve the moral worth of the people. Their zealotry is driven by the purest of intentions.
Who decides who has sour grapes?
"The beatings will continue until morale improves."
This rings true to me, and I find it very insightful. Thank you for writing it.
This is it. This sentence is 100% correct.
OI. The parents of the millenials are the X-gens mate.
Sometimes known as the lost generation, or latch-key-kids etc.
The boomers are _our_ parents! And don't you forget it.
Now, get off my lawn :)
Usually, yes, but not always! I'm 29 (born in 1993), which I think is pretty clearly in the range of millennial (definitions vary, and I've seen cutoffs anywhere between 1994 and 1997, but I don't think anyone would put me in Gen Z by any reasonable stretch of the imagination). My parents were born in late 1958 and early 1959, which is probably not within the most common definition of boomer, but I've met other people my age with parents born a few years before mine. I don't think anyone would consider someone born in, say, 1955, to be Gen X, and having a kid at 39 in 1994 would have been somewhat unusual but not really that crazy (especially if the other parent happened to be a few years younger).
If that still doesn't convince you, I don't think I have anything else I could say, but maybe reading this comic might provide a compelling argument: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EOdaSW2XUAE1Pxm?format=png&name=...
I get where you're coming from but I think maybe relax a bit there...
The dirty secret is that they haven't really had those supposed educational advantages for a long time, if ever.
I attended undergrad at a large university that was (and still is) around the 75-100 range in US News rankings. I then attended graduate school at a top-10 US News school. My expectation coming in was that compared to my peers in undergrad, the undergrad students I was teaching as grad student would on average be smarter and work harder, and would have better resources available to them. All three were false. They were on average more ambitious and more demanding (in terms of e.g. asking for points back on assignments), but not smarter.
There are very real advantages to attending an elite school, but they are primarily social rather than educational. Having letters of recommendation from top scholars helps you get into grad school. Making friends with other people attending an elite school can provide all sorts of opportunities down the road. Just having the name on your resume will open doors for you. The undergrad education itself, though, probably isn't better.
Not only are the students of less quality, the pace has to match the bottom, so they don't fail out all the special entries.
All those schools have going for them these days is a reputation that’s no longer deserved, social connections, wealth and a sense of entitlement that scores them freebies from time to time.
Why are people so willing to accept that from childhood leagues to professional, in basketball, football, soccer, etc. society scours and finds all the best players, and nobody is out to prove that it's not true, but that somehow we as a society are incapable doing it in intellectual fields? Does that mean that no player who didn't make it as a pro wasn't close, or that every pro player works out? No, but within the stochastic variance, sure.
Based on my own experience at an elite school (as a graduate student, teaching undergrads), this is definitely false.
> Why are people so willing to accept that from childhood leagues to professional, in basketball, football, soccer, etc. society scours and finds all the best players, and nobody is out to prove that it's not true, but that somehow we as a society are incapable doing it in intellectual fields?
Because athletic performance can be objectively and reasonably easily measured along many (not all) dimensions. Intellectual performance is (1) much harder to measure objectively and (2) much less socially acceptable to use such measurements. Good grades can indicate high intellectual performance, or they can indicate grade inflation. A high SAT score can indicate high intellectual ability, or it can indicate that your parents paid $4000 for SAT prep courses and 1-on-1 tutoring. Basing college acceptance on a battery of psychological tests might be somewhat better than current methods at selecting elite students, but (1) those tests would immediately become the subjects of a new test-prep industry and (2) it's not socially acceptable to do that.
My gut feeling is being responsible for your own well being (rent, food, job) is important for contextualizing other aspects of your life, like studying vs play.
Why are people over the age of 18 voluntarily putting themselves into an environment where they have to ask if they can have a party? Why is this nonsense not simply dying on its own? The real problem is that people don't simply leave. Easiest way to not be annoyed by some bureaucrat gone mad with power is to separate school life from private life.
University and hospital affiliates are often the biggest slumlords in their area. Having a buffer to make room for future expansion that produces income is a winning strategy.
