> 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.
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?
A similar aspect is the replacement of American with US Citizen. This would exclude American Samoans who are non-citizen nationals of the United States.
This is a fair point. But there's no adjective (in English) for a person or thing that is from the United States. In Spanish they use the word estadounidense for this, but I can't think of an easily pronounceable analog in English. It would be handy to have!
Most of the online dictionaries I checked showed that "Yankee" is a derogatory or possibly offensive word, including in British English. This is not a purely domestic (US-based) connotation.
> Most of the online dictionaries I checked showed that "Yankee" is a derogatory or possibly offensive word, including in British English. This is not a purely domestic (US-based) connotation.
I believe Yankee originated in the Revolutionary War era as a kind of slur used by the British against Americans, but then was reappropriated.
Because it was just some clueless people in the IT department. Stanford doesn't have "language experts" on call to vet every bad idea from every department, nor would it be reasonable to expect them to. Hard to believe people are still getting bent out of shape about this.
> Because it was just some clueless people in the IT department.
It speaks to a surprising lack of basic policy-making competence.
> Stanford doesn't have "language experts" on call to vet every bad idea from every department, nor would it be reasonable to expect them to.
I'm sure they have tenured English professors on campus. Apparently no one had the sense to walk across campus and run this by one.
And even if it was impossible to vet this language policy with a "language experts," due to the lack of a some pre-existing bureaucratized process to do so, that doesn't excuse the fact that they apparently failed to use a dictionary and some common sense.
> Hard to believe people are still getting bent out of shape about this.
I'm not "bent out of shape," I'm laughing at their amusing display of incompetence.
> It speaks to a surprising lack of basic policy-making competence.
Yes, a random subcommittee in the IT department does not have basic policy making competence. Okay, that's the story.
> I'm sure they have tenured English professors on campus. Apparently no one had the sense to walk across campus and run this by one.
Stanford-level English professors are not there to be copy editors for the IT department. Linguistics experts and English professors are there to be experts. Do we expect all departments to run their web pages past the CS professors for bugs?
> that doesn't excuse the fact that they apparently failed to use a dictionary and some common sense.
Sure, but that doesn't explain why anyone is still mad or surprised about it today, months later, when the whole issue has been explained and has been diffused.
> I'm not "bent out of shape," I'm laughing at their amusing incompetence.
>> It speaks to a surprising lack of basic policy-making competence.
> Yes, a random subcommittee in the IT department does not have basic policy making competence. Okay, that's the story.
I'm kind of surprised by your defensiveness about this. Pretty much all detailed policy is made by a "random subcommittee in the X department." They have to be competent or your whole organization looks stupid and may get justifiably mocked. If they're incompetent, the higher ups aren't doing a adequate job of monitoring them or are assigning them inappropriate tasks.
> Stanford-level English professors are not there to be copy editors for the IT department. Linguistics experts and English professors are there to be experts. Do we expect all departments to run their web pages past the CS professors for bugs?
I'd expect if someone stops by your office with a problem, you'd give them at least a few minutes of your time to help.
> I'm kind of surprised by your defensiveness about this.
I'm not defending anything (I called them clueless!), I was stating the actual scope of what we're talking about. It's true that subcommittees compose the whole organization, but at the same time, what happened was that the whole organization was judged as if it were the small subcommittee. The rush to condemn Stanford as a whole is what I'm critiquing.
> I'd expect if someone stops by your office with a problem, you'd give them at least a few minutes of your time to help.
And when your day ends up filled with spell checking documents when you have a Ph.D. in English, maybe you might rethink that open door policy.
> I'm not defending anything (I called them clueless!), I was stating the actual scope of what we're talking about. It's true that subcommittees compose the whole organization, but at the same time, what happened was that the whole organization was judged as if it were the small subcommittee.
You kinda are. You seem to be trying to shift blame to a scapegoat, which is a pretty common defense tactic. If you shoot someone, you can't claim you're innocent because it was only your finger that pulled the trigger. Obviously things are a little blurrier with organizations, but certainly not totally disconnected.
>> I'd expect if someone stops by your office with a problem, you'd give them at least a few minutes of your time to help.
> And when your day ends up filled with spell checking documents when you have a Ph.D. in English, maybe you might rethink that open door policy.
