"For the past several years, Stanford has required students to adhere to a Student Party Policy, which includes a highly detailed “Harm Reduction Plan” mandating multiple sober monitors and designated alcohol service areas, and prohibiting the serving of any hard liquor.
Party hosts must also provide “EANABs,” or Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages, to “contribute to an inclusive and inviting experience” for all partygoers. Hosts are also required to take an online “Party Planning Course” before submitting their applications. "
Is this normal!?! I feel sorry for this generation. Attempts to make their world risk free has turned it into "fuck up once and we'll destroy you".
> Attempts to make their world risk free has turned it into "fuck up once and we'll destroy you".
TBH I think it is a much bigger problem that low-stakes hyper-local issues have been elevated into proxy battles for national politics. Truly, the fact that anyone who is not either attending or administering this university cares about their party policy at all (let alone enough to write about it professionally) is completely absurd.
Stanford is an elite institution that others watch carefully. Administrators go to conferences & workshops to discuss their practices. They get promoted into positions at other universities.
Stanford is a leading indicator of campus life elsewhere.
No one cares about their party policy. This article is about how administration in universities are regularly harassing students. I france our uni look very much different, policy and structure-wise, and yet i can relate big time to this. I knew a lot of students who got harassed badly for tons of random reasons.
What a terrible take. The entire purpose of college is to influence the minds that attend them before sending them out to further propagate those ideals into the world.
Furthermore, this is an elite institution that ostensibly is training future leaders - the type of people most poised to spread influence.
Your argument is basically the domino effect meme with Stanford Party Policy on one end and Global Culture on the other? I dunno about others but I definitely don't buy it - I think some people just like minding other people's business.
To your point about training future leaders, there is a reason people don't start out training with live ammo. If every element of campus life could randomly and capriciously be escalated to the national stage, how could anyone possibly expect kids to learn how to take risks or make mistakes? (I believe this is true across the political spectrum)
20 years ago this would have been a heated discussion limited to the campus community, which to me at least held the possibility of the sides having empathy for each other. Now, with the polarized, dehumanized nature of our national discourse, I have no doubt that everyone will simply dig in.
> Your argument is basically the domino effect meme with Stanford Party Policy on one end and Global Culture on the other?
this is an exaggerated straw-man version of my argument, but yes. colleges are a training ground for young people during their formative years, a place we send them to intentionally change their personalities and come into their own being away from their parents. One college isnt going to topple the global culture, but calling bad things that happen at college "hyperlocal" is obviously wrong.
> If every element of campus life could randomly and capriciously be escalated to the national stage, how could anyone possibly expect kids to learn how to take risks or make mistakes?
i dont understand this argument. the article we're commenting on is about exactly this type of oppressive, no-mistakes, no-learning regime the college administration is creating. the media coverage isnt about highlighting mistakes students made; the media coverage is escalating to the national stage the exact thing youre complaining about. a girl got a conduct violation for intentionally spilling coffee and then killed herself.
> oppressive, no-mistakes, no-learning regime the college administration is creating.
Let's first acknowledge there are many competing interests in these stories. For every student who is mad about being accused of cheating, there is a student (or maybe dozens) who are worried about people cheating who cheapen the degree and educational experience for everyone. So yes, it's sad we live in a society where grades and educational records are so important, that a single black mark will limit opportunities. On the other hand, we want to make sure that the institutions of higher education are fair and rigorous in their standards. That means when students violate those standards, consequences are served. When students violate standards and consequences are not served, that's a signal the standards are not as such.
Mistakes are okay. That doesn't mean mistakes should go unpunished, and that doesn't mean punishment is oppression.
Let's consider the evidence in the article. I assume this is the strongest evidence available, because if stronger evidence is out there, I question why the author didn't include it to support her piece.
There's not much substance to this article, but I think we don't have to look at the whole thing. There are really only a few key points that cut through the noise:
“I had young kids that were 18, 19 years old who are international asking me [Paulmeier], ‘Hey, can I talk to this attorney and tell them I drank a beer, or am I going to get my visa revoked?’ ”
Note, the piece never claims that there was no underage or unsafe drinking. The only claim actually made in the whole piece about the frat's expulsion was that it was overly harsh. Let's also remember that this isn't just any student. This is a student who took it upon himself to become the president of an organization, a position that comes with trust and responsibility, a position which has control and access to Stanford funds. This student admits "he worked closely with OCS to follow all its rules", so he knew or should have known better.
So he's guilty.
“Any place that sets a bar so high that you have to be literally perfect to get there; and when you get here, if you don’t stay perfect, [Stanford] will punish you with every administrative resource they have for embarrassing them,”
This is where Paulmeier basically admits his guilt. His position is not "I did everything right and yet I am unfairly being held accountable for something I didn't do." Instead, it's "I made mistakes, and being held account to those mistakes is unfair." Paulmeier is framing his guilt at throwing ragers that harmed other students as he failed to be "literally perfect" because the bar is set so high. Do you get that? He feels the bar is set so high, he can't live up to the expectations of not throwing campus-sanctioned blowouts which land other students in the hospital. Paulmeier I guess just can't meet the high bar Stanford has set. It's not that he's guilty of egregiously violating campus standards. It's that the standards are so high, how could anyone reasonably be expected to adhere to them?
So if I'm going to read between the lines, my inference is that Paulmeier is the kind of person who feels that he shouldn't be held responsible for his actions, and he's trying to make it seem like Stanford is oppressing him rather than the truth: he's being held accountable for bad decisions.
In my opinion, the worst thing Stanford could do for society is to treat such people that they are above reproach. We have too many of such people at the top echelons of our society, people for whom any semblance of accountability is treated as a grave affront to all of society. We see it in politics, where just this morning in the wee hours, the former POTUS threatened "death and destruction" for being held accountable for fraud he definitely committed. We nip that behavior in the bud by punishing it when it starts in college, not by coddling it until it metastasizes into a national cancer.
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So what do we do about this? Is it really a problem? Well, the lawyers have ideas:
implementing some of Ottilie’s ideas, such as opening up a student’s ability to reach out to witnesses, could have adverse side effects, such as a greater risk of witness intimidation.
Of course the Stanford educated lawyer's plan was to implement the US judicial system inside of Stanford. That's what would be best for his clients. But what would that mean for students? Does that mean every time a student is accused of cheating, the whole class is subpoenaed to testify in front of a Stanford grand jury? Where does it end? Do students then reserve the right to appeal their cheating case to SCOTUS?
Which brings me to this whole "due process" claim. Due process doesn't mean all the process. This is the calling card of the guilty criminal; right next to "I didn't do it" is "due process wasn't followed, therefore I get away with my crimes" It's such a potent tactic because in the case where someone's rights really are being violated, you want to make sure that is corrected.
But very often it's the case that someone who is guilty will claim that if only some other process had been followed, which is the appropriate process, that the outcome would have been different. And that the outcome was negative is a reflection on the fact the process wasn't followed, and not the fact that the process found guilt. If you can delay the result by demanding more "due process", all you have to do to delay any result is to continually demand more process.
