Who Is Running Stanford?

> By themselves, some recent actions taken by Stanford were somewhat humorous. The school has been the butt of jokes by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and numerous other major and local papers. For example, the IT department came out with its “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” to be used on its websites. The national media had a field day with this action, especially when it recommended no longer using the word “American.”

Wow. That document says the word "chief" should not be used because it's a "cultural appropriation" of indigenous communities.

The word is derived from Latin via French, and was first used in 14th-century Middle English (i.e. pre-contact): https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chief.

How can a supposed academic institution put out such a policy that obviously hadn't been vetted by a language expert, let alone someone who could be bothered to use a dictionary?

The examples in the article are a bit varied, so we cannot conveniently assign a single, much less single pathological cause, or even nefarious cause, apart from "general malaise and decadence" perhaps.

But some of the examples do point to bloated administration as a seat of troubles. Yale, for example, has a <1:1 undergrad student to administrator ratio. That's right, more than one administrator per student. But what's important here is not just how this impacts the cost of education having to pay all those salaries and build and maintain the facilities to hold their offices. Administration has also been the motor by which, shall we say, the "new ideological norms" have been imposed on universities, and conspicuously so in recently years, by commissars in administration. I wouldn't be surprised if hiring decisions and admissions are also guided or influenced by such new ideological policing. In a way, they can't help but be influenced by them, directly or indirectly. This leads to a positive feedback loop that concentrates wackiness in universities. (I'm not objecting to concentration per se. A university is a community and certain commonly held norms must govern every community. It is essential for the common good of that community, and these are not arbitrary. I am objecting to some of the insane norms that are being imposed and highlighting the way in which it is or may be occurring.)

There’s a great quote from a recent TV show that summarizes the putative value of a college degree:

The whole point of a college degree is to show a potential employer that you showed up someplace four years in a row, completed a series of tasks reasonably well, and on time. So if he hires you, there’s a semi-decent chance that you’ll show up there every day and not fuck his business up.

(Delivered by Sylvester Stallone! https://youtube.com/shorts/SUlrllck1Po)

Arguably the value proposition of Stanford and other colleges in the same situation has changed. Rather than show ability to complete reasonably complex tasks on time, a Stanford degree’s real value now is that it shows the bearer is capable of safely navigating the diversity/equality/inclusion bureaucracy.

From this perspective, the fact that Stanford has enough administrators to give each one a full-time salaried job harassing one individual student each and still have staff left over to run classes is actually strengthening their value. Anyone who graduates from Stanford has survived a bureaucratic gauntlet infinitely more insane and Kafka-esque than whatever your DEI department can cook up. Hire a Stanford graduate and you can be sure they won’t bring shame on your company with an insensitive word or sexually suggestive action. Ironically, perhaps these colleges are preparing students for the workplace more effectively than they have in decades.

It's not just Stanford. Change some details and this letter could have been written about any number of universities today. With no disrespect to the writer, they came across as if they were just stumbling into the problems of modern universities and attributing it to Stanford in particular. This maybe adds to its appeal, though, as it highlights the absurdity of it all — as if someone responsible is just stumbling onto all of this and is like "what the hell is going on in here?"

Who cares? Stanford has one administrator for every student. Professsors are a fraction of that. If they want to shut something down, start with the DEI office and then the law school since they are both a disgrace.

Stanford seems to be run by a faceless bureaucracy that (a) cares first and foremost about the bureaucracy itself, its power, its reputation, its vision, its goals, its organization, its efficiency, its financial situation, etc., and (b) cares only secondarily about students.

The many wonderful professors who do care about students operate at the mercy of apparatchiks in the bureaucracy.

> Katie supposedly spilled coffee on a Stanford varsity football player who assaulted a friend of hers (he got to play out the season, and was never disciplined). Stanford knew that Katie was struggling after she was brought into Stanford’s byzantine and draconian student discipline process. On the last day, or actually the evening of the last day Katie could be disciplined, Stanford sent an email to her saying they were placing her diploma on hold three months short of graduation, and proceeding to a disciplinary hearing. Her parents claim she could have lost her student status, her membership on the soccer team, her captainship of the team and other benefits of a Stanford degree.

This really doesn't make sense. It's difficult to believe that spilling coffee on someone else resulted in a formal disciplinary action.

My take on this is that it’s a result of stupid luxury.

There’s a lot of admin positions. I’m not sure what the right amount of admin is, but seems stanford has too many doing too little and too much. I didn’t go to Stanford, I went to way lower rated schools but it seemed to me that my interactions with admin were all unpleasant and funny in a Brazil-style way. And whole I would like them to be better, I never thought that more people would solve the problems.

Stanford admin staff has doubled in the past 40 years [0] and they have more admin staff than teachers. Students did not double during this period.

I think admin staff are more insidious than just driving up costs (although that’s important). I think it’s an issue of giving smart people good pay and bullshit work. Perhaps with good intention they want to be constructive but choose bikeshedding topics and really drill down to do something to stay busy. I can only imagine the amount of work that went into the decision to cut sports teams and which ones, dozens of committees and papers and consultants over something completely stupid that shouldn’t even be worth a single agenda item.

I remember an analysis after 9/11 that partially blamed the attacks on Middle East countries shift of cutting all the busy work for graduates so smart people got masters degrees and had nothing to do. [1] So the boredom ended up leading to more terrorism.