Stanford is an edge case because, as a sibling commenter says, it owns a lot of real estate, but also it's in an insanely high cost-of-living area, so students can't necessarily afford to live just anywhere. At most "normal" universities in the US, you can just live off-campus and do what you want (or at least, follow the city and landlord's rules, not the university's).
OK, Stanford alums on here, no more donations until Stanford gets the administrator/faculty ratio back to 1990 levels.[1]
[1] https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-administrative-bloat-is...
This could be a line straight out of "Brazil" or some similar work, I laughed out loud.
'Adding more engineers to a project that's in trouble is like using gasoline to put out a fire'
Off hand it feels like the issue here is the universities idea is the committees jobs is to ensure the students party responsibly without taking on any actual responsibility themselves.
To be honest when I went to Uni., I never really understood the hazing aspect and the overboard frat parties, but some partying as long as you don't have extraordinary excess or condone danger (ala hazing) it's part of growing up. Stanford is overcorrecting.
If the uni is in a big city you have other places to discover and party.
That's so far down the planned-economy planned-society political line (control is required) that it's sad they can't see this for a the outright sickness that it is.
Things like green hair and other alternative culture tropes used to signal an anti-authoritarian attitude, but now it signals a hyper authoritarian one using rote criticisms to target anything simple enough that others just enjoy, and which others won't match the irrational aggression being used against them to defend their simple enjoyment of it, and in yielding, it just empowers these bullies.
We need to stop believing and listening to histrionic authoritarian personalities. It was a mistake, and they systematically abuse the very tolerance that characterizes western culture with a simple escalating bullying technique of, "oh, so you say you are tolerant, do you tolerate this moral abomination? No? Well then you are intolerant and if you don't denounce your own dispicable intolerance hard enough, then surely you are a collaborator! Pay me off and I won't tell the world what a disgusting person you are!"
Stanford (and other universities) got hustled by the oldest hustle since street corners were invented, and they're both too naive to figure it out, and too conceited to admit they have been taken by less intelligent but galactically more street smart people they thought they could just be nice to and help. Stanford doesn't hate fun, it just has a terminal ideological cancer.
This is what has been bothering me about the modern idea of tolerance. "We'll tolerate anything but intolerance" seems to transition to simple bullying far too often.
It is important to remember that a paradox does not have a straightforward solution. And if the solution exists it is likely about allowing more speech not less.
> Havel uses the example of a greengrocer who displays in his shop the sign Workers of the world, unite! Since failure to display the sign could be seen as disloyalty, he displays it and the sign becomes not a symbol of his enthusiasm for the regime, but a symbol of both his submission to it and humiliation by it. Havel returns repeatedly to this motif to show the contradictions between the "intentions of life" and the "intentions of systems", i.e. between the individual and the state, in a totalitarian society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Hav...
If you'll ever hear people comparing modern "woke" movements to the communists of the past (especially Mao's Red Guards) , those similarities are precisely why.
> Havel uses the example of a greengrocer who displays in his shop the sign Workers of the world, unite! Since failure to display the sign could be seen as disloyalty
or is that a different phenomenon?
Have you ever been a student? Because agreeableness with arbitrary, stupid rules isn't ever a trait I'd universally prescribe to them. Pushing back on them seems way more common than quiet agreeableness.
It's a bit ironic that you're infantilizing said students, in order to critique a policy that... Infantilizes them.
Says the guy describing everyone with green hair
1. In modern society, everyone is carrying an Internet-connected video camera and nearly every nontrivial social event is filmed.
2. Sexual assault and harassment cases are often litigated in the informal justice system, where there is no statute of limitations, "guilty until proven innocent" standards are often applied, and "I was just a dumb kid trying to navigate a new social environment" is not an excuse.
3. Almost everything I did was expected to be a form of resume-building, even as early as high school.
Will my actions at Exotic Erotic look good to employers? Will they by acceptable to social media users twenty years from now? Can I absolutely guarantee that no one at the event will feel I made them uncomfortable? (Am I willing to bet my future career — the whole reason I am spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend an elite college — on all of the answers being "yes" just to attend one party?)