--
This brings me to the Meyers case. This is a tragedy. If I had to read between the lines here, it would seem that a boy was accused of assaulting/raping a girl, and he went through a process, and he was cleared. Meyers seems to have had a problem with that, and assaulted him. This is disingenuously minimized as "spilling coffee" by those looking to push an angle, but it was alleged assault and injury which was alleged. Regardless of the circumstances, at minimum an investigation must be opened when such allegations are made, and the student under investigation should be notified. I believe that would be in following with due process afforded to Meyers, and not informing her that she was under investigation would have violated her due process.
The tragedy here is that Meyers ended her life when subjected to that process. The easy thing to do is to blame Stanford as the proximal cause, but that doesn't really explain the whole situation. Frankly, being less harsh here doesn't necessarily mean Meyers doesn't end up killing herself. The situation is so complex. I could just as easily say that Meyers would be alive if her friend hadn't been raped and assaulted and the rapist let off the hook, so the blame rests with the rapist. But that's unfair too, because again, it's more complex than that.
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Finally, Paulmeier wraps it up better than I could:
Paulmeier and other students and alumni told me they’re not asking for Stanford to make it easier for students to cheat, or worse, cause harm to others. All they want is for students to have the chance to make mistakes and learn from them—and sure, allow them to let loose a bit in the process.
Actually, Paulmeier and others, especially the lawyer that was hired, is asking for exactly that. Because what they want to do is to turn routine academic issues like misbehavior and cheating into huge legal battles.
The class coordinator’s allegation, based not on her own observation but that of an anonymous student, was the only evidence against them, Ottilie said. But all three students were charged by OCS with cheating under the university’s honor code.
The students knew Ottilie ran his own law practice and reached out for his counsel. Ottilie agreed to take the students’ case pro bono and worked with two other alumni lawyers on their defense—recreating seating charts and finding over a dozen witnesses who were willing to testify to their innocence.
A student sees another student cheating and tells the teacher. The teacher tries to get to the bottom of it. All of a sudden, we've got lawyers descending on the classroom doing what they do best: they want to issue subpoenas for testimony, they want to start a war room with a murder board and crack team of specialists to comb the neighborhood for witnesses, etc. None of this will make cheating less likely. All it will do is insulate cheaters. The standard of proof for cheating shouldn't be "beyond a reasonable doubt". There should be due process, but we can't turn every cheating case into a capital crime and empanel a jury for it. The entire educational system would cease to function.
Or go with the harm angle? Is Paulmeier asking for Stanford to make it easier for students to cause harm to others? Yes, emphatically he is. Because Paulmeier actually caused harm to other students. He abused his position of power and trust and authority to do that, even after he worked closely with Stanford to ensure that he wouldn't. He still did, and when he was caught, his response was not to accept responsibility, but to intone that it's the system itself that's the problem, not his behavior (although he admits his behavior has been problematic). It's not that he's wrong for his actions, it's that the system is oppressive for holding him accountable. What he wants to do is change the system so that people like him aren't held responsible when they use their position to harm others.
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My opinion of this piece is that it's very one sided. At a higher level though, it's very concerning to me that some people are trying so hard to make this into a culture war controversy. These situations are very complicated, and it's a sad that they go poorly for some students. On the other hand, other students are being protected by these processes. Could they be better? Yes. Emphatically. Is the subject of this piece salty because he got called out for being an irresponsible jerk who's decisions hurt people? Yes. Does this mean Stanford is at "war" with the student? No. And that's really the bottom line.
Could you say more about why you think that this is a terrible take? It's not clear to me from your comment. If you're being sarcastic: forgive me; bravo, well-played. Otherwise...
My attempt at a generous reading would summarize your point as "kids go to Stanford to finish their inculcation before we let them start taking responsibility for things. The idea of controlling potentiality destructive behavior is crucial for social control and stability."
The position I described strikes me as mechanistic in the extreme. I'll skip over my disagreement with "the enture purpose..." and focus on the big issue. Wouldn't it be better for everyone concerned to allow kids to make mistakes that affect just a few people, and be forced to learn how to navigate and resolve those errors-- that is, to build practical wisdom--before putting them in a position where their mistakes (due to a lack of perspective and emotional immaturity borne by living in tightly controlled conditions), affect many people?
Exactly. This article is just culture war pearl-clutching at its very worst. Having students adhere to a campus policy when having parties on campus seems perfectly reasonable, and considered without the hyperbolic tone of the article, the policy itself seems fine in substance.
If you didn't take into account that it is written for undergrads etc you might think it was strangely specific but then you realise these are people who in some cases have just left home. In an ideal world you could just have your policy be "don't be an idiot" but sadly the people who need that policy in the first place also need it spelled out for them in a little more detail.
>> Attempts to make their world risk free has turned it into "fuck up once and we'll destroy you".
>> TBH I think it is a much bigger problem that low-stakes hyper-local issues have been elevated into proxy battles for national politics.
Ironically, another hyper-local problem that's been elevated at the national level is the shoplifting epidemics that's happening not far from Stanford.
I can't help but to be amazed at the completely different treatment a shoplifting thug will receive (absolutely no repercussion) vs a model Stanford student who has one (victimless) mishap (bullied to suicide by bureaucrats).
This looks to apply to on-campus parties only? If so, it's more liberal, if also more complicated, than the university I went to where the policy for alcohol on-campus was "No."
Granted you could find dozens of parties within a mile of campus there; I don't know the geography of Stanford.
Right. The article bends over backwards to make this sound like a repressive policy, but it's significantly more permissive than most campuses' alcohol rules.
My campus didn't allow alcohol at campus parties, full stop[1]. It was nominally allowed at individually approved events, of which I never observed any (besides perhaps a football game?).
In my first week of university in London there was an official Maths Department party for new students. There was so much wine the head of department asked me and several others to take a box of 6 bottles home (each!) so it would be less obvious that she's ordered too much.
There are at least 4 bars on the main campus, and several pubs just outside it.
They do have a policy:
> The licensed premises in the College are normally open at lunchtime and in the evening, with regular extensions during term-time for the Union bar until midnight on Wednesdays and 1.00 am on Saturdays (i.e. extended from Friday evening). It is College policy that sales of alcohol must not be promoted at lunchtime
You have to understand, the UK got to keep all of its normal Protestants. All of the nuts (see: Puritans and other non-conformist unmentionables) came here.
Massachusetts was a Puritan colony and blue-laws state, but there was plenty of drinking for all undergrads using university money till the whole MADD (and related groups) national campaigns against drunk driving. (and in reaction you could get Tshirts that said DAMM, drunks against mad mothers)
The 17 and 18yo drinking ages around the country all got raised when the federal govt cut off highway funds if the state age wasn't 21. The insanity is all within my lifetime.
(but yes, various jurisdictions around the country before that were, for religi-political reasons but not puritan, "dry" with no sale of alcohol.)