That's an obvious mischaracterization of what they would have been asked to do, or what would have happened. People are usually pretty respectful of other people's time, especially in these kinds of situations.
If an IT department of a major organization has both the time and motivation to
construct and publicize such a document, that speaks volumes of the incentive structure and cooperate priorities of their organization. The fact that they released such document in the public domain without first running it from the PR department speaks volumes to their incompetence.
This was not some random internal IT document. This was an official, public Stanford policy, advertised as part of a specific PR strategy.
If you saw a chart of Stanford administrative overhead growth, you would be aghast.
All these useless busybody administrators sucking down $100k+/yr compete for visibility in order to grow their compensation and hire yet even more of their dipshit buddies.
They are a cancer.
Learning, teaching, and researching are entirely beside the point. Demonstrate moral superiority and hire your friends if you want to stick around.
This insular, spiraling, incenstuous dynamic produces artifacts that are tremendously embarrassing and discrediting when exposed to the outside world.
> This was not some random internal IT document. This was an official, public Stanford policy, advertised as part of a specific PR strategy.
You're just projecting that you don't really understand how universities are organized. Universities are towns more than corporations, and we share a lot of things in public because we are very open. Unlike corporations which use a veil of secrecy to hide their operations, universities operate more freely. This is a good thing.
That is of course until the public and provocateurs come in and start misrepresenting things, as was the case here. It was a policy proposed by a subcommittee of a department, and the document described itself as aspirational and a guideline. Was it a good idea? No. But it was misrepresented by outsiders as "official, public Stanford policy, advertised as part of a specific PR strategy." This is a flat mischaracterization of what that document was. It's a mischaracterization of the literal words on the document explaining what it was.
You may say that its nature on the Internet made it a defacto public PR strategy, but again that shows ignorance of how University PR works (lol, what's a "PR department"? That's corporate speak), but the subsequent hiding of the document behind the Stanford network should make clear it was never for you in the first place. The fact that you're still mischaracterizing the document today tells me you are intentionally pushing misinformation. I'm not sure why, but don't you think you should stop?
> speaks volumes to their incompetence.
Okay, and what was the fallout really? A bunch of conservatives and right wingers had a field day complaining about wokeness gone wild. And? Stanford continues to be a world-class institution producing cutting-edge research. The world continues turning. Stanford enrollment continues to grow.
> You kinda are. You seem to be trying to shift blame to a scapegoat, which is a pretty common defense tactic.
Placing the blame on the literal people who caused the problem instead of generalizing it to people who didn't cause the problem is the opposite of scapegoating. I can't think of the right term for what you're doing: taking something a small part of the whole did and using it to push an agenda against the larger organization.
Because what you're doing here definitely smells of agenda pushing, especially because you seem to have no relationship whatsoever to the Stanford community, yet you seem to have very strong opinions about what they should be doing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm getting from your posts is that you're from the outside looking in, and what you see inside makes you really mad (or I guess, amused?), but otherwise you have no real relationship to Sandford or academia whatsoever, is that true?
> That's an obvious mischaracterization of what they would have been asked to do, or what would have happened.
Not sure how one can mischaracterize a counterfactual. You imagine it would go one way, and I use my experience to note I think it would have gone another way. As a professor who didn't get to eat lunch until 4:00 yesterday because people were in my office until that time asking for random help, I can easily see how an English professor would not have time to do a grammar and spell checks for for the whole campus.
It seems you have very limited experience on college campuses and in academia in general, so maybe you could just admit that you opinion is based in ignorance instead of saying people are mischaracterizing the situation. What real experience do you have on the slack capacity of professors to manage the technical output of various campus departments? It's okay if the answer is "none" but we should just be clear about that.
> Because what you're doing here definitely smells of agenda pushing, especially because you seem to have no relationship whatsoever to the Stanford community, yet you seem to have very strong opinions about what they should be doing.
Yeah, I thought that list was really stupid (to the point of being amusing), and that's where it would have ended if you hadn't rushed in with the vigorous agenda pushing, defensiveness, projection, etc. I also get the impression you're probably also conflating me other others.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm getting from your posts is that you're from the outside looking in, and what you see inside makes you really mad (or I guess, amused?), but otherwise you have no real relationship to Sandford or academia whatsoever, is that true?
I'm a literal dog on the internet.
Honestly, you seem to be the one who's "really mad." It feels a lot like a police apologist who insists it must be "just a few bad apples," and everyone must also understand it that way as well.
