I spent 3 years living in one of the co-ops briefly mentioned in the article ("In 2013, the administration took over the student-run anarchist house and painted over the old murals."). I wouldn't call it an "anarchist house" but it sure as hell was a lot of fun to live there. I painted some of those murals that are now apparently gone. We built a giant illegal loft in our room to make it two stories (which we would disassemble for a day every year when the fire inspection happened). We did some stupid and illegal shit, sure. But the sense of community was unparalleled. The alumni association owned the house, so we had to deal with all the maintenance. We came back to campus a week before everyone else every year to work on the house. We cooked and cleaned for ourselves. I've never since experienced anything close to that same feeling of communal pride. It was a mess, but it was our beautiful mess.
I was in the co-ops and also a frat in the early 2010's. I knew about XOX, SAE, and KA but not theta delt or sigma chi -- let alone french house, slav, haus mitt, or casa italiana. Aside from undergrads, the school will miss out, too -- my pledge class founded thirteen companies in the few years after graduation, and I hired several friends from EBF for my own -- but the administration will probably never realize what they've done to the undergraduate culture. This is really sad news; I hope the rest of the co-ops escape -- most of the housing options are extremely uninspiring to actively anti-social and not great for mental health, as the article points out.
Hey, I lived in a very similar system at Michigan State University. It was a ton of fun and I made some of my best friends in that house. Really sad to hear that Stanford painted over the murals.
> We built a giant illegal loft in our room to make it two stories (which we would disassemble for a day every year when the fire inspection happened). We did some stupid and illegal shit, sure. But the sense of community was unparalleled.
Sounds like toxic “bro” culture.
First of all, fire safety regulations are one of those things that are written in blood so speak. Casually bypassing them is not something to be celebrated.
Second, is it any surprise that people who come out of this environment then end up creating startups which skirt regulations, sell out their users privacy, and do “stupid and illegal shit”.
In fairness, this sort of transformation has taken place in every station of American life. My dweeb chemist parents regularly hosted and attended parties with their dweeb chemist colleauges. My wife and I have hosted 3 parties in the last 17 years.
We had to fight for the modicum of freedom our kids had growing up. Our oldest now has a car but his licence forbids him taking friends along.[1]
Our youngest built his first model rocket this week, to find it's only feasible to launch with a club. The nearest club, which used to host monthly launches at Moffett field, is closed until Fall. So it'll take as long to drive to and from the launch site as to buid a rocket, and the maximum launch cadence is monthly. Not a viable hobby for a 13-year-old, unless it's your only hobby and your parents help with everything.
Churches have disintegrated, workplaces are toast. The loss of "third places" was measured by Putnam.[2] Somebody on twitter suggested companies should have sports teams, aparrently unaware it was quite common until recently.
On my first day of work in California in 2001, my boss asked me if I'd tried ecstasy yet.[3] Nowadays you must be mentally ill to take it, under a doctor's supervision. Hope you get better like us!
> Stanford students live in brand new buildings with white walls. We have a $20 million dollar meditation center that nobody uses. But students didn’t ask for any of that. We just wanted a dirty house with friends.
From my experience, covid exacerbated this significantly. I don't know if it's just the universities or a broader cultural shift. And as the article says, the administrators introduced more "community initiatives" to exonerate themselves of gleefully destroying campus life and letting it atrophy for two years straight (while making students pay in person tuition for online school)
It feels like in the past couple years we've gone from a culture of spontaneity and grassroots initiative to one of bitter obsequiousness that's obsessed with taking itself seriously. The only way to subvert it is by turning it into one big joke
edit: thanks to OP for posting this magazine, it's the first thing I've seen in a while that actually has something to say
I think what gets missed about greek life in general is that its just a group of students. It's not inherently more dangerous or not than any other group of college age students. In my experiences in undergrad, organizations like club rugby or even the marching band were where you seriously got hazed or had risky partying going on. Greek parties in contrast were regulated. Representatives from the interfraternity council would walk through and inspect that you had people staffing the party and supplies like water and food. Pledges would work as bouncers or watch out for people getting too ill. People who were misbehaving would get tossed out routinely for the parties open more to the public, and members showing poor behavior would also get removed from the fraternity entirely.