I'm going to guess that you're in your 30s or younger (looked, yep). Part of what you're seeing in the comments is a reflection of age ranges on HN and of pretty massive change over the last 30-35 years around alcohol on campuses.
As relevant history, it's less than 40 years since the October 1986 deadline for states to raise their alcohol purchase and possession ages to 21, and until sometime in the '90s a lot of schools were still pretty permissive about underage drinking on campus as long as it wasn't in the face of 'townies' and police. For a lot of HN readers who graduated in the 90s (or earlier) the kind of party and alcohol restrictions that are now commonplace are something they first encountered when their kids went to college.
My recollection was that in NY, you could have,drink,and buy alcohol as a minor. You just couldn't SELL it to a minor, and, at least in my nbhd, that wasn't really enforced. I saw a couple guys drinking a six-pack at an AP exam in the morning in full view of a proctor. Colleges didn't seem to care much as long as you drank relatively low alcohol beer. What got scary was when I visited a more hard-drinking and yet repressive college where I saw 17 year olds with enough liquor under their beds to kill an elephant. I happen to think that we lost something when adults couldn't drink with college students -- underage drinking without adults easily goes overboard.
Sure: I readily accept that this is a generational thing. But it's being presented as a culture war shift, when plenty of people in the comments here have observed that Stanford's policy has not meaningfully changed in the last 20 years.
I think banning alcohol on campus is foolish, and leads to worse overall outcomes. I also think this article's framing is dishonest and intentionally tendentious.
The University I went to was a dry (or nearly dry, maybe wine for welcoming VIP speakers) campus for a long time, but the degree to which it was enforced varied. It was also largely moot since there were 3 bars a single block away from the student union and the majority of students lived off campus.
The vast majority of undergrads live on campus. Off-campus housing is quite expensive (it's in Palo Alto), since you're competing with Googlers and the like for real estate.
This is not a problem or experience unique to Stanford: NYC has 600,000 university students living in it, and they manage to tear it up just fine without relying on the campus to host their parties.
The point is that the vast majority of Stanford undergrads live on-campus. That is presumably not true for universities in NYC. Given that Stanford undergrads live almost entirely on-campus, it is not surprising that on-campus parties form the backbone of the party scene. And given that most undergrads in NYC do not live on-campus, it is not surprising that their party scenes are not as impacted by campus rules.
Boring and smaller aren't the concern: I went to a large state school in an extremely boring suburb of DC. We still managed to cram people into overpriced off-campus housing and to drink ourselves stupid.
Sure, there are just very few Stanford undergrads who live off-campus. And most Stanford undergrads would not choose to live off-campus in order to be able to party more.
They are adults, and if there are no reasonable venues for being able to do regular adult things, for intentional reasons or not, they will create venues somehow, someway.
If there is anything to be learned from Prohibition, it is if you make rules too strict for the context, either you have to enforce them with unreasonable measures, or people break the rules in ways that cause more harm than you were trying to prevent.
> They are adults, and if there are no reasonable venues for being able to do regular adult things, for intentional reasons or not, they will create venues somehow, someway.
Yes, it's called an off-campus apartment. Students have been drinking in them for centuries.
America's pathologies around student drinking are ridiculous. But let's not pretend like the path of least resistance doesn't already exist, and isn't in wide application by just about every other college in this country. The only reason we're talking about Stanford is because it hits all of the culture war hot-topic buttons (elite college, bureaucracy, "coddling," &c.). Nothing about the actual state of affairs is remotely unusual or controversial.
Have you ever lived in the area? I'm 100% sure you have't because of how you're framing this. Off campus housing is extremely expensive. Stanford doesn't really provide any affordable options off campus because they have all the housing they need in campus. The only students who live out of campus are local students and MBA students.
Do you expect undergrads who fly come from Missouri to start paying 2k/month for housing? I'm sorry but your solution is an imaginary one that doesn't apply to Stanford. NYC is completely different because you can practically live anywhere there and use the great public transportation network to get to where you want to go. If you live in East Palo Alto (cheapest area), good luck getting to class.
> Yes, it's called an off-campus apartment. Students have been drinking in them for centuries.
Agreed as a generality. But we are discussing Stanford in particular and you were replying to this:
> Sure, there are just very few Stanford undergrads who live off-campus. And most Stanford undergrads would not choose to live off-campus in order to be able to party more.
The local effectiveness and externalities of rules, no matter how widespread or time honored, still depend on their local context.
So many takes on here prove that this really should not be elevated to a national discussion. You simply do not understand the context at Stanford.
95% of undergrads live on campus. There is not enough housing for them to live off-campus irrespective of the cost. There is not enough parking for that many students to commute. Freshmen aren’t even allowed to have cars. Off-campus housing is not an option.
At least up until 2016 there was an “open door policy” where underage drinking was not policed when done indoors, ironically for safety, so that students would not be afraid to ask for help or support when necessary.
If you don’t know the context at Stanford, you really can’t understand the “war” aspect and I don’t blame you. That’s why this shouldn’t be national news.
Sure, but also most undergrads are not of drinking age, so a no drinking policy is not exactly the end of the world for them. They shouldn’t be drinking anyway.
> underage drinking was not policed
Not policing underage drinking is one thing. But chartered school organizations, throwing school approved events, on school property, with school funds is absolute something Stanford must police. You don’t need to have attended Stanford to understand why.
Stanford campus is somewhat inconveniently distant from any off campus housing. As in two miles is more than a quarter mile when you're running late to class.
Exactly. The main reason these rules are great is that it makes students comfortable with calling an ambulance when someone has alcohol poisoning.
If drinking is illegal on campus, then you criminalize alcohol poisoning too and students die as a result.
My university had a similar, but not as regimented policy as Stanford. It allows the administration and the students to understand each other.
Edit: Besides alcohol poisoning, you also decriminalize injuries and re-criminalize sexual assault.
Most of Palo Alto and Menlo Park are within an easy bike ride from campus. You can mostly stay on pleasant tree-filled residential streets as you admire the multi-million-dollar cottages. Though as others have commented: few undergraduates live or party off-campus.
The welcome event for freshers at Aberystwyth uni had the speaker (Chancellor? Don't remember) practically encouraging people to relax and drink as well as studying.
One of my acquaintances at university did an exchange year with an American university, was forced to attend an alcoholism awareness group therapy program after being caught at a party with one beer, at which (I paraphrase but by his own description) almost caused a riot by plainly describing his experiences with alcohol when the moderators of that program asked him to share.
Myself however, I was exactly the "lock yourself away in your bedroom and study (without drinking)" personality that one of the authority figures told all of us not to be.
Lol, from how I understand you post I feel like it could be a comedy skit about a Welsh guy going to the coastal US and acting normally, like telling drinking stories, while the sheltered people around him are horrified.
"Felly beth bynnag, ar ôl i ni i gyd orffen y pumed peint, David, chwedl llwyr ei fod, penderfynodd roi un o'r defaid yr oeddem wedi'i ddwyn i sedd gefn car y deon. Beth bynnag, arweiniodd un peth at un arall, a nawr ni chaniateir o fewn hanner milltir i'r Amwythig."