> As a professor who didn't get to eat lunch until 4:00 yesterday because people were in my office until that time asking for random help...
So, in other words, based on your example, there's a decent chance they'd be open to help, at least a little.
> I can easily see how an English professor would not have time to do a grammar and spell checks for for the whole campus.
That's a weird bit of black and white thinking, and seems to be based on the assumption that one must be totally closed to outside requests for help or open to helping literally anyone with any trivial thing.
> Honestly, you seem to be the one who's "really mad."
Yes, if you haven't noticed, other people on this thread are saying dehumanizing things like "administrators are a cancer" and "PhD is little more than a UBI program for people unable to integrate into the workforce" and "American universities have become extravagant nurseries for overgrown babies".
I mean, talk about projection. But if people were saying this about you and yours, I think you'd be a little mad too. Do you casually describe people as cancer? When you think of an "administrator", does that person have a blurry face, or does that person have the face of someone you know and love?
I'm not going to say that everything is perfect here, but this kind of vitriol feels qualitatively different, and I'm sorry you can't see that, but you're also not the target of these kinds of attacks. We can all express our opinions here without calling the other side cancer or a child. What's said here is kind of mild (unless you browse with show dead), but go read the comments about "Stanford" and other Universities on different outlets, and people are calling for the death of college administrators and professors. Even students.
Like... that's the level of discourse in this thread, and that's not my doing. I didn't cause those people to say those things. That's just the level of discourse that the word "Stanford" attracts on HN. I wonder why? You think I'm the one pushing an agenda? Look around, the agenda is being pushed by a lot of people, and I'm not one of them. But insofar as you think I am, what agenda is that? That Universities are good things and are helpful in society? That we shouldn't use the actions of a few to cast blame on the many? What exactly am I saying here that's objectionable?
> I also get the impression you're probably also conflating me other others.
I think I've responded to you directly to your points in this thread. If I've mistaken a point someone else made for one you made, please point that out and I'll reformulate my response with apologies.
> So, in other words, based on your example, there's a decent chance they'd be open to help, at least a little.
Yes, a far cry from where we started, which was that subcommittees should have their work approved by linguistics experts before publication, which is unreasonable. The much more reasonable stance is that subcommittees could leverage expertise available on campus from time to time, but we shouldn't have the expectation that linguistics experts should be on call to vet these kinds of things, and that they don't should rise to the level of incompetence. Because literally no one is held to that standard.
> That's a weird bit of black and white thinking, and seems to be based on the assumption that one must be totally closed to outside requests for help or open to helping literally anyone with any trivial thing.
No, it's thinking from the experience that 100% of the day is filled with other work. So it's not that one must be totally close to outside requests, it's that one does not have the bandwidth to open up for even trivial things outside of one's job description. Any work beyond that is in the "favor" realm of collegiality. It's not within the expected duties of tenured English professors to vet university comms, just like it's not within the expected duties of the business college to help with university accounting, just like it's not my job as a CS professor to even handle the IT in my own department, let alone the college or university.
Although the amusing thing to me here if we are to take your proposal seriously, then the correct course of action would be to create a department tasked with specifically being experts through which communications would be filtered. This department would require administrators, and I'm sure you know what the people here would say about this department.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. If your comms are unprofessional, then you're an incompetent university. If you have a process for vetting comms so that they're professional, then you're bloated with administrators, therefore you're an incompetent university.
By unprofessional, I think you mean laughably absurd... let's be honest here. I agree with your point that it wasn't an official university opinion. But it is troubling how no one in a department had the common sense and courage to call this out before it was released.
> Do you casually describe people as cancer? When you think of an "administrator", does that person have a blurry face, or does that person have the face of someone you know and love?
> I'm not going to say that everything is perfect here, but this kind of vitriol feels qualitatively different, and I'm sorry you can't see that, but you're also not the target of these kinds of attacks.
I do not describe people as "cancer."
As an aside, there seem to be some interesting parallels to the dynamic of police critics/police apologists here.
>> I also get the impression you're probably also conflating me other others.
> I think I've responded to you directly to your points in this thread. If I've mistaken a point someone else made for one you made, please point that out and I'll reformulate my response with apologies....