Obviously, high tuition and kangaroo court pogroms on privileged kids is better than blowing stuff up. But perhaps the solution is to not have make work positions and release people to create real things.

I think a possible solution is for alumni to stop donating and state reasons. But that might result in just hiring more admin staff to promote more donations. (I know a contact who works as one of 5 admin staff in a 4th tier subregional university that works on alumni promotions and is justified by a 1.2x return on salary based on the increased donations. So, for example, their cost is $500k per year and they produce a newsletters and a ton of spam and bring in $600k so it’s good right?)

I think a Stanford degree is still very valuable and I would spend more time reading a job application with a Stanford degree, but what’s the tipping point?

[0] https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-administrative-bloat-is... [1] https://slate.com/technology/2009/12/why-do-so-many-terroris... “ Gambetta and Hertog propose that a lack of appropriate jobs in their home countries may have radicalized some engineers in Arab countries. The graduates they studied came of age at a time when a degree from a competitive technical program was supposed to provide a guarantee of high-status employment. But the promises of modernization and development were often stymied by repression and corruption, and many young engineers in the 1980s were left jobless and frustrated. One exception was Saudi Arabia, where engineers had little trouble finding work in an ever-expanding economy. As it happens, Saudi Arabia is also the only Arab state where the study found that engineers are not disproportionately represented in the radical movement.”

American universities have become extravagant nurseries for overgrown babies, both the students and the staff. Some ancient professors (ie: pre 2013) are probably still ok, but otherwise the whole thing has become nothing but a bunch of crybabies and whiners pointing at each other and screeching.

University used to be a signal; get in, graduate, and maybe you've got something more to you than the average person. Now, it's an anti-signal: if you actually jumped through the hoops to get in, and went into debt to indoctrinate yourself, not to mention actively harm your ability to function in the real world, then sane employers are going to forgo you.

Stanford's history is a little shocking. Founder Amasa Leland Stanford, a robber baron, the 8th Governor of California and subsequent US Senator, died of heart failure, but had locomotor ataxia, a symptom of tabes dorsalis, which is a late consequence of neurosyphilis. His wife, cofounder Jane Sanford, died of strychnine poisoning, murdered by... we're really not sure, but my money's on her late husband's syphilic lover.

Although this is a letter to the editor rather than an op-ed, I seem to recall Stanford's newspaper inadvertently publishing an AI-generated op-ed submission at one point. The problem is likely to get worse.

Stanfraud is the new nickname.

Stanford doesn't need competent admin - in fact, that would detract from the organization's hidden imperatives. While Stanford is nominally a university, it is also a high-class university. This is the school all of America's rich elites send their kids to, because they remember it being the best school to go to when they were kids. And those rich elites are perfectly willing to shower money on a school that does not deserve it in exchange for stupid vanity and ego projects.

To be clear: every university has at least one stupidly rich alumni that bought a vanity building[0]. The thing that makes Stanford unique is that they have an outsize number of stupidly rich alumni, all of whom send their kids there. And this means that everyone else who wants to "network" with these stupidly rich kids needs to go to Stanford. So Stanford admin isn't actually selling an education, they're selling access.

What this does to the actually educational part of the school is sort of what oil does to a fledgling democracy. All organizations are colony organisms that must continue bringing in resources to keep individual cells aligned with the colony. Smart leaders know this and will intentionally diversify their income to reduce business risk. On the other hand, if you don't diversify income - or one particular source of income grows so much it dwarfs everything else - then the organization's interests can no longer persist. They must be set aside to serve the interest of maintaining and exploiting that income. The tail wags the dog.

Who's running Stanford? Whoever's needed to get and keep rich kids on campus so they have access to sell in order to justify their high tuition costs. Remember, education has diminishing returns: a $100,000 degree does not get you 10x as much knowledge as a $10,000 one, and people signing up for schools will figure this out. So everything else is an afterthought - including the actual classes, testing, and certifications that people are ostensibly paying for. Because you aren't going to Stanford purely because the classes are that good.

International students are another source of unusually lucrative revenue. China has loads of middle-class students that go to western universities if they can't pass the extremely strict Gaokao test that you need in order to get into a Chinese uni. American colleges manipulated college rankings to increase their share of foreign students. This is great, until China suddenly can't send kids overseas anymore, and then colleges see revenues fall off a cliff.

Athletic departments themselves have done this to other schools that aren't in the Ivy League. The NCAA was set up with a bunch of very odd rules ostensibly established to prevent professionalization of college sports, but in practice they just perpetuate the exploitation of athletes that are pros in all but name. Any college with a half-decent team can command a lucrative sports fandom, so the NCAA became a billion dollar franchise anyway. As a result, more and more of the budget of an educational institution is dedicated to running a sports team consisting of unpaid pro athletes whose courseload is a bunch of fake Swahili courses[1].

When colleges are treated as businesses, the only people who matter are the administrators that can find new ways to increase revenue. Everything else is an afterthought.

[0] From my personal experience: SUNY Stony Brook has the Charles B. Wang Center, an extremely expensive, over-budget building whose primary utilization is housing an Asian fusion restaurant. The actual conference rooms there were rarely used for classes. Hell, back when I-CON was still on campus, they didn't even use that building.

(If something has somehow changed about the Wang Center since the decade and change I went to that school, let me know.)

[1] I did not make this up. https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/unc-investig...

> I was then saddened to read about Stanford soccer player Katie Meyer, who had committed suicide last March after a badly botched disciplinary action

No need to continue reading.