*American stares back in monolingual, desperately grasping with one hand for some holy water as they believe they have witnessed Speaking In Tongues*
A lot of people the stuff I see coming out of Stanford admin is absolutely ridiculous.
But I actually liked the EANABs policy when I was there. Granted, they mostly remained intact, but they provide something to hidrate in a party and something for those who don't drink (which is not that rare!).
The EANABs is fine - I even do this at my parties as adults, it's good to have good non-alcoholic drinks for non-drinkers and for pacing.
That said, you're spot on about the ridiculous rules. One of the dumbest alcohol policies was to ban liquor containers over 750ml [1]. But you could still have any number of liquor bottles, as long as they were individually less than 750ml. The rationale is that since two 750ml bottles costs marginally more than a 1.5L handle of alcohol, that will reduce binge drinking. I kid you not.
This actually doesn’t seem that silly to me. Isn’t this a bog standard Pigouvian tax? And I think it should be fairly uncontroversial that there are definite negative externalities to handles of liquor…
What is the real cost difference between two 750ml vodka bottles and one 1.5L handle? The Piguovian tax is probably on the order of $1-2 per liter of liquor. This is negligible.
yeah I agree, I've tried to follow that EANAB's example when throwing parties elsewhere too. I most certainly do not submit any party plan to anyone in advance
Having decent NABs on hand for parties has always been a polite and common-sense thing to do. "Equally Attractive" seems like a bit of a judgement call.
haha yeah I don't care about the acronym, but I find the term somewhat ridiculous yet fun to say, which makes people think about it and not ignore it (maybe).
I think this was more or less normal over twenty years ago when everyone started to crack down on underage drinking. Get caught serving minors or hazing and the university might take your house away.
From the university's standpoint they of course want to pave the way for donations and protect their reputation. If they boot an occasional animal house fraternity it just lets them open a door to a more reputable organization that is more discreet about breaking campus rules.
All of these rules sound onerous, but they boil down to the same rules as when I was in college ~15 years ago in a very different place (and only applied to public and openly promoted parties).
They're a very low-lift means to reducing hospital trips, at the very least.
Welcome to the life in the internet era. every mistake, every errant post, every fuck up catalogued, stamped and preserved in perpetuity. Ready to be used in a moment's notice against you should you stray from the established narrative or the instructions of "The Party"
As a Briton, it's incomprehensible to me that American adults allow themselves to be told, like children, that they can't drink alcohol until they are an older adult! It's completely and utterly baffling. How do you guys put up with it?
Am I now supposed to be upset about universities tackling the problem of excessive drinking by students? Because when it comes to alcohol, fucking up once can also destroy you. I still remember how a number of years ago, a student at the university of Groningen drank himself to death under peer pressure. The article refers to a student being hospitalised due to alcohol.
The university working to reduce the dangers of alcohol sounds like a very good thing to me.
Of course the rest of the article, about harsh punishments by the university that even drove one student to suicide, is also serious. It looks like Stanford needs to be a bit more concerned with their students' mental health and not just their alcohol intake. The relationship between the university and its students comes across as far too antagonistic, and that's not good.
Well, I didn't say anything about laws. As alcohol-related incidents increase in frequency and severity, and as payouts become bigger, the cost to insure (including self-insure) goes up.
This kind of policy existed at my alma mater 30 years ago. Even the alt beverage bit. Can't remember if we just served water or did we actually have punch of some kind. We even had (student) inspectors that went around to registered parties to verify that the rules were followed. And yes, citations were written and disciplinary hearings were held, and party privileges revoked for the semester. This was at a big 10 state school.
This actually seems like a permissive rule compared to the usual no alcohol, period. But private schools in general have weird rules for unrelated things, mostly to protect their own reputation, so yeah it is "screw up and we'll destroy you" for those. The funniest I can think of was how my private elementary school banned all students from personally having a MySpace account, at the threat of expulsion.
So don't host official fraternity parties if you're not OK with those requirements. What's complicated about this? Fraternities are "official" organizations; official organizations have to deal with official policies. Just have unofficial parties.
If only it were allows to host a party, with your friends who happen to be in the same fraternity, and it were allowed to do this unofficially, without having to follow university rules.
Unfortunately, this is often not allowed. As in literally, if you have a party, at a private residence, because the people going to it happen to be in the same fraternity, this is disallowed.
Unofficial parties are quite literally often not allowed, and are seen by universities as a way of getting around their draconian rules, and you could actually get in trouble for hosting them.
Sorry, I'm not a native speaker. I think I used the word request improperly. I am aware that those conditions must be met. But then again I am not surprised that those were stated as requirements rather than requests.
From what I understand a request is just a polite suggestion easily, routinely ignored if it requires additional work or foresight and deviates from pre-estabilished culture.
Party and alcohol restrictions have been normal for years for universities that are paranoid about liability - which seems to be most of them in the US. A disconnect is that alcohol is illegal for under-21s, which includes many/most college students.
Then again this is also the school that fired its mascot (a student) for carrying a sign that said "Stanford Hates Fun" - thereby demonstrating the sign's accuracy.
But the greater issue is hostile and punitive policies which exacerbate student stress and depression. The pandemic was handled particularly poorly, and university policies compounded with isolation seem to have greatly harmed student mental health.
A possibly positive change is that universities seem more willing to acknowledge student suicides, and to allow students (and faculty and staff) time to grieve. Perhaps they are worried about potential liability.
The policy looks like it's only for parties held by student organizations [1], not all parties held by its students, which makes the whole thing more silly than dystopian.
> I'm surprised they allow alcohol at student organization events, period
According to the link above, "student organizations" also includes fraternities/sororities and athletic teams. Never heard of fraternities/sororities not being allowed to have alcohol at their parties before, outside of schools with a religious lean (e.g., BYU) or edge cases. I didn't go to college that long ago either, been barely 6 years since I graduated.
The only relevant thing I remember we had was a "dry week", iirc during the first week of any given semester. During "dry week", fraternities/sororities weren't allowed to have alcohol at their events, period. Which made sense, because it was also the rush week, and the school didn't want fraternities/sororities to entice students with alcohol during their recruitment week.
God, now I'm thinking about how much better our fundraisers would have been if we could have sold drink tickets, for the organizations I was involved in. And how much more I'd have cared about fundraising if we could have diverted some of the proceeds to buy ourselves alcohol "for official functions", LOL.
The original cover of The Hobbit has runes running along the outside; the runes read "The Hobbit or There and Back Again, being the record of a journey by Bilbo Baggins of Hobbiton compiled from his memoirs by JRR Tolkein and published by G?rge Allen and Unwin Ltd"[0].
I can read that because of my mum's books on doing fortune telling with Viking rune stones, which she kept near her statue of a Hindu god and some magic crystals.
At this point, calling one of the sacraments by a silly name is the least of my problems if it turns out to all be real.
(Knowing what an inscription means is actually an important real-world method of being able to read it!)