You repeatedly characterized me as angry about this ("bent out of shame", "mad"), even after I corrected you. The whole first part of your recent comment kinda confirms to me that you are probably at least partially responding to me as a stereotype of "university critics" that you've created.
>> So, in other words, based on your example, there's a decent chance they'd be open to help, at least a little.
> Yes, a far cry from where we started, which was that subcommittees should have their work approved by linguistics experts before publication, which is unreasonable.
That's not where "we" started, that's where you started. I think you were always projecting a more formalized, rigid, bureaucratized process onto what I said than I ever imagined.
> The much more reasonable stance is that subcommittees could leverage expertise available on campus from time to time, but we shouldn't have the expectation that linguistics experts should be on call to vet these kinds of things, and that they don't should rise to the level of incompetence. Because literally no one is held to that standard.
I think the reasonable stance is that you shouldn't be creating language policies like the one I quoted if you lack access to the competence to do so. It rises to the level of incompetence if you don't double-check using widely-available reference material and a little common sense and you fail consult experts who could catch your mistakes.
Organizationally, someone in an oversight capacity should have been paying attention to catch the problems. Which were glaring, since I, a dog on the internet, found one in about 30 seconds.
> Although the amusing thing to me here if we are to take your proposal seriously, then the correct course of action would be to create a department tasked with specifically being experts through which communications would be filtered. This department would require administrators, and I'm sure you know what the people here would say about this department.
Doesn't Standford have an organizational communications department? One would think they'd have some competence in crafting communications policy that the IT department may lack. Alternatively, if administrative overhead is a concern, a totally valid course of action is to play it safe and either avoid creating such policies in the first place or creating ones that are don't stray from areas were there isn't an clear consensus.
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.)
> I wouldn't be surprised if hiring decisions and admissions are also guided or influenced by such new ideological policing.
They are. If this is what they do openly, just imagine how severe the tacit, unofficial discrimination is, that they don't (yet) dare write down as official policy:
Berkeley Weeded Out Job Applicants Who Didn't Propose Specific Plans To Advance Diversity [..] In one example, of a pool of 894 candidates was narrowed down to 214 based solely on how convincing their plans to spread diversity were. - https://reason.com/2020/02/03/university-of-california-diver...
>Administration has also been the motor by which, shall we say, the "new ideological norms" have been imposed on universities
In his book The Coddling of the American Mind Jonathan Haidt covers some of this in-depth. He speaks about the growth of administrators and their general CYA approach, which seems evidenced in the article, among other causes. But where he draws an important distinction from your conclusion is that he claims these universities are reacting to changes in the student culture and administrators aren't the root cause themselves.
He goes on to describe how, because colleges are now run as businesses, they must conform to their customers (students) preferences. Beyond the obvious extravagance of new facilities, this also extends towards cultural policies. Some of that leads to an overly protective safety culture (e.g., expecting third parties to intervene to solve issues) which, in turn, creates the need for more administrators. What's interesting in his book is that he lays the case that this is even more prevalent in prestigious universities because the overly protective safety culture is more prevalent in upper-middle and upper class American culture, which is over-represented in these institutions.
My guess is that people couldn't forecast this particular result, except in hindsight.
I'm sure if you ask most college deans "Would you prefer more money for your department?" the answer is always going to be "yes". So it starts as a one small decision to get more money and that decision leads to another, and another...It's a slow mission creep that can eventually morph the entire culture to one that is ROI focused.
I'll give one example from experience. One college used to have a "veterans coordinator" that was really just an ancillary duty assigned to an employee. Just one of those side duties that every has as part of their job. When the new GI Bill was passed, the administration realized how many more veterans may be available for college. They decided to hire a position to focus solely on that program. I mean, who is going to be against the idea of helping veterans transition from service back to civilian life via education, right? Once they saw how much money was involved, they could justify even more hires. Now there are whole teams that only focus on veterans on campus. On one hand, it's a great service to provide a specific population. On the other, it's administrative bloat predicated on an ROI calculation.
It's not a good thing, but what else do you expect in a capitalist system? The whole system is tilted toward the "business" construct that even human beings are forced to incorporate in order to remain competitive. What chance do Universities have?
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.
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.
> The whole point of a humanities 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.
Lets be honest here, some degrees show proficiency in some field. Other degrees, which are far more popular, show that you showed up on time, four years in a row.