I mean, several campus advocacy groups were explicitly trying to tell men to stop engaging in those kinds of risky social behaviors!
I don't know that that's a bad thing. I've heard some people, especially women, really did get physically and psychologically injured at these kinds of events. Perhaps cancelling these events is a reasonable price to pay to keep those people safe.
But I disagree with much of the rest. You’re welcome to make those choices for yourself, making your life about resume-building and career from an early age, and certainly society benefits a lot from people like that. But suggesting that everyone should be forced into those choices feels wrong to me. I think having a colorful and joyful life has its own value, but even if we’re sticking to utilitarian arguments, a lot of the people who benefited humanity the most were certainly not resume-driven rule-followers in their youth.
As for false rape accusations… I think this is one of those things that gets talked about so much that it seems more common than it is. I believe it can happen, but every one of my male friends has made it this far in life without being accused of rape. If you only have sex with people who enthusiastically want to have sex with you, I think you can probably put this somewhere between “plane crash” and “lightning strike” in terms of how much you should worry about it.
Also, I'm not worried about comes-out-of-nowhere false associations. I am aware that I need to avoid actually doing something wrong because the consequences of that are really high. I implement your "only have sex with people who enthusiastically want to have sex with you" rule by not getting drunk at student-organized "anything-but-clothes" parties!
I still question the premise that the only worthwhile activities are the ones that look good on a resume.
The point of those schools is to go work for McKinsey or whatever. Your folks didn’t take violin at age 3 and pay $50k for lacrosse academy for you to blow it all at some kegger.
I actually don’t think my parents care all that much whether I work at McKinsey or Google or wherever. They put me in music lessons because they thought it might be interesting, not because it would help me land the perfect corporate job. I doubt my parents even know what McKinsey is.
Yes, I fully agree. The fraternities have a ton more true rape cases than they have false allegations. Which might also be a reason the the crackdown on fraternity culture.
And no, I wouldnt attend "exotic erotic" neither - but it should be allowed for those who want to attend it.
Also it is quite funny that the person who didnt attend an event has the most to write about it. Basically hearsay.
Your whole post looks like some sort of politically correct resume building. Are you trying to get correct social score here as well? Seriously sounds like your whole life is about getting social score.
In a world of apparatchiks like you any kind of fun is forbidden.
They could probably get away with having wild parties on the side, before camera phones and social media. But, like, the fact that you must now choose between attending wild parties and being a spreadsheet filler is the real reason why there aren't wild parties at Stanford anymore.
And definition of wild is getting wider, so they have to hire more apparatchiks.
Edit: Berkeley not Stanford protected John Yoo
It explains their defense, but it certainly doesn't excuse it.
The assumption that partying is something important that needs to be preserved.
Look, I'm not coming at this from a culture war perspective. I'm speaking from my own experience here: if I could go back and talk to my 17 year old self in the first week of school all these decades later, I'd ask about all the parties I was thinking of attending, and say, "Yeah, none of those matter. Feel free to skip, oh.., every one, from now until graduation."
Connections? Didn't make any that mattered. Romances? Zero. Friendships? Basically they were as strong as they needed to be from daily conversations.
What was really valuable and unique were the classes, though I had a hard time seeing that then.
But people here seem to disagree - and I don't think it's because they're all in college either. They really find they have value. Sadly, they did not for me.
Those friends have more impact on me today than whatever my GPA average might have been with a few less hangovers.
Geez, can't imagine why
For example, I made connections, including to lawyers and one to a friend who was an MIT prof for a while; the problem is, they didn’t amount to anything practically useful (I’m not a lawyer or in that profs field). And a connection is defined by its practical utility.
As for the friendships, truthfully I could’ve substituted any one of those friendships for another one in my 20s or 30s and I don’t see it changing much. Or I could’ve basically been as strong friends w them post college, even w less face time in college.
In other words all this partying and close time w your buddies in college is, in my experience, vastly overrated. I could’ve skipped out on most of it and not been worse off.
None of those are “socializing and making connections” though. Sure it happens during these events, but this article seems to say it’s “innovators” of our tech world—who dare to dream. Except the people who actually did that work weren’t out partying. They we’re studying physics, chemistry, math and programming while having a curiosity to tinker and experiment with this knowledge.