The "Z" used by Tolkien there appears to be his own invention. The whole inscription is something of a mess; a few things are put into runes by sound, but mostly a fairly strict letter-to-letter transcription is used. This is especially bad in "published", which prints an "S" followed by an "H", reflecting nothing about the actual word. (The sound in question would, in a real Anglo-Saxon text, be represented sc, not sh; Tolkien in his other documents used a mirror-reversed S rune instead.)
Only when they have gathered for the ritual at the annointed hour, when the cleric speaks the incantation does the transubstantiation occur, that they may feast upon the flesh and blood of their god.
How is requiring additional options, which are legally the only options about 75% of students can legally consume, any sort of suppression? Especially when technically only about 25% of students in a 4 year college in the US can even legally drink.
The way that university policy often works, is that for certain groups, especially "Greek Life" related groups, if you run an event that is included any members of that group, then the group could be held liable.
That leads to absurd situations where if a bunch of friends, host a party, in a privately owned residence, because the friends happen to be in the same fraternity, if anything bad happens, the fraternity could get in trouble.
And this is regardless of if the event is hosted off campus, in a privately owned place.
>Is this normal!?! I feel sorry for this generation. Attempts to make their world risk free has turned it into "fuck up once and we'll destroy you".
If the students would simply stop raping people and dying of fentanyl overdoses which lead to their parents suing the school I'm sure Stanford would not have as many rules for what occurs on campus.
Or we can choose as a society to free Stanford of civil liability for the actions of people who aren't Stanford employees on its campus.
It is normal, typical, common, and expected for universities in the United States to completely prohibit alcohol consumption on campus.
These rules seem like an attempt to regulate on-campus activities to a degree much lower than in public institutions.
Why is this guy getting downvoted. I went to college in the mid-to-late 2010s and was in Greek life. We'd be inspected by our university all the time when we'd throw parties at our Frat's house and if photos of alcohol and stuff were seen by admin we'd def face disciplinary action.
You can agree or disagree with that all you want but at least that's how a lot of universities are handling alcohol and parties on campus. Blame overlitigious parents if you have to, it makes sense to be honest as no university wants to be on the hook liability wise. Look at what happened to Stanford after Brock Turner (which is also around the time Stanford became so overbearing about campus culture)
The cost of tuition being ridiculously high means that students want to avoid getting expelled at any cost, because the financial hit is pretty damn big, you'd lose half a year to a year of tuition.
If tuition was less expensive, or free, students would be freer to not give a fuck about these ridiculous policies.
Everyone I grew up with was underage drinking none of these things you've listed happened to anyone I know. Regulating parties might be one way to lessen the chances. But I'm not sure that price is worth it.
In the US, something like 1 in 6 women have been a victim of sexual assault and only about 1 in 5 of those report the assault. It’s very likely that if you were a regular attendee of parties among teenagers where people were drinking heavily then someone was sexually assaulted. You can think nothing bad happened to anyone, but it’s just unlikely.
These are on-campus parties. Underage college drinking is still a big thing. Title is clickbait.
But gen Z (which I'm part of) has lost out on a lot of other fun things and turned antisocial on average for other reasons, some of them having to do with safety obsession.
You're straight up being disingenuous by implying that people against Stanford's safety culture are pro-sexual assualt, pro-car accident, etc. Like honestly, do you think people against these policies are legitimately evil or something?
This is such a weird article that I feel like I must not understand it. From what I can tell:
A fraternity hosted one or more parties where, by finding of fact and apparently the admission of the frat itself, they served alcohol to minors, contravening an obvious Stanford policy; as a result, they had to go through an annoying adjudication process and spend several months under the thread of a long-term suspension of the fraternity.
Contemporaneously, a student assaulted with a cup of coffee another student that she believed was himself responsible for assaulting one of her friends. Stanford began an annoying adjudication process, this time including a thread of expulsion from the school. The student committed suicide.
The latter case is, of course, a terrible tragedy. But an adjudication process doesn't seem like a disproportionate response to an assault, however minor. Stanford students are adults; transpose this setting to a workplace and there would be no adjudication at all, only an immediate termination. The story seems dead set on pinning the responsibility for the tragedy on Stanford, and Stanford may well be at fault! But it's not clear from the article how.
Meanwhile: the organizer of the frat party is less jubilant about his campus life after his frat party ran afoul of the frat party police. I feel like I have to have missed some other detail of how Stanford messed with his life, because from what I can tell, at all times in this story, he remained a Stanford student in good standing. His frat ran a risk of being prevented from hosting parties. So what?
Again: if I sound flippant here, it's likely because there is some aspect of this story that I simply don't understand.
There's quite a bit more in the story, such as this from an alumni attorney helping students anonymously accused of cheating on an exam:
The students knew Ottilie ran his own law practice and reached out for his counsel. Ottilie agreed to take the students’ case pro bono and worked with two other alumni lawyers on their defense—recreating seating charts and finding over a dozen witnesses who were willing to testify to their innocence.
Ottilie said he turned up at multiple hearings for the students only to be told by university officials he was not allowed to speak on their behalf, but could advise them from behind the scenes.
After five months of a judicial process that Ottilie describes as “biased against the students,” all three of his clients were acquitted of the charges. But the experience exposed a deep flaw in the university’s treatment of its student body, Ottilie told me.
“In the process of working with those students, we discovered that Stanford. . . was denying them of their procedural due process rights at literally every step of the process,” he said.
I get that there are process concerns here (and that people think the rules Stanford is enforcing are dumb). But the stakes seem very low: we're talking about procedural due process protecting the rights of fraternities to host parties with alcohol.
But the stakes seem very low: we're talking about procedural due process protecting the rights of fraternities to host parties with alcohol.
No? The quote is in reference to a lawyer defending students accused of cheating on an exam and facing an administrative process with no presumption of innocence or right to a proper defense. A process which could permanently destroy their college education and career prospects.
Here we're talking about a case where students were, in 2012, accused of cheating on a bio test, and not found guilty. Meanwhile: cheating is absolutely rampant --- and has presumably only gotten much, much worse since 2012.
The standards should be high in any situation where you can significantly harm a person's life trajectory, even if not in a criminal court. Getting kicked out of Stanford for cheating could definitely derail a person's life.
The overwhelming majority of high-achieving students can't get in to Stanford to begin with, so it's hard for me to understand how being asked to leave Stanford could be ruinous.
I think the core bit you've missed is: Stanford explicitly selects for perfectionists by requiring extremely high standards of (most) students. Those students have spend several years working very hard to get in, aware that even the slightest mis-step can cost them everything they've worked for. But they're surrounded by people trying to help them get in.
Then they get to Stanford and discover that the university administration is actively hostile, it's looking for reasons to get rid of imperfect students, or students that can be blamed for imperfection (anyone running a group of students that has a problem).
But that's all of life, too, isn't it? If you host a party in real life that serves alcohol to minors and get caught, you'll face more annoying consequences than a 1 year party moratorium. And, as I said, I'm pretty sure that if you deliberately dump a cup of coffee onto a coworker, you'll be fired instantly.