The value an EE graduate or an MD graduate has is not the same as the value of someone who could have coasted through university with minimal effort.
I think for non-work-qualifying degrees, it's marginal. Obviously a doctor who is on the wards during his training needs that training. Or a lawyer who needs to pass exams to even call himself that.
I did an engineering degree. What am I competent at, that I actually learned at university? I don't think there's really anything. The whole thing was just a bunch of different introductions to various topics. Could I work in cryptography? Well, I did a course on RSA and that kind of thing, but I'm fairly sure I couldn't just do a job like that. Could I build electronics? Most of my higher level courses were EE courses, and I built a working radio in the first year, but I couldn't just walk into an EE job either. What about civil? I learned a few things about structures but it's not like I could just design a building.
They're all just things that show that you're capable of learning stuff in some area, and you have some degree of interest. But none of them confers competence.
This is what I call the miracle of graduation. People think that somehow you learned the things you need for a job in college. But logically it's impossible. When you're on your first job, you're learning that job 40-80 hours a week, and you're interacting with professionals in the field, learning valuable meta-competencies. At uni you split your 40 hours among dozens of topics and you're taking an academic view, not a professional one. Many of your hours are also spent learning how to pass exams, rather than anything useful.
> I think for non-work-qualifying degrees, it's marginal. Obviously a doctor who is on the wards during his training needs that training. Or a lawyer who needs to pass exams to even call himself that.
My point is not that a degree makes you work-ready.
It's that "it shows you can shop up, on time and perform reasonably" is too incorrect to be a useful argument. All degrees shows that, but some only show that while others show that the graduate in that specific degree will perform better than others (or graduates of other degrees).
It's a popular idea that a degree only shows commitment, but it's a wrong idea. Only humanities degrees show just commitment. Financial, Medical, Engineering and Law degrees show commitment as well as indicate a level of willingness to engage with more difficult problems.
I have a MSEE and PhD (EE) (from Stanford to boot !) and I'm not sure if I learned anything value creating in my school years. At least at the graduate level, I think a lot depends on your choices of courses. I biased toward Electromagnetism, and learned solution of PDEs. It taught me computational PDEs and building intuition for physical modeling of real world. It is certainly helping me in my "corporate" job. Yet I don't have a good answer when my dad asks 'what value are you creating'. My dad is also an EE and he has salt-of-the-earth understanding of systems, motors, 3-phase home wiring etc etc. He can fix those things in a crunch. I cant. Did Stanford teach me anything useful? I honestly don't know.
I think everyone agrees that the skillset will differ depending on the degree and the university. The point was that within the area of your degree, university also signals conformity.
Also true of someone who graduated from law. (It is interesting to note that all three - law, medicine, and architecture - have licensing requirements involving an imposing exam separate to the degree.)
My point is not to agree completely with Stallone’s quote, but rather to use it to represent the commonly-held belief that, while the stated value of a college degree is the information learned, the real value is proof of work ethic. I introduced that belief so that I could put forward my contention, that a third value of college degrees is emerging: proficiency at navigating modern DEI bureaucracy.
And to be clear, I believe it’s a valuable proficiency to have! For many companies, hiring a closet racist is undoubtedly more dangerous than hiring a lazy oaf.
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.
Part of the problem may be that professors have been more willing to hand over the reins of running the university to administrators in recent decades. On the surface, it may seem a good deal for the professors: they get to spend more time on researching the problems they are interested in. But the downside is they have ceded control to the "faceless bureaucracy" who care less about the traditional aims of a university (research, education) and more about the institution itself.
People complaining about university bureaucracies is as old as the whole notion of universities. Neal Stephenson's first novel, the Big-U, is essentially about that. Not his finest work but entertaining. It's set at a fictional college near Boston. But it seems interchangeable with just about any university. Money, power, corruption, bureaucracy, etc. are all themes in that novel.
The thing is, universities are places that combine a large number of people that go there, large budgets, and wide varieties of weird things that need funding, attention, etc. with lots of groups of people favoring one thing over the other and quite a bit of alumni, politicians, and other people in power obsessing over how it is all administered. So, a certain level of bureaucracy and politics are pretty much a given. As are disagreements over how this is administered. And any such organization that exists for a while inevitably develops some Kafka-esque bureaucracies. It would be anomalous if that wasn't the case. Literally almost every university on this planet has this issue. Some might regard this as a feature and not a bug. Learning to thrive in such a place helps prepare people for the real world a bit.