It also took some silver tongued entrepreneurs with rich families like Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, etc. to use these geeks (being rich nerds themselves) to create profitable organizations now synonymous with Silicon Valley itself
I guarantee you, innovation isn’t suffering because a bunch of Stanford frat students can’t fill houses up with sand anymore.
University of Virginia, University of Michigan, UNC -- these schools are so large that it's impossible to completely shut out self-organized chaos.
I fully expect the next wave of excellence to come from these schools.
Stanford is also significantly more selective than all of those institutions. But unlike the IITs or Tsinghua, which are as or more selective, it's not based on grades and scores, but also additional class signals.
Maybe that's what these schools should focus on when they teach compassion, diversity and inclusion.
I know elite college people are smart but I feel like they can also be really mean/petty. Granted, I’ve only met a handful people from such institutions and only one person didn’t act weird about it.
Virtually all the traders were from elite schools. Devs and quants had diverse backgrounds.
(I got the job.)
I really believe that places like Stanford (and even top Greek orgs at “lower tier” schools) are elitist in a way that’s harmful to society. They are pay-to-play for the vast majority of attendees (not saying you don’t have to be smart to get in - but the number of smart applicants is far greater than the number of slots and they consistently favor applicants who can pay $100k/year in tuition[1]). They’re also a straight shot to the institutions that control the world - my friends who went to Ivy Leagues now work in government and media, while my state school friends work in tech (not FAANG but startups and medium sized firms), public health, and non-profits.
Perhaps most disturbingly, these elite schools do in fact seem to be the ones least open to independent thought. At that Ivy League party, when people talked about something serious (not gossip or TV or whatever), it was inevitably their career trajectories, real and imagined. The parties at my state school had discussions ranging from local politics to heterodox economic theories.
The place where I disagree with the article is the idea that these elite schools were once unique bastions of free thought. Research your local public university and you’ll find that they were a hub for, as an example, anti-war protests. Kent State was Kent State, not Harvard or Yale.
I think (and this is my guess, not anything I have research to back) the “anti-fun” shift is some strange combination of healthy respect for the people (mostly underpaid janitors, groundskeepers, etc.) who have to clean up after the shenanigans of rich children and a collective fear of having an image of yourself doing something stupid preserved forever on social media.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/10/magazine/coll...
There's always an element of "don't get caught" with student orgs.
I built my career in the post tech boom 2000s in a culture where engineering and product were hands-down the most important people in the business.
If I wanted to bolt a cool second hand espresso grinder to the mini kitchen wall — one bought with my own massively over egged salary — then no one could stop me. Paint a mural paying homage to a map(parseInt) type bug that took down the site? Sure! Here’s a sculpture made of empty beer cans from Friday night drinks in the office. All very silly, hit/miss sometimes on taste, but all part of the flavour. Everyone did things like this: hosted silly parties, brought in weird food, etc etc. The sense of eccentric character was strong. Hackers were hackers in everything, not just their codebase.
Now I get admonished by HR anytime I do anything which they perceive as being equivalent to daubing crayon in the walls. Merry Christmas HN. Keep the spirit of hacker-past alive!
I distinctly remember attending a party at a Stanford frat during the "crackdown" timeframe. As I was walking up to the house, I noticed a small scrum of people gathered on the front lawn. It seemed that a cop was in a discussion with several of the brothers. He had his Maglite out and appeared to be writing them ticket. But as I got closer, I realized the brothers were grilling hot dogs and the cop was using his flashlight to illuminate the grill. A marked contrast from our house's interactions with Berkeley's police.
All Berkeley frats/sororities have houses on private property, meaning they are subject to the City of Berkeley laws and regulations which are enforced by Berkeley police (as opposed to the UCPD which only operates on campus). As you can imagine, the City of Berkeley (often egged on by NIMBYs living next to the fraternity houses) were less than enthused about Greek life and tried to pass several laws/restrictions to effectively outlaw them.