Two things: college is supposed to be an opportunity to learn from mistakes so making the normal consequence of any mistake the end of your career goes against that. Historically the decent young men of Stanford were able to get drunk, pull dumb stunts, embarrass themselves, then graduate and join "real life". The recent decision that sexual assault should be taken off the list of allowable "dumb stunts" is still working its way through the system, and right now we seem to be at the "major overreaction" stage.
Secondly, part of the idea of Stanford and other elite schools is to create social links so that even quite serious mistakes aren't career-ending. The idea that "your first business will fail, and that's ok" is necessary because almost all new businesses do fail. Society needs that, and since the US can't have a social safety net, we need that group of rich kids with rich friends to provide at least some people who can afford those failures.
We can argue about whether the victim of the coffee-dumping was wrong to think it was a minor thing, but hopefully we can all agree that the death penalty was a bit harsh for that offense?
Stanford students are adults (indeed, many of them aren't even young adults). It is not principally the mission of Stanford to insulate its students from consequences. We just had a story here earlier today where HN is up in arms (somewhat reasonably so) because of Stanford's refusal to visit consequences on students who protested an odious speaker. Here the consequences we're talking about are even sillier: it's the right to host official school-sanctioned parties with alcohol service. Who gives a shit?
Second, it indeed may be a subtextual benefit of Stanford that attendance cements your status among an elite (this touches on the "human capital" vs. "signaling" debate). But to whatever extent that's the case, it's a bad thing. Stanford attendance is an unimaginably rarified privilege. If Stanford's disciplinary process happens to mute some of the status benefit of making it in, so much the better.
I don't have much to say about the coffee-cup case, which is very sad, and which fortunately doesn't occupy much of the attention of this article the way the frat party case does. So: let's just focus our attention on the frat party. And in response to it, I'd just remind you of the scene in The Social Network, where the Winklevii attempt to escalate to the president of Harvard their concerns about Zuckerberg stealing the idea for ConnectU. Retaining lawyers to fight sanctions against underage drinking is that, but like 6 times dumber.
Wait, I don't think even the article is complaining that students can't host frat parties. It's about students having to deal with months of legal proceedings as a consequence when they potentially break a rule.
Your characterization of frat parties as being an asinine issue is true and exactly the reason for concern here. Legal proceedings are super shitty to go through. Your whole life basically gets mentally put on hold. If the issue in question is such a non-issue, why should it cause students to have to face that?
I think he was saying that the banning of parties with alcohol for a frat house accused of serving alcohol to minors is a mild punishment and not a notable event. I don't think he was saying that frat parties serving alcohol to minors is a non-issue. It's a pretty serious crime when you're not on a campus.
You're right, I misread. That negates my second paragraph.
Again though, the article is not complaining about parties being banned, but about the process surrounding that decision:
Dealing for months with lawyers and campus investigators drove Paulmeier, typically enthusiastic and motivated, into what he calls an “exhausted, burnt-out depression.” He told me he had gone through “a state of mental and physical exhaustion and collapse.”
Paulmeier was doing graduate-level coursework before the investigation. But by the end of spring 2022, he ended up with three incomplete classes. Normally a student who earned mostly As and Bs, he said he started his senior year in the fall by failing a class for the first time in his life.
His grades dropped so precipitously he was placed on academic probation and was in danger of failing out. Worst of all, one of his academic advisors wrote him a sympathetic letter urging him “in the strongest terms” to withdraw his honors thesis, which explored how elite colleges can reform their admissions processes to attract more students like him.
From what I understand, what happened was:
* Paulmeier hosted a party which he claims adhered to the rules.
* Allegations were made that rules were broken.
* His frat was placed on probation, along with several other frats.
* The university proceeded with a months-long investigation, throwing the weight of their legal team at the students, with actual lawyers doing lawyer things.
So basically, either accept the allegations, or go through months of legal crap. And this is going to be the standard process for resolving code of conduct disputes across the board, all the way up to and including matters involving academic suspensions (the coffee cup girl). I dunno, do we really want universities to be run this way?
> college is supposed to be an opportunity to learn from mistakes
Where did you read that? I think you're quoting your own expectations. Certainly, people should be allowed to learn from mistakes (at all stages in life), but college is not designed to shield you from consequences. Now, I don't know what dumb stunts you're referring to (stealing the opposing team's pig mascot like in a movie?) but if any stunt causes actual harm, there will be consequences.
> We can argue about whether the victim of the coffee-dumping was wrong to think it was a minor thing, but hopefully we can all agree that the death penalty was a bit harsh for that offense?
The University bears zero responsibility for her death. Unless you are suggesting that any investigation must be preceded by a mental health evaluation in case the individual has suicidal predispositions.
The university was being actively hostile towards Meyer? It seems unambiguous to me that the hostility originated with Meyer. One does not accidentally spill coffee and it just happens to land on the person your friend unsuccessfully accused of harassment out of the 10k+ students on campus. According to the university, this resulted in physical injury [1]. This isn't just the university trying to "get rid of imperfect students". Violent retaliation on account of dissatisfaction with the outcome of a sexual assault proceeding is a very significant transgression. If the university didn't sanction Meyer it would set the precedent that pouring boiling water on classmates is tolerated behavior - do you want the friends of men found responsible of sexual assault pouring boiling water on accusers if they feel the outcome was unjustified, in the same vein as what Meyer did? It's unfortunate that the university's actions seem to have prompted Meyer to take her life, but that does not mean their actions were wrong.
That said I do agree with a lot of what the article wrote. I was an undergrad at Stanford 2011-2015. The university was ramping up its control on social life around that time. Slav house was shut down my junior year, and they were already starting to tighten the reigns on band and greek life. I'm not sure what the outcome of this will be. Perhaps students will start to socialize more off campus, but that's not really feasible without a car (and the attended risks of driving under the influence).
Maybe I'm wrong, but a misdemeanor (or a meeting between the students if acceptable to both, except apparently it was an administrator and not the coffee-dampened football player who filed the complaint) might have been preferable to a 5-page single-spaced letter threatening a final-semester senior with expulsion.
"Where'd you go to school?" "7 semesters at Stanford, finishing as captain of the women's soccer team, then they expelled me a month before graduation for throwing coffee on someone who'd sexually assaulted one of my teammates."
Yeah, I'm pretty sure misdemeanor charges with a fine and maybe community service would've been preferable to threats of expulsion from VERY EXPENSIVE school you were about to graduate from. All the time, all the money, all the student loans, but no degree.
Good thing Stanford apparently makes its money on research. What are the odds ANY of the women on the soccer team she was captain of ever give money to the school as alums?
The "coffee-dampened" student was physically injured [1], according to the university. The fact that this act of violence was done on account of disagreeing with the outcome of a sexual assault proceeding does not make it less serious - quite the contrary, the fact that this was retaliation over the outcome of a proceeding makes it far more serious as it risks igniting a cycle of further escalation and retaliation. Would you have been so nonchalant if the accused was found responsible, and he poured coffee on his accuser because he felt the outcome of the proceeding was incorrect? If not, then the accused deserved the same protection from accusers dissatisfied with the outcome of sexual misconduct proceedings.