Its a much safer environment to party than at some random off campus house where there's no rules, no inspections, no one deciding not to party and be a bouncer, and therefore anyone is potentially wandering in off the street into the party. Ironic that the university would go so hard after these student orgs that actually do a good job managing things like underage drinking or keeping drug use from getting too out of hand, while turning a blind eye to the fact that most partying isn't even happening withing student orgs but just from random people throwing big parties in their off campus houses. Just goes to show they care more about optics and how easy it is for the media to write a hit piece on greek life than actually being pragmatic about safety.
It is absolutely impossible to take this article seriously, because the author refuses to acknowledge the un-fucking-believably fraught legacy that the Greek fraternity system has, at Stanford and at every other school.
> Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus
Oh, yeah, Stanford’s really afraid of “student spontaneity.”
They’re definitely not afraid of organizations that:
- ritualize physical and mental abuse
- force people to consume dangerous amounts of drugs and alcohol
- institutionalize racism, classism, and misogyny
- protect - and encourage! - sexual assaulters
Fraternities aren’t all bad. Fraternity brothers aren’t all bad. I was one, and I met some of the best friends of my life. But that also means I know just how fucking bad it gets, even now (2016-2020).
Yeah, sucks, you don't get to live in a big fun house and pull Animal House-style pranks any more. You lost your privileges after killing a fucking kid.
Sometimes it feels like we're living in the second Victorian age. Living sanitized lives and speaking sanitized language, with recurring bouts of moral panic.
Even in the early 00s when I was in college everything seemed to have become lamer than it was just a decade prior. 20th century libertinism peaked in the 70s and has been in retreat since then.
> Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting.
Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon now, but this sounds like the direction the entire country has been heading for a long time now. For each individual choice between risky joy and safe ennui we have chosen the safe option, starting with the riskiest (or at least perceived to be riskiest) behaviors and continuing on. It's hard to argue against most of these choices in isolation, but the final result seems clearly undesirable to me.
The amount of control American universities exercise over their students is mind-boggling to me. I went to Uppsala University in Sweden, which has a rich and varied student life. But none of that has anything to do with the University (any of them, there are 3 in town). The universities provide education, period. Housing is not run by the University, and it certainly has nothing to do with student social life.
What stops a bunch of Stanford students from starting whatever club they want in their spare time? Obviously it can't be on Stanford property, so maybe that's the difference, they have their students over a barrel because they can deny them access to housing which I guess is hard to find otherwise?
American universities are not at all like European universities. Think summer camp for young adults, with classes in the background. Campus life and sports are just as important as academics. European universities are much more bare-bones and focused on their core mission of education. That's mostly good, in my opinion, as university is way cheaper in Europe and students tend to be more focused on their studies, but it also means that as a student, you're much more on your own. At an American university, there are always dozens of administrators or counselors you can go talk to about any issue you have, from "How do I register for this class?" to issues in your personal life.
> What stops a bunch of Stanford students from starting whatever club they want in their spare time?
Nothing, but greek system was advantaged over random non-greek friends groups or clubs. If you start own random non-greek club, the university wont guarantee or give you house for it. For the record, Standford always had plenty of students who were not members of Greek clubs. They created and participated in own spare time activities too.
In Europe, if your spare time club rents a house, it will have street number and no one will act as if it was great injustice. Based on article, that is destruction and homogenity. In Europe, if you fill the entire floor with sand and bulldozer it away to property you dont own, through property you dont own, the house owner will object - but in article university administrators are the bad guys for objecting.
> What stops a bunch of Stanford students from starting whatever club they want in their spare time?
In my country, nothing - but if your club is willing to submit to the university authorities, they will provide some resources that will help the club survive your graduation.
For example, spaces at new-member-recruitment events when the university gets a new class of students, usage of university rooms outside of teaching hours, some storage space, maybe some money, and so on.
And because clubs for students have to completely replace their membership every 3-4 years in order to survive, that help can be the difference between a club that continues to exist and one that doesn't.
> What stops a bunch of Stanford students from starting whatever club they want in their spare time?
Technically nothing, but often times its funding. If it's a university sponsored club, the school will give you money in certain cases. Often times students rely on that money to keep the club going, depending on what they do.
I think I'm close to an outside observer - I didn't go to Stanford and don't have a dog in that fight, as the saying goes. I don't trust the conclusions of this article.
It starts with a story about a frat which filled their building's first floor with sand, so much that they had to rent a bulldozer to relocate it to the campus lake. Then they call the Stanford admins killjoys for not supporting it. But... of course Stanford wouldn't support that! That would try anyone's patience.