The university administration tried to assert some control by officially "recognizing" fraternities that complied with university policies. But at the end of the day, to the average student, it would be impossible to separate the sanctioned frats from the unsanctioned ones: they all held parties, conducted rush, held formals, etc. Having frats located on university property does have some serious advantages. One big one is forcing someone to leave entirely. Berkeley frats had to deal with people showing up from all over the Bay trying to sneak into our parties. They were never happy about not being let into the party, but there was nothing we could do to stop them from standing out on the sidewalk and causing issues.
As they say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Berkeley has an extreme housing shortage. The university realized that having several thousands students willing to cram as many as people as possible into a single house was actually hugely beneficial. Ultimately, the administration stood with the fraternities against Berkeley city council because they realized that they had nowhere else to put all these students.
So if I had to chose, which system is better? Having everything controlled by the university? Or ultimately being subject to the whims of cantankerous old people with too much time on their hands?
Let them be just like all other orgs, with no special rules just for them. Half the problems will dissappear overnight.
You have things a bit mistaken. Rules that apply to greek organizations are often much more strict and onerous.
Many greek orgs would love to be treated under the same rules as the soccer club, or whatever. The soccer club doesn't have to deal with the administration breathing down their back every time they host a party or similar.
Instead of that, at most of these elite schools we see a hostile administration, constantly looking for every opportunity to shutdown these orgs.
They don't really exists outside of setup where they are officially supported. But yes, negative sentiment toward them from students in general and administration that have to deal with them exists.
The one inviolable rule for university housing was "no growing of pot plants in a dorm room facing the street". Otherwise, cheerful anarchism prevailed, mixed with some anti-war near mayhem. Good times, indeed.
The whole purpose of an undergraduate education should be to build young people into having the knowledge and skills to really be free in society. A literally “liberal” education in the original sense of the word.
Instead adults have to ask permission to have guests.
That’s how you manufacture consent for a police state, making people live in an environment where the authorities have to approve of everything until their mid twenties.
This is also how you waste student money, state money, research money funneling it away into entirely unnecessary jobs.
University of California students just got done with a strike, maybe Stanford students should strike until the administration stops wasting their money.
You can see it in people like Dan Gross who named his venture fund after the eugenics research fund Pioneer Fund and called other people "NPCs" in a lecture that got big on HN a few years ago.
There are certainly narcissists at Stanford (and any other prestigious institution) but this desperate need to write off thousands of intelligent people based on some kind of imagined persecution is pretty weird to me.
Just for the record, I studied at a very unprestigious journalism school in Australia. But I work with many Stanford grads and in a company with it's fair share of assholes, they have all been lovely.
Back then, this stuff was theoretically in the name of safety, though that was totally misguided. When I got to my freshman dorm, the RAs told us to leave the door open if we were drinking, so they'd know if anything was wrong. In return, there would be no trouble. They held up their end of the bargain, and everyone was drunk but safe and free of administrative trouble. Even the Stanford sheriffs were well known for not giving you trouble unless you were flagrantly drinking in public or causing a real problem. Forcing people to hide their drinking didn't make anybody safer.
It's really a shame that the administration has chosen this direction. I genuinely don't know what the point is.
This is like asking the police department to sanction drunken driving — versus individual cops making a judgment call.
I think this all dates back to the end of Halloween in the Castro[1]. This was back in 2006. S.F used to throw a huge awesome LGBTQ themed party and then some gang members decided to attend. Gang members being gang members, one threw a bottle at another and 9 people got shot. They shut the whole thing down that 10s of thousands enjoyed hugely because of that one incident.
I'm thinking that the extreme overreaction was because if this incident had started a rift between any group that was not a white supremacist or Christian group and LGBTQ+ this would have been catastrophic for intersectionalism. So they had to shut it all down. The suspects were never arrested or described any more in news articles than being associated with at least one gang.
Thus, I think the end of fun is to prevent any incident between the great mass of intersectionalist factions that don't like each other, or have irreconcilable differences in real life and must exist in carefully managed online spaces and social interactions in structured environments in order to present as part of a unified woke coalition. The contradictions are so great between all these groups that more and more rules must be added on top of rules to keep all the conflict from escaping out and piercing the image of a bland unified morally righteous whole.