I mean supportive parents, and very likely also a supportive school and supportive community. "led a youth group" on the application doesn't arise in isolation, any more than high grades in external exams come from homeschooling (they can in both cases, but you're in the 0.1% of the 1% who get into Stanford territory).
I think the issue is making mountains out of molehills.
If you have ever been subject to the faceless institutional processes judicial, or non-judicial, they can be weaponized in a way that forgets there is a human on the receiving end. We need to be careful when things go overboard with applying the letter of the law and forgetting the spirit of it which is about justice.
Sometimes, the punishment is the process.
> Stanford now has more than 10,000 administrators who oversee the 7,761 undergraduate and 9,565 graduate students—almost enough for each student to have their own personal butler. (There are about 2,290 faculty members.) These bureaucrats make up an increasingly powerful segment of the university population, as they expand their portfolio and send the message that all conflict should be adjudicated by them. (OCS reports for the 2022–2023 school year have not yet been released.)
This bothered me, and this series of occurences in Academia sounds exactly like what is happening with medicine these days.
A bunch of administrators that are not educators ((or physicians) , or professional law enforcement, or judges, or prosectuors, all having professional, and advanced legal educations )) that desperately are in need of work to justify their raison d'être.
> But an adjudication process doesn't seem like a disproportionate response to an assault, however minor.
It’s a cup of coffee that wasn’t hot or scalding and wasn’t reported by the student but by an administrator. It’s a multi month process including outside counsel hired by the university.
It sounds entirely disproportionate in the first place. This seems like a stupid and wasteful unjust kangaroo court that was designed by people to create more work for themselves to hire more people and lawyers for make work. It doesn’t seem designed to deliver justice so what is the point.
Stanford received federal funds and a system having processed this dumb likely has other faults that should be addressed if they wish to continue receiving funds.
The article is basically saying “Stanford is really stupid” and based on this article, I agree. I don’t go to Stanford and never will do it doesn’t directly affect me other than I’m generally interested in reducing the price of college.
(1) The coffee assault apparently caused a physical injury.
(2) If you dumped so much as a cup of cold water on someone in a workplace, you'd be out on your ass that day.
I honestly don't understand what we're even debating here. This isn't middle school. These are adults, in one of the most selective institutions on the planet.
Yes. They should have left this to the police and courts and, if she gets convicted, or pleads guilty, expel her.
This also ensures there’s a proper public record for future schools or employers.
I don’t know why the author of this piece tried to wave away a felony assault. And I’m saddened that a woman who got in to Stanford doesn’t believe in due process, but instead opts for vigilante justice based on a rumor. We reap what we sow.
Zero is the number of workplaces that would wait for a police report before terminating someone for throwing a beverage. The unreality of these kinds of message board discussions when it comes to getting the police involved to settle disputes always throws me. I mean, get a police report if you want to press charges, but Stanford is under absolutely no obligation to involve the police before threatening expulsion.
Of course she should have been expelled. (And her parents are real pieces of sh* for suing the school. They should be apologizing for their daughter who made the school unsafe.)
But the Police should have been involved too. This woman needed to have her viscousness memorialized and put on public record.
The article and references does not describe any injury from the coffee. Not from the football player’s account, nor from any medical treatment.
College isn’t a workplace. And even in a workplace it depends on the circumstances. In my workplace, super regulated, if a third party claimed that someone threw coffee on someone else, no one is getting fired that day. And if they were then it would be a pretty huge wrongful termination lawsuit. The only thing that gets you “out on your ass” is if you are an immediate threat to others. So maybe if it was scalding coffee that resulted in hospitalization and the person was still on the loose throwing coffee.
But like someone else said, throwing coffee is a crime. Let the police do their job. We don’t need extra judicial investigations for reasons.
You get that there are additional sources of information beyond what the author of this article provides, right? It's not cheating to go look things up.
> transpose this setting to a workplace and there would be no adjudication at all, only an immediate termination.
One only wishes, and maybe now days that is true, but even 10 years ago this wasn't a sure thing, especially if the aggressor was at a high level in the company.
Senior year my dorm was slapped with a one month party prohibition because we had an unsanctioned party the night before school started. It was slightly annoying, but also provided the obvious theme for the permitted, sanctioned, registered party held one month later.
The rules have been changing, though. At the time, nobody was responsible for enforcing the law on drinking age except the drinker. I think the article has more appeal for people whose past fun is being stolen.
Many US colleges/universities maintain a particular kind of legal bubble, where the surrounding city/state law enforcement largely leaves college police/security to their own devices to create an environment in which students very rarely face actual legal consequences for their misdeeds. On the whole, this is generally a good thing, in that it mitigates the worst effects of a broken national drug and alcohol policy. Local law enforcement doesn't want to have to deal with the large number of student alcohol and drug-related offenses (and especially not their parents), schools want to avoid the bad publicity of their students ending up in jail, and students definitely don't want to end up in the court system either.
That is the trade you make as a student going to a prestigious private school - you won't end up in real court unless you do something incredibly egregious, but you will have to deal with the internal disciplinary process that could (but very rarely does) expel you. If you want to be a school-sanctioned student organization, living within the legal bubble, you get to play by the rules that sustain the bubble. If you don't, live off campus and take your chances with local police.
I can't take the use of "war" in this headline seriously at all. Why is everything framed so threateningly? Maybe this is a bad policy, but it seems to me they want to ensure on-campus, official student organization run, parties that serve alcohol do so responsibly and provide other drinks so people don't feel like they have to drink booze. Maybe they've gone too far in another direction, but seems something Standford and its students can hash out without it being a fan for culture war bullshit.
I don't like that either and if someone can suggest a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article itself), we'd be happy to change it.
I'm not really sure if you can do anything about it - it is the actual title of the article. I went through the site and it seems to be mostly culture war related editorial pieces, so maybe this one's just on me to not click through when I see thefp.com
How about "Standford's Orwellian Peace Against its Own Students"?
It's literally the title of the linked article. I don't think editorializing and changing titles to placate neo-Puritans is helping anyone. If you don't like the title, contact the author and ask them to amend the title.
> Stanford now has more than 10,000 administrators who oversee the 7,761 undergraduate and 9,565 graduate students—almost enough for each student to have their own personal butler. (There are about 2,290 faculty members.) These bureaucrats make up an increasingly powerful segment of the university population, as they expand their portfolio and send the message that all conflict should be adjudicated by them. (OCS reports for the 2022–2023 school year have not yet been released.)
Lead to this:
> “I’m sitting in two-hour-long interviews on Zoom with lawyers who are trying to verbally and rhetorically trap people,” he said. “I had young kids that were 18, 19 years old who are international asking me, ‘Hey, can I talk to this attorney and tell them I drank a beer, or am I going to get my visa revoked?’ ”
I guess if you can't make it as a student there, you can always become an admin to bully those who put the work in to get admitted?