What kind of impact does dumping all that sand have? What about running the bulldozer over the Stanford campus? What if someone is injured by the bulldozer? I wouldn't trust teenagers renting an after-party bulldozer who never cleared that with anyone, never notified anyone, and have no proof of training.
Then, the article talks about Stanford letting the lake "go dry." I live in California and I can tell you what happened: the drought. There's a killer drought, nonessential water use is discouraged, and a manmade lake in a little-used corner of a campus is the definition of nonessential. Stanford did the right thing by not artificially pumping it up. There's no malice involved; a lake like that, in 2022, is destined to dry up.
So based on those things, I don't think I can trust the article to be taking a balanced, sensible position. My "middle of the road" position wold be that, yes, sometimes adventurous college kids can get away with something - once in a while. But over the long term, it's the institution's job to prevent one-off events from turning into ongoing disaster generators.
You might live in California and have certainly seen the drought, but the lake didn't go dry due to drought.
The lake was fed by diverting water from nearby San Francisquito Creek. The university chose to stop filling the lake for recreational use in 2001 to protect the endangered California tiger salamander as the article notes. The lake was still sometimes artificially filled to support salamander breeding, but it was not maintained to a level suitable for (most forms of) recreation (though I still saw members of KA attempt to take a raft out on 1-2ft of water during a rainy week -- I think their raft was more full of beer than the lake was of water, though my memory is hazy).
The university has since removed the dam used to divert water to Lake Lag as part of a process of habitat restoration upstream. I'm not sure how that will affect the population of salamanders that depended on that water in Lake Lag, but I believe they also breed upstream and will have more sustainable natural habitat. Also, water from Searsville Dam just upstream from this project is used to irrigate Stanford's golf course, and that is cited as a reason not to remove that dam (the other reason is that removing it would change habitats that formed from the lake it created).
The school has sometimes turned off its campus fountains during periods of drought. They shut the fountains down for 2 years while I was there. During that same time I didn't see them shut off water to the golf courses though, and that consumes substantially more water than the fountains. They did restore water in the fountains for the weeks leading up to our graduation, and I can recommend grabbing a pitcher of beer or two from the CoHo and walking it straight down to the fountain outside the bookstore for a soak, if the school still allows it.
To summarize, if we are to infer Stanford's priorities based on how it has approached the complex dynamics around Lake Lag and its (former) tributary, I believe that would look like: golf course > endangered salamander > students.
> What kind of impact does dumping all that sand have? What about running the bulldozer over the Stanford campus? What if someone is injured by the bulldozer? I wouldn't trust teenagers renting an after-party bulldozer who never cleared that with anyone, never notified anyone, and have no proof of training.
That's exactly the attitude that causes this problem - there's always a reason to say no. These are supposed to be adults, they (presumably) legally rented the bulldozer, they got the consent of the groundskeeper.
There's no possible fun so innocuous that you can't come up with one more bureaucratic requirement to slap on it if you really try. Thought experiment: if it turned out the bulldozer driver did in fact have some kind of training/license, would that change your mind? Or would you just look for another reason to say this was bad?
> What kind of impact does dumping all that sand have?
The sand gets wet and sits in the water. It's sand, i.e. dirt. In case you weren't aware, there's already dirt at the bottom of all lakes.
> What about running the bulldozer over the Stanford campus?
The ground would get slightly compacted and maybe some grass torn up. That's why they got clearance from the person responsible for that, the groundskeeper.
> What if someone is injured by the bulldozer?
They will learn an important lesson about bulldozer safety.
> I wouldn't trust teenagers renting an after-party bulldozer who never cleared that with anyone, never notified anyone, and have no proof of training.
If you ever find yourself running a bulldozer rental place, you're free to not rent to them.
> What if someone is injured by the bulldozer? I wouldn't trust teenagers renting an after-party bulldozer who never cleared that with anyone, never notified anyone, and have no proof of training.
You, sir, would have an absolute conniption if you knew half the stuff we got up to in the airborne…
My interactions with Stanford administrators convinced me that I didn't need a graduate degree and that I would never donate to the school.