Obviously some universities do better than others. But overall, it seems Stanford is still doing fine in producing some world class research, maintaining good academic standards, and generally attracting new generations of students that are willing to pay up the stupendously large tuition fees. I don't see what the big deal here is other than some immature people being immature, which if you think about it is the whole point of a university.
> 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.
For me, it’s not just that. It’s that they chose to investigate spilled coffee (which is assault although the police weren’t involved so makes me think it didn’t warrant their assault label) reported not by the student but by a third party who claimed to witness it, but did not investigate the sexual assault charges against the coffee spillee.
So Stanford is selectively investigating seemingly spurious charges against weak people rather than more serious charges against powerful people.
So it’s a pretty cruel systemic bullying. And seems to reinforce my perception (perhaps wrong) that it’s a bullshit system that just wants to stay active and not actually do anything.
"the University reported this allegation to the Title IX Office and the police, but the Title IX Office did not pursue the matter as “the criteria for moving forward with an investigation were not met.”"
To be generous, they investigated it and found insufficient evidence. To a cynic, they superficially "investigated" it.
This is a good clarification. To be more accurate, I should have said that they chose to spend significant resources investigating the coffee and did not spend resources investigating the sexual assault. In that the accusation of sexual assault didn’t result in any emails and potential degree withdrawals.
Imagine if they had just referred the “assault” accusation to the police. I expect the student would not have killed herself.
This is a curious statement and you’ve made it twice. Did you read the article that describes how the university acted toward one student and not another.
Do you think they spent equal or similar resources on the two events? What do you think I’m making up?
I'm guessing here, but I think there issue may be:
>"Imagine if they had just referred the “assault” accusation to the police."
But the previous comment (and mentioned link) says:
>"the University reported this allegation to the Title IX Office and the police"
I.e., they did refer it to both the school administration and the police. It was apparently not found to be worth pursuing. For more context:
"Mostofi also addressed the allegation that a football player sexually assaulted another player on the women’s soccer team. Mostofi wrote that the University reported this allegation to the Title IX Office and the police, but the Title IX Office did not pursue the matter as “the criteria for moving forward with an investigation were not met.”[1]
To be generous to the OP, they may be wondering why you are implying they should continue to spend resources on something they already investigated and found without merit. We shouldn't be investigating as part of a dog-and-pony show.
In the universe where I live, a Uni will most likely throw the accused under a bus, won't respect his rights and will even withhold or disregard exonerating evidence.
Ah, an unwanted kiss. I think, in the real world, spilling some (warmish) coffee on someone is a reasonable retaliation for an unwanted kiss. Once it enters the bureaucracy then they get called assault and require disciplinary action.
"The university defended its response to the alleged sexual assault on Meyer’s teammate — described as an unwanted kiss — by saying the incident was reported to its Title IX office, which decided against moving forward with an investigation, and local police."
How does the university have authority to decide to go to the police or not? I'm always confused when people report crimes against them to a church, school, or some other organization and then the organization decides not to engage the police or legal. The victim is just suppose to shrug and say "oh well, i guess i'm just out of luck!".
The victim should go straight to the police and report a crime was committed against them. At least leave it up to actual investigators to make a decision if a crime was committed or not and not some third party with motive to sweep it under the rug.
>The victim should go straight to the police and report a crime was committed against them. At least leave it up to actual investigators to make a decision if a crime was committed or not and not some third party with motive to sweep it under the rug.
You might as well be telling a victim to send their case to /dev/null. We have all of these awful systems as band-aids on the real problem - that of police being completely non-functional in their current state.
I made another comment about this elsewhere, but this fact is interesting in the context where Jonathan Haidt’s perspective on the changes on college campuses. His idea is that it’s an outgrowth of an overly concerned culture of safety that trains kids to think of themselves as fragile. An extension of this is that they expect relatively small differences to be mediated by third parties rather than learning to resolve it themselves.
It should go without saying that this is a superficial connection on my part without knowing all the details of the encounter.
That is certainly part of it. Consider another angle...once a structure like that comes into existence, people will weaponize it. Any slight can be reported to campus authorities and the perpetrator gets to deal with months of severely worded paperwork.