[1]https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/halloween-castro-histor...
SF doesn’t want to enforce laws and fun things are less possible when violent idiots attend.
There’s a demographic skew when it comes to violent idiots and people with more virtue signaling than sense are trying to turn “violent idiot” into a protected class and strangely start celebrating many of them.
So we can’t have nice things that attract people who tend to hurt others.
BTW, for all you downvoters. How is closing down the Stanford outdoor hiking club not proof of this kind of thing? You have hikers and they are accused of violating some sort of diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice protocol. It's because there's some other group that has some sort of grievance with people hiking and in order to prevent conflict they have to layer on more rules and bureaucracy to keep all the grievance energy from crating a big dust up, scandal, someone suing the school, etc. They have created all these mobs of enraged activists marching around everywhere looking for someone to enrage them so they can feel validated. The school, to defend themselves creates more rules, more bureaucracy, less controversial fun, etc. Banning Halloween in the Castro was just the kickoff event to the long downhill slide since then.
In other words the whole “right of passage” where you’d dump a young teenager in the woods with a knife and a fishing pole and tell them “good luck” needs a modern equivalent.
Human beings seem to have a sort of suffering constant where it doesn’t matter how awful or easy your life is, you find about the same amount to suffer from regardless if you’re a billionaire or an orphan foraging in a garbage dump. People with really comfortable lives are finding troubling things to suffer from and it needs to be addressed and soon.
We need a better proxy for maturity to do things like vote than just how many years you’ve existed.
In pretty much all jurisdictions, the latter group is more forceful, more aggressive and more determined to take control to impose their own flavor of authoritarianism, left, right or otherwise. The only group consistently failing to take control are those that would take control and actually make a point of leaving you alone.
Now that it’s been largely gentrified, time is ripe to restart something, preferably towards Dolores.
Where's that essay on bullshit jobs when you need it.
Also interesting to see the traction Eva (the author of the Palladium article) has gotten. She has a complicated reputation, but I'm glad to see a major constructive contribution.
Any Alumni in the Bay who want to help support student self-administration, I encourage you to reach out to the ASSU. It's an institution perpetually lacking wisdom (like any student group).
https://nypost.com/2022/12/20/stanford-releases-guide-agains...
They do seem to hate fun indeed!
> "The annual tuition and living expense budget to go to Stanford was $78,218 for the 2020/2021 academic year. The cost is the same for all students regardless of California residence status as there is no in-state discount." - collegecalc.org
Why go to Stanford then? Is it the world-class education, or is the networking opportunities, the chance to meet the children of other extremely wealthy parents who might ease your way into a lucrative job opportunity post-graduation?
Since the students are certainly not the ones footing the bill for an ~320,000 four-year education, this marketing operation is aimed at the parents, most likely. Safe, controlled, bland...
You seem to be assuming a 35% total tax rate at $120k gross income, which seems wildly high.
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
The problem we have today is that people will look at disdain for one flavor of authoritarianism as an argument to impose a competing flavor of authoritarianism. Those with an authoritarian tendency exploit this dynamic actively such that societies are constantly oscillating between the different authoritarian policies, accumulating more liberty reducing rules with each swing of the pendulum.
I suspect that what is fun is different for different people.
I think my interactions with authority were much, much more pleasant at Stanford than at UT. Mostly because the cops were really understanding and supportive. I frequently hosted parties (some large) at both, and not once did they come to stop me at Stanford, whereas in Austin it was always a risk.
That said, I suspect that's the campus police, the administrators seem to be different. And I am sad to see that they are pushing for punishing fun.
Speaking as someone who didn’t go to a school with any of the cutesy crap in the OP, and last read about the institution when someone had to yank a rapist off some lady, I’m not very sympathetic.
I tried very hard to get in someplace without an athletics program to avoid west coast equivalent of Dartmouth style shenanigans… then got into neither and quit my PhD after realizing it wasn’t going to end unless I excused and ignored a litany of abusive and illegal behavior.