Beyond that, I also got totally fed up trying to figure out how to get definitive positive permission to do anything. At one point I asked facilities if I could build an oven to cure composites. They reviewed and approved the plans. But when some other group within the school saw the result, they flipped out and hired a consultant to trump up false hazards. I was only clued in because a sympathetic dean leaked an email to me. I invited the fire marshal out to take a look, and I got a thumbs up to operate.
I eventually moved the oven to rented space elsewhere since I was told I couldn't keep the thing on campus. I was then told my student group would be dissolved if we used off-campus facilities. We agreed that if I brought it back that my group could use it for its intended purpose for a year and then find another solution next year.
I found a crew demolishing it at 4 AM the following morning. A deal's a deal, I guess. We went back to heating our composites with propane heaters aimed into a collapsible wood-and-plastic box, rather than our electrically heated concrete and flame-resistant foam box. The propane solution has been used every year since.
There are hundreds of stories like this out of Caltech as well. Ultimately it makes one believe the saying that it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission, and that getting things done relies on this.
And we're told the reason China is rocketing ahead is because of IP theft.
Meanwhile, we can't train competent engineers, technicians, and tradesmen, in the West, because everyone is too caught up in this type of gatekeeping and pigheadedness.
> I eventually moved the oven to rented space elsewhere since I was told I couldn't keep the thing on campus
I can understand this. The US has a very litigious society. If someone gets sick from being exposed to something that can even be loosely associated with your oven, the school will have to spend a lot of money defending itself.
My last university is in the throes of getting rid of Greek Life. First it was crackdowns on dangerous hazing behavior, but you know how the slippery slope goes: next was alcohol, then just vague accusations. Meanwhile, there's a strong attempt from the usual suspects to convince students that Greek life is inherently racist. The sororities seem to have bought this concept more than the fraternities and some have closed their own chapters.
Now, I have no love for Greek life but I think it ought to be an option. Some people really benefit from it.
I lived in one of the co-ops mentioned in the article in '93. None of us lugged a camera to KAbo, Exotic Erotic, or any band parties that year. The author doesn't seem to consider it, but I wonder if a better title for the article might be, Our Phones' War on Social Life.
UChicago also set to bulldozing the fun and quirky parts of its undergraduate residential life towards the tail end of my time there. A very similar sense of nostalgia, loss, and rage at the anonymous administrators hell-bent on whitewashing everything pervaded the campus. Perhaps it’s a phenomenon of our cultural moment. Or perhaps, like with Burning Man, it’s just part of the way that the communities of these institutions define themselves.
I'm sure there's a reason (probably related to lawsuits, liability, or negative publicity) for universities cracking down on student-run housing options, but it flies in the face of the idea of "residential education" - that students could actually learn something by being in charge of their residences.
Since university administrations can just wait for undergraduate cohorts to graduate, it's up to alumni, graduate students, faculty and staff to push back, but they rarely do. The point about eliminating certain houses during the pandemic makes sense - the administration had the advantage of undergraduate turnover (and loss of institutional memory) as well as pandemic stress and amnesia.
If we look at Yahoo! or Google, which originally were hosted on Stanford's network (though Excite was hosted off campus?), or Cromemco, a computer company that was actually started in a graduate engineering dorm at Stanford in the 1970s, we can see that ultimately it may be in the university's (financial) interest to sometimes let students do what they want.
Then again Facebook originated as an abuse of Harvard's undergraduate face book, so maybe some cracking down isn't entirely a bad idea.
A lot of these high-end schools have been working to crack down on forms of risk, at the cost of a huge amount of fun and personal discovery. The issues is, this has happened for kids all the way down to when they are toddlers. People need to be able to be in risky, crazy, abnormal situations; it's part of growing up and figuring out who you are. This will only push it later in life, when the risks are far higher, and/or will just have even more uncreative drones.
I read the whole article, and it seems to be entirely about the push to remove Greek / Frat / Sorority life from campus and convert these houses to more traditional dorms.
I know that some people who got a lot out of Greek Life equate it with Social Life, but most college students don't pledge/rush and it doesn't get in the way of social life. There are plenty of ways to socialize without frats.
The point being made is not that the Greek system is being pushed out and that worsens the social atmosphere. It's that Stanford is losing its atypical social community (which includes not only the Greek system but also co-ops), and that will hurt the uniqueness and advantage of Stanford as a breeding ground for interesting thinkers.
Not to mention these are just symptoms, there are more problematic things that are not ostensible.