If the coffee is hot, I would argue it is worse than beating or slapping. So I'm not so surprised. On the other hand the consequences should in any case be limited since people can do some physical harm in a fit of rage.
Getting burned by a hot liquid like coffee can lead to severe injury. But don't underestimate the danger of getting beat to the head. It's very common in popular media, but very dangerous in real life.
Okay, so maybe this was an overreaction then? But also an investigation might be opened due to a slight slap and be also an overreaction. I find it difficult to blame the university for a suicide that happened before an investigation was even concluded. It sounds to me like blaming a court of law before a ruling has been made.
>> 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).
> This really doesn't make sense. It's difficult to believe that spilling coffee on someone else resulted in a formal disciplinary action.
Maybe "spill" was the wrong word. I don't know anything about the events in question, but the context raises the likelihood that what she actually did was deliberately dump or splash coffee on the guy.
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.”
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
I like this and have unconsciously used this when designing governance processes. I try to design so that people who like governing and code review are avoided and people who hate it, are competent, and view it as a duty are favored. So always to avoid “professional governancers,” especially when people try to hire contractors to perform review as their incentive is to just burn time. I haven’t encountered a good simple metric.
If I were designing a university (and I never would), I’d make admin a chore that professors are forced to do in addition to the real work. I’d make it some sort of only senior people can do it so there’s some prestige but is not fun. That way competent people are doing it, but they do it as busywork on top of their “real” work. There are some downsides to that and I think such a system is not stable as, naturally, smart people would get out of it [0] and eventually they would hire professional admins and everyone would avoid.
[0] I read a story a few years ago how Feynman hated administration, https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard-Feynman-think-of-acad..., so I got the idea to take on a very high profile admin task and ruin it so thoroughly and famously that my “brand” would be tagged with “never let prepend do administration and manage projects as ve will mess them up.”
30 more years until I know if it works. Fingers crossed.
When my kids started Elementary school we had a Principal, a superintendent, and teachers, The superintendent both retired and we now have a Principal, a superintendent, a vice-principal, and a few specialized directors. This happened over 10 years right before my eyes. The new Principal claimed the job was just too big. We are small town with fewer than 600 students. I feel like such a grumpy old man doubting these peoples work effort. I think people that do poor jobs hire more people to create more confusion. I'm not proud of my cynicism.
I have a simile experience. I live in an affluent suburb and I moved here for the school. There’s 5 vice principals and all sorts of others. Of course there are 30 students per classroom.
Also, sadly, the vice principals make more than teachers so there’s a perverse incentive for people who need more money to move from teaching to administration.
I had a surreal meeting that the school scheduled for me when my child’s kindergarten teacher wanted to tell me my child had autism. It was the principal, the kindergarten vice principal, a backup vp, the special needs assessor (not the special needs teacher there was someone whose permanent job for the school was to identify kids with special needs), the teacher, and a county observer. So six school staff and me and my spouse.
It seemed like a big deal when we got there. They said that my child had autism and should be moved into special classes. I asked what made them think that and the kindergarten teacher presented her “evidence” that my child got upset once because the room was too noisy and poor performance in class.
I asked what else made them think that and they didn’t have anything else. There was no medical training out of the six people. It was so surreal. My kid had been screened many times and no one said anything so I said I would talk with the pediatrician.
Pediatrician laughed and said they were crazy and wrote a letter saying bo autism.
The school ignored the letter and tried to move them into the class despite my disagreement.
Comically, they had forgotten to file some form weeks earlier and when I showed the county procedure the county observer forced them to “follow the documented procedure” and so the process stopped, my kid stayed in regular class. And, weirdly, they never filed the forms for stage 1 of the multi stage process and I never heard about it. (10 years later, still no autism).
I never got closer as to what was going on and I fear their attention to pivoted to some other, less fortunate child.
All that labor, my cynical self says the more administrators the more things need to be found to administrate.
So glad to be out of the public school system. I always supported public schools. If I was starting out today I would break my back to keep my kids out of the system.
I hear you and I have experienced the same thing at the local schools. But I will say that my wife is a teacher and there are many more kids with serious needs today than I believe there were when she and I went to school. Not a statistic I can back up, but as a grumpy old man I think about that too.
No doubt that is why I'm embarrassed by my cynicism. I was a kid that would have had also sort of interventions that would have helped me academically. Our school tries to keep class size below 15 and there is a classroom helper. All those interventions take paperwork and that could be the problem with workload. I would like to think a good school administrator could develop a good strategy so that eventually the daily paperwork creates the end reports.