I feel bad for folks who JUST put on an unauthorized costume but… I saw so much shit passing through when interning in the Bay I don’t have any sympathy for the party people of Palo Alto - most of them should be sent to the nuthouse.
(And not a bar.)
If you want to fuck around, go off campus.
The morality police you see in Iran is an exact extension of what you will see if this type of behavior is left to grow.
> Next year, Outdoor House will be reinstated, but only because house members promised to refocus their theme on “racial and environmental justice in the outdoors.” Upholding diversity, equity, and inclusion is the first of four “ResX principles” that now govern undergraduate housing. Stanford reserves the right to unhouse any organization that does not, in their opinion, uphold these principles.
Looking from the other side of the “party” that very same culture of no consequences and unchecked toxic masculinity probably also fueled the rampant problems with SA that’s been exposed widely across tech during the #metoo movement.
Today the university is largely re-imagined in the conservative mold. It is foremost an elite job-training site, and includes not only the cosmopolitan social training that companies demand of 21st-century knowledge workers, but free-market costs commensurate with the expected value of the degree in the vocational sphere. Administration has been handed over to a business class walled off from the educators, for fear of academics running the show, with predictable results of fiefdom-building. Tenured educators are disappearing and being replaced with the adjunct precariat, another conservative win. This all contributes to an atmosphere where the stakes of any action are very high for both students and university employees, and danger abounds, whether it be from lawsuits or from the possibility of being forced out of school and suffering lifelong consequences as a result. It's perplexing to see this laid at the feet of academics, when one needs look no further than other bastions of the conservative mindset, like HOAs or corporate HR departments, to find organizations that would be similarly displeased with an ad-hoc island in a common-area water feature.
It's also clear that the increasingly bloated administration is horrendously inefficient from a free market POV, but what's happened here is not a free market, but regulatory capture: the administration makes the rules and spends the budget to benefit itself, squeezing out both teaching staff and students in the process.
Liberal opinions may be commonly held there but the university itself isn't.
> It’s perplexing to see this laid at the feet of academics …
I believe the answers are partly contained in your comment. For one, it’s in the professional interests of the administrative class to continue to demonize, marginalize, and disempower academics. For another, it’s in their political interests to continue pushing academic institutions towards job-training programs rather than expanding intellects.
The western conservative parties have disgraced themselves over the last 40 years with their failure to conserve successful free-market competition, no doubt. Looking at the US, and counting likely 2nd order effects, the majority of the economy is directed by government spending. ~40% directly, and probably double-digits indirectly as services to that 40%. Major fields like education, healthcare, energy, banking and housing are paralysed by regulation.
The US still gets to claim relatively free market vs Europe or Asia, but the situation is so far gone it is debatable whether there are any genuinely free-market policies. A free market would not be paying for these administrators, for example.
But all of that doesn't mean that the universities exist in the conservative image. The situation is the ugly compromise between a failed conservative movement to re-establish free markets and anti-market forces.
We're in some kind of horseshoe world where self-identifying Democrats are already more likely to be virgins than their Republican counterparts. Just looking at the 20 somethings I know, I don't see how this trend of progressives being less fit in life doesn't continue until we at least have 20 years of dominance from more conservative backgrounds by default. I don't see any way to reverse the trends that have become base parts of the progressive culture.
[Edit: anonymizing]
I think this is equally strange to many conservatives who are still attempting to digest this.
When several liberal writers went on tirades regarding how it should be forbidden for people to talk about their sex lives in public, it occurred to me the current liberals were not the ones of my formative years.
I started my career in the liberal arts and one of the reasons I abandoned them was that they were a poor investment. Physics may have "revolutions" but it always builds on the math of the previous generation if nothing else. Someone who could ace a test in 1930 could do well cold today and learn the quantum stuff relatively quickly. A 1960's feminist is wrong about just about everything according to a modern one and maybe the modern one is indeed right but it just shows that learning about feminism is useless except in as much as you need "right now". There's no future return for investment today.
The rest of us have nothing because these elites have everything.
...wouldn't let you in, eh?
I'm not sure how what you said is supposed to be a "gotcha", it describes literally 99.99% of humanity.