I can't speak for Stanford, but Santa Clara University has gone through a similar transition. It started while I was there ('11-15), where the "party street" was full of frats, sororities, and just loosely themed houses. The school and the police really started to shut down parties on that street hard my second year there. What used to be just every house open to anyone became closed doors, you had to know someone who actually lived there.
I think the school has started to buy the actual property on that street now to control it more.
I won't apologize for the behavior of the frats, some of them did some truly awful stuff, and I never was a part of any of them, but I watched the university expand from educational to trying to manage the entire student experience.
Most of the houses affected weren't Greek. Many were themed houses oriented around a particular experience: an Italian dorm, a Slavic dorm, a... druggie co-op, for lack of a better phrasing.
Why would you make your housing or social life, or indeed your weird edgy experiences of whatever kind, dependent on the same institution teaching your classes? That's the actual root cause.
And I understand that some of these institutions require living on campus, at least in the first years, which is absolutely insane.
I wonder if there is a connection with smartphone culture.
In the old times you lived in your physical environment and did not spend an inordinate amount of time in social network or the internet.
Students would have been more defensive with regards to their bastions of freedom against the administration if this felt closer to them- that's my guess
I live over by MIT at northeastern(go ahead, make fun of me for not getting in), and all my life I've dreamt of being part of the MIT "hacker" culture. It simply does not exist at northeastern, as I know of only 4 people or so who share in the ethos I know of. Also of note at my wonderful college are the police around every corner, with their cars parked everywhere watching us, the massive network of security cameras, and the insane access control. To give you the idea of what it's like to come home after classes, I walk towards the lobby of my building, with a camera facing outwards, it sees me and unlocks door 1. Then I scan my card and a guard sees my face and door 2 unlocks. I walk under a camera which looks at my face. I then tap my keycard on my lock and punch in my code. This lock is also inside of my room, and I have been locked out of my room, while in my /own/ room twice. Back to the beginning of the digression, I am part of my university's radio club, and the MIT hacker scene. From what my friends say, MIT clamps down more and more by the day. Increased cameras, draconian universal keycard systems and obstructive bureaucrats galore. Additionally, the alumnus among them are now seen as weird outsiders ever since the pandemic shifted the access norms on campus(it used to be open and now everything is keycard controlled). I can certify I would have gone absolutely _bonkers_ without knowing these people, I can say with certainty that before I knew them it was perhaps the most miserable year of my life. I hope in the future we can be kept even safer, perhaps in little cubes with cameras on all the walls and a little screen and keyboard to take classes with. I think that will lead to a healthy dialogue on global inclusion themes and mindful wellness.
I wonder if this has anything to do with a difference in demographics and college selection behavior of applicants.
No data here, but maybe parents are taking an increasing roll in college choice, and the beaurocrats are simply catering to the wishes of those parents.
Do they get parents coming on college tours saying “hey look at that awesome anarchist house?” Or are they getting parents saying “wow, look at all the new, clean, fancy building conducive to studying?”
Honest question here. I’m can’t also help but think of Dead Poets Society. Which if you haven’t watched you should !
[+] [-] dougmccune|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pigscantfly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanj|3 years ago|reply
I lived in a similar beautiful mess, but it still exists!
https://pika.mit.edu/
[+] [-] every|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://collegehouses.org/listings/21st/
[+] [-] hyperbovine|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChadNauseam|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|3 years ago|reply
Sounds like toxic “bro” culture.
First of all, fire safety regulations are one of those things that are written in blood so speak. Casually bypassing them is not something to be celebrated.
Second, is it any surprise that people who come out of this environment then end up creating startups which skirt regulations, sell out their users privacy, and do “stupid and illegal shit”.
[+] [-] beefman|3 years ago|reply
We had to fight for the modicum of freedom our kids had growing up. Our oldest now has a car but his licence forbids him taking friends along.[1]
Our youngest built his first model rocket this week, to find it's only feasible to launch with a club. The nearest club, which used to host monthly launches at Moffett field, is closed until Fall. So it'll take as long to drive to and from the launch site as to buid a rocket, and the maximum launch cadence is monthly. Not a viable hobby for a 13-year-old, unless it's your only hobby and your parents help with everything.
Churches have disintegrated, workplaces are toast. The loss of "third places" was measured by Putnam.[2] Somebody on twitter suggested companies should have sports teams, aparrently unaware it was quite common until recently.