Governments at multiple levels have also imposed additional compliance mandates on schools. It now takes extra work to gather the necessary data and submit official reports. But there is a lot of waste in most school districts and much of that work could be automated.
heh elementary school principals get high in the parking lot before school (at least they do in Dallas public schools). You're not dealing with the best people in public education.
The Principal that needed the vice principal was found years early having sex in a school closet with another teacher.We can only imagine why they couldn't keep up with the paperwork.
The job of administration should always be to _reduce_ the bureaucratic burden of an organization.
Think of a small firm that doesn't have a dedicated admin and/or accountant. Leadership and productive workers might constantly be dealing with admin tasks themselves, it becomes a mess quickly and no one really knows how to do these things efficiently, because it is a skill in itself. The boss often becomes a bottleneck, workers have to deal with inconsistencies and so on.
This is why an admin is hired: They are the lubricant of an organization. Make everything smoother. Say "no" at the appropriate times. Organize internal knowledge and time tables. Set up meetings etc. They are there to make everything _easier_ and smoother for the rest.
If administration becomes its own, self-perpetuating thing that invents arbitrary rules, instantiates committees and process rigidity, it becomes a complete burden. A polished turd that makes the appearance of neat organization and professionalism, but is rotten on the inside as it's spreading and encumbering everyone else.
Tangent: school “ratings” are part of the grift. Yes, there are bad schools, but you hit diminishing returns far sooner than expensive schools want you to believe.
I agree on the ratings. I struggled with a way to convey that this is not a school where you would even imagine alumni caring about. It’s the school to go to when you don’t get into the state university and don’t get into the secondary state university. Not that it’s bad, it’s just not a place that should have 5 people working on this task.
So at I thought that the ranking shows that they haven’t even gotten to the point of joining the grift of rankings. It’s rated between 400-500.
It’s hard to truly rank universities in general or even in specific subject areas and, for me, it falls into the unquantifiable reputation realm.
I grew up with Bill Gates and Paul Allen and Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs and other successful college dropouts so I always felt I wanted to look at output and production rather than credentials. But of course, I have to settle for medical boards and whatnot and the drawbacks of that as there’s no way I can or am willing to evaluate cardiologists based solely on their work. Artists and coders, sure.
I feel like your cited article [0] loses most, or all, of its heft when the author admits that 47 percent of the growth in "admin positions"---more precisely, of non-teaching employees---comes from hiring at Stanford's hospital. Doctors, nurses, and other hospital employees shouldn't be counted as part of the university's administrative bloat.
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.
We can all point to extravagances in industries we don't like, and then declare them playgrounds for overgrown babies. I remember when I was in undergrad walking past the Google offices in Pittsburgh. There was a bridge above them where you could look down into the window. I didn't really know about Google at the time, but my eyes were caught by the bean bags, foosball table, ping pong table, the giant wall of candy, and of course the bright primary colors. I think there was a finger painting station back there too, but I can't be sure.
For the longest time I had thought it was a daycare but I was confused as to why there were never any children. Turns out it was an office for Google engineers!
So it's pretty rich to hear about how Universities are nurseries from a website dedicated to the tech industry. Especially when universities are attended by 18-21 year olds who still have developing frontal lobes. The tech industry is mostly (ostensibly) grown ass men, so what's their excuse for the bean bags and candy walls?
A bit orthogonal but I very much consider academic study beyond undergraduate to be an anti-signal. Not so much at an institution like Stanford, where doing a PhD still means something; but very quickly past the sparse handful of top tier universities, a PhD is little more than a UBI program for people unable to integrate into the workforce.
> PhD is little more than a UBI program for people unable to integrate into the workforce.
People with Ph.D.s have the highest employment rate of any degree, so I'm not sure how you can hold this opinion. Maybe you're just a little biased against Ph.D.s?
It would be more accurate to compare doctoral degree attainers with other degree attainers holding IQ constant, and perhaps age as well. Everyone gets a job eventually.
Okay, but what kind of evidence/analysis did you collect before arriving at the conclusion that a "PhD is little more than a UBI program for people unable to integrate into the workforce"? Because data show they are able to integrate into the workforce just fine.
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.
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.)
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?