On my first day of work in California in 2001, my boss asked me if I'd tried ecstasy yet.[3] Nowadays you must be mentally ill to take it, under a doctor's supervision. Hope you get better like us!
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-education-and-safety/ed...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
[3] https://twitter.com/clumma/status/1519377410810023936
[+] [-] derevaunseraun|3 years ago|reply
From my experience, covid exacerbated this significantly. I don't know if it's just the universities or a broader cultural shift. And as the article says, the administrators introduced more "community initiatives" to exonerate themselves of gleefully destroying campus life and letting it atrophy for two years straight (while making students pay in person tuition for online school)
It feels like in the past couple years we've gone from a culture of spontaneity and grassroots initiative to one of bitter obsequiousness that's obsessed with taking itself seriously. The only way to subvert it is by turning it into one big joke
edit: thanks to OP for posting this magazine, it's the first thing I've seen in a while that actually has something to say
[+] [-] asdff|3 years ago|reply
Its a much safer environment to party than at some random off campus house where there's no rules, no inspections, no one deciding not to party and be a bouncer, and therefore anyone is potentially wandering in off the street into the party. Ironic that the university would go so hard after these student orgs that actually do a good job managing things like underage drinking or keeping drug use from getting too out of hand, while turning a blind eye to the fact that most partying isn't even happening withing student orgs but just from random people throwing big parties in their off campus houses. Just goes to show they care more about optics and how easy it is for the media to write a hit piece on greek life than actually being pragmatic about safety.
[+] [-] ketzo|3 years ago|reply
> Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus
Oh, yeah, Stanford’s really afraid of “student spontaneity.”
They’re definitely not afraid of organizations that:
- ritualize physical and mental abuse
- force people to consume dangerous amounts of drugs and alcohol
- institutionalize racism, classism, and misogyny
- protect - and encourage! - sexual assaulters
Fraternities aren’t all bad. Fraternity brothers aren’t all bad. I was one, and I met some of the best friends of my life. But that also means I know just how fucking bad it gets, even now (2016-2020).
Yeah, sucks, you don't get to live in a big fun house and pull Animal House-style pranks any more. You lost your privileges after killing a fucking kid.
https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Family-sues-Stanford-ro...
Oh, sorry -- did I say a kid, singular?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hazing_deaths_in_the_U...
29 dead in the U.S. in the last 12 years.
And the author makes this out to be some stick-in-the-mud administrator trying to take away their toys. Makes me fucking sick.
[+] [-] jackcosgrove|3 years ago|reply
Even in the early 00s when I was in college everything seemed to have become lamer than it was just a decade prior. 20th century libertinism peaked in the 70s and has been in retreat since then.
[+] [-] aidenn0|3 years ago|reply
Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon now, but this sounds like the direction the entire country has been heading for a long time now. For each individual choice between risky joy and safe ennui we have chosen the safe option, starting with the riskiest (or at least perceived to be riskiest) behaviors and continuing on. It's hard to argue against most of these choices in isolation, but the final result seems clearly undesirable to me.
[+] [-] lutorm|3 years ago|reply
What stops a bunch of Stanford students from starting whatever club they want in their spare time? Obviously it can't be on Stanford property, so maybe that's the difference, they have their students over a barrel because they can deny them access to housing which I guess is hard to find otherwise?
[+] [-] DiogenesKynikos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watwut|3 years ago|reply
Nothing, but greek system was advantaged over random non-greek friends groups or clubs. If you start own random non-greek club, the university wont guarantee or give you house for it. For the record, Standford always had plenty of students who were not members of Greek clubs. They created and participated in own spare time activities too.
In Europe, if your spare time club rents a house, it will have street number and no one will act as if it was great injustice. Based on article, that is destruction and homogenity. In Europe, if you fill the entire floor with sand and bulldozer it away to property you dont own, through property you dont own, the house owner will object - but in article university administrators are the bad guys for objecting.
[+] [-] trh0awayman|3 years ago|reply
At many universities, the rules apply to you even off campus.
[+] [-] michaelt|3 years ago|reply
In my country, nothing - but if your club is willing to submit to the university authorities, they will provide some resources that will help the club survive your graduation.
For example, spaces at new-member-recruitment events when the university gets a new class of students, usage of university rooms outside of teaching hours, some storage space, maybe some money, and so on.
And because clubs for students have to completely replace their membership every 3-4 years in order to survive, that help can be the difference between a club that continues to exist and one that doesn't.
[+] [-] _fat_santa|3 years ago|reply
Technically nothing, but often times its funding. If it's a university sponsored club, the school will give you money in certain cases. Often times students rely on that money to keep the club going, depending on what they do.
[+] [-] julianeon|3 years ago|reply
It starts with a story about a frat which filled their building's first floor with sand, so much that they had to rent a bulldozer to relocate it to the campus lake. Then they call the Stanford admins killjoys for not supporting it. But... of course Stanford wouldn't support that! That would try anyone's patience.
What kind of impact does dumping all that sand have? What about running the bulldozer over the Stanford campus? What if someone is injured by the bulldozer? I wouldn't trust teenagers renting an after-party bulldozer who never cleared that with anyone, never notified anyone, and have no proof of training.
Then, the article talks about Stanford letting the lake "go dry." I live in California and I can tell you what happened: the drought. There's a killer drought, nonessential water use is discouraged, and a manmade lake in a little-used corner of a campus is the definition of nonessential. Stanford did the right thing by not artificially pumping it up. There's no malice involved; a lake like that, in 2022, is destined to dry up.
So based on those things, I don't think I can trust the article to be taking a balanced, sensible position. My "middle of the road" position wold be that, yes, sometimes adventurous college kids can get away with something - once in a while. But over the long term, it's the institution's job to prevent one-off events from turning into ongoing disaster generators.
[+] [-] awhitty|3 years ago|reply
The lake was fed by diverting water from nearby San Francisquito Creek. The university chose to stop filling the lake for recreational use in 2001 to protect the endangered California tiger salamander as the article notes. The lake was still sometimes artificially filled to support salamander breeding, but it was not maintained to a level suitable for (most forms of) recreation (though I still saw members of KA attempt to take a raft out on 1-2ft of water during a rainy week -- I think their raft was more full of beer than the lake was of water, though my memory is hazy).
The university has since removed the dam used to divert water to Lake Lag as part of a process of habitat restoration upstream. I'm not sure how that will affect the population of salamanders that depended on that water in Lake Lag, but I believe they also breed upstream and will have more sustainable natural habitat. Also, water from Searsville Dam just upstream from this project is used to irrigate Stanford's golf course, and that is cited as a reason not to remove that dam (the other reason is that removing it would change habitats that formed from the lake it created).
The school has sometimes turned off its campus fountains during periods of drought. They shut the fountains down for 2 years while I was there. During that same time I didn't see them shut off water to the golf courses though, and that consumes substantially more water than the fountains. They did restore water in the fountains for the weeks leading up to our graduation, and I can recommend grabbing a pitcher of beer or two from the CoHo and walking it straight down to the fountain outside the bookstore for a soak, if the school still allows it.
To summarize, if we are to infer Stanford's priorities based on how it has approached the complex dynamics around Lake Lag and its (former) tributary, I believe that would look like: golf course > endangered salamander > students.
[+] [-] lmm|3 years ago|reply
That's exactly the attitude that causes this problem - there's always a reason to say no. These are supposed to be adults, they (presumably) legally rented the bulldozer, they got the consent of the groundskeeper.
There's no possible fun so innocuous that you can't come up with one more bureaucratic requirement to slap on it if you really try. Thought experiment: if it turned out the bulldozer driver did in fact have some kind of training/license, would that change your mind? Or would you just look for another reason to say this was bad?
[+] [-] imgabe|3 years ago|reply
The sand gets wet and sits in the water. It's sand, i.e. dirt. In case you weren't aware, there's already dirt at the bottom of all lakes.
> What about running the bulldozer over the Stanford campus?
The ground would get slightly compacted and maybe some grass torn up. That's why they got clearance from the person responsible for that, the groundskeeper.
> What if someone is injured by the bulldozer?
They will learn an important lesson about bulldozer safety.
> I wouldn't trust teenagers renting an after-party bulldozer who never cleared that with anyone, never notified anyone, and have no proof of training.
If you ever find yourself running a bulldozer rental place, you're free to not rent to them.
[+] [-] UncleEntity|3 years ago|reply
You, sir, would have an absolute conniption if you knew half the stuff we got up to in the airborne…
[+] [-] civilized|3 years ago|reply
You didn't show anything the author said was dishonest or egregiously wrong. You just have your own ideas on a couple of particulars.
[+] [-] rileyphone|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zbrozek|3 years ago|reply
Beyond that, I also got totally fed up trying to figure out how to get definitive positive permission to do anything. At one point I asked facilities if I could build an oven to cure composites. They reviewed and approved the plans. But when some other group within the school saw the result, they flipped out and hired a consultant to trump up false hazards. I was only clued in because a sympathetic dean leaked an email to me. I invited the fire marshal out to take a look, and I got a thumbs up to operate.
I eventually moved the oven to rented space elsewhere since I was told I couldn't keep the thing on campus. I was then told my student group would be dissolved if we used off-campus facilities. We agreed that if I brought it back that my group could use it for its intended purpose for a year and then find another solution next year.
I found a crew demolishing it at 4 AM the following morning. A deal's a deal, I guess. We went back to heating our composites with propane heaters aimed into a collapsible wood-and-plastic box, rather than our electrically heated concrete and flame-resistant foam box. The propane solution has been used every year since.
[+] [-] namlem|3 years ago|reply
This is the craziest part to me. There doesn't seem to be any rational reason for it other than wanting absolute control for its own sake.
[+] [-] xvedejas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|3 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, we can't train competent engineers, technicians, and tradesmen, in the West, because everyone is too caught up in this type of gatekeeping and pigheadedness.
[+] [-] colordrops|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rbanffy|3 years ago|reply
I can understand this. The US has a very litigious society. If someone gets sick from being exposed to something that can even be loosely associated with your oven, the school will have to spend a lot of money defending itself.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] at_a_remove|3 years ago|reply
Now, I have no love for Greek life but I think it ought to be an option. Some people really benefit from it.
[+] [-] alamortsubite|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] closeparen|3 years ago|reply
https://chicagomaroon.com/2015/04/28/residents-of-satellite-...
[+] [-] curiousllama|3 years ago|reply
I was always disappointed at the sanitization of anything involving more than a half dozen people. Even lascivious ball was just tame
[+] [-] musicale|3 years ago|reply
Since university administrations can just wait for undergraduate cohorts to graduate, it's up to alumni, graduate students, faculty and staff to push back, but they rarely do. The point about eliminating certain houses during the pandemic makes sense - the administration had the advantage of undergraduate turnover (and loss of institutional memory) as well as pandemic stress and amnesia.
If we look at Yahoo! or Google, which originally were hosted on Stanford's network (though Excite was hosted off campus?), or Cromemco, a computer company that was actually started in a graduate engineering dorm at Stanford in the 1970s, we can see that ultimately it may be in the university's (financial) interest to sometimes let students do what they want.
Then again Facebook originated as an abuse of Harvard's undergraduate face book, so maybe some cracking down isn't entirely a bad idea.
[+] [-] kernoble|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] humanistbot|3 years ago|reply
I know that some people who got a lot out of Greek Life equate it with Social Life, but most college students don't pledge/rush and it doesn't get in the way of social life. There are plenty of ways to socialize without frats.
[+] [-] avindroth|3 years ago|reply
Not to mention these are just symptoms, there are more problematic things that are not ostensible.
[+] [-] GrifMD|3 years ago|reply
I think the school has started to buy the actual property on that street now to control it more.
I won't apologize for the behavior of the frats, some of them did some truly awful stuff, and I never was a part of any of them, but I watched the university expand from educational to trying to manage the entire student experience.
[+] [-] scarmig|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hizonner|3 years ago|reply
And I understand that some of these institutions require living on campus, at least in the first years, which is absolutely insane.
[+] [-] sharikous|3 years ago|reply
In the old times you lived in your physical environment and did not spend an inordinate amount of time in social network or the internet.
Students would have been more defensive with regards to their bastions of freedom against the administration if this felt closer to them- that's my guess
[+] [-] WorldPeas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdavis6890|3 years ago|reply
No data here, but maybe parents are taking an increasing roll in college choice, and the beaurocrats are simply catering to the wishes of those parents.
Do they get parents coming on college tours saying “hey look at that awesome anarchist house?” Or are they getting parents saying “wow, look at all the new, clean, fancy building conducive to studying?”
Honest question here. I’m can’t also help but think of Dead Poets Society. Which if you haven’t watched you should !