That 10k number doesn't even sound impossible, knowing what we know about large universities now, but I just wonder where it came from. Maybe I'm missing something obvious on that PDF?
> “If I didn’t get into Stanford, I probably wasn’t going to go to college,” he told me.
> he returned for his junior year in the fall of 2021 hoping to salvage a sense of community and camaraderie
> host a party at his fraternity, Kappa Sigma, where he was now president
Is he a student, or is he LARPing some idealised college experience he saw in a movie?
> Party hosts must also provide “EANABs,” or Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages, to “contribute to an inclusive and inviting experience” for all partygoers. Hosts are also required to take an online “Party Planning Course” before submitting their applications.
My understanding is that stanford doesn't really have "off-campus". Everyone lives on campus. As far as whether he partied too much, that's kind of the point of college to probably more than half of students in America. Not to learn academics but to network with peers.
As I reminisced on an earlier post about the chilling atmosphere for students at Stanford, the situation was a mite different in the 1970s. My first day there as a callow freshman from the Midwest, the cool guy next door in the dorm kindly approached me and muttered "Hey kid, you want a hit of hash?"
The one inviolable rule for university housing at the time was "no growing of pot plants in a dorm room facing the street". Otherwise, cheerful anarchism prevailed, mixed with some anti-war near mayhem. Good times, indeed.
> “He decided not to hire an outside lawyer for his defense because he said he was confident the allegations were nothing more than misunderstandings.”
I’m not sure how you expect to be able to get a huge settlement out of Stanford with no lawyer, but best of luck to you, brother.
I love the covid angle thrown in for dramatic effect-- "poor students wanted the parties to get over covid blues and look how the college is punishing them!! Evil College!" My immigrant 0.02$-- if you care about building a life, being a frat president or organizing parties are optional activities. But then again, I also don't get why college football coaches are paid more than CS professors...
Cynically I think that the university spending lots on billable hours makes these types of investigations more likely to continue and grow.
It seems like universities having infinite money through their endowments lets them fund stupid projects like these investigations and a near 1:1 student to admin ratio.
This seems like something like alumni and benefactors can help by requiring some governance of this stupid pork. Or maybe federal funds will not pay for orgs that spend more on admin than teaching or research.
> I discovered that 2004 was Peak Booze: the year when Brits drank more than they had done for a century, and more than they have done in the decade since. Leading the way to this alcoholic apogee were those of us born around 1980. No other generation drank so much in their early 20s. Why us?
> Everyone in alcohol research knows the graph. It plots the change in annual consumption of alcohol in the UK, calculated in litres of pure alcohol per person. (None of us drinks pure alcohol, thankfully; one litre of pure alcohol is equivalent to 35 pints of strong beer.) In 1950, Brits drank an average of 3.9 litres per person. Look to the right and at first the line barely rises. Then, in 1960, it begins to creep upward. The climb becomes steadier during the 1970s. The upward trajectory ends in 1980, but that turns out to be temporary. By the late 1990s consumption is rising rapidly again.
> Come Peak Booze, in 2004, we were drinking 9.5 litres of alcohol per person – the equivalent of more than 100 bottles of wine – each year.
As someone who comes from central Europe and lived in UK for a few years I say this - UK is not particularly alcoholic. It's the drinking culture which is terrible and I think it's due to 2 facts:
- pubs close early - if you want a pub open longer than till 11 pm you need a more expensive license. I was told it's a remnant of a WWII policy when they needed workers ready in the morning to work in factories. Anyway the places which stay oper are more expensive. This encourages binge drinking. If you drink 8 lagers in 2 hours because the club you go to afterwards is twice as expensive you get pretty drunk. If you spaced it out between 9 pm and 4 am you would be fine.
- very strict enforcement of no alcohol till 18. When the teens turn 18 and get access to alcohol they get shitfaced. I started drinking at home or at pubs at 15 and I learned how much I can safely drink. It also took off the forbidden fruit badge. Try any UK high street on Friday 11 pm, there UK doesn't seem to have bright future :-)
Agree with you on that! UK's drinking culture seemed extremely toxic.
I've been to London several times for work and meeting extended family, and socializing almost always seemed to heavily revolve around alcohol there - let's go to the pub nearby for a couple pints, oh it's 3pm at this trade show let's start serving hard liquor and beer, fellow 20somethings entire free time spent while clubbing or over boozy brunches.
As a San Franciscan that's honestly insane - people I chat with talk more about which raves or ski slopes or state parks they're gunna check out and maybe have 1 strong IPA beer or some Soju and then call it a night.
I think it’s the opposite. Alcohol is one of the most destructive forces in our modern society and we mostly all accept it very casually because a huge proportion of is are in denial about our personal addiction.
They’ve clearly ratcheted up the enforcement, EANABs did not used to be mandated (except maybe having water available?), and underage drinking was only a problem for the person doing it if they got caught outside with an open container or biking while drunk.
While I was there there was an “open door” drinking policy for freshmen. Meaning RAs would not stop you from drinking anything you chose but wanted the doors open so they could intervene quickly if someone got alcohol poisoning. It’s my understanding that hard alcohol is now banned so people just close the door.
Specific policies aside it’s clear from their actions that the university wants to purge student control from housing or social organizations. They unceremoniously eliminated the European theme houses, ended student control of band, have been picking the frats off one by one. The coops are probably next on the chopping block.
Talk about burying the lede, the article is 4000 words deep before they mention that the draconian party requirements were implemented after an unconscious student was raped behind a dumpster at a frat party in 2015.
And these fraternities are housed on campus, as far as I can tell. The university is entitled to impose whatever requirements it likes on social clubs that use university property. And administrators are justified in taking a harsh stance against a category of clubs that have a long rap sheet for sexual assault, hazing, and extreme binge drinking. It would be unethical for administrators to not take action.
As other posters have pointed out these rules are in fact liberal by university standards. Many universities ban alcohol from undergrad social events entirely, others are completely dry across the board.
The traditional approach would be for the frats to move off campus if they don’t like the rules, but that’s not possible because Palo Alto, so instead they’re trying to do culture war special pleading in conservative media.
I didn't attend Stanford, but I've been on campus a zillion times for various functions (cultural events, choir, extension classes).
It's not like most colleges. There's no big group of off-campus apartment buildings that nearly all upperclassmen live in.
Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages is, without doubt, the most nanny-ish rule ever invented ("What? You only have Coke? That's not equally attractive! I'm writing you up.")
Image-conscious corporatization of academics is a strange spectacle, certainly. Enforcing strict behavioral norms is something large corporations are known for, and that seems to be what's going on here.
> "...only over the past decade has the school gone all-in on an ecosystem of startup-supporting programs, turning classrooms into job fairs and students into entrepreneurs-to-be, and effectively handing the keys of the campus to venture capitalists....The most important support system today is the network of people — and cash — who now populate and surround the institution, hunting for investments."
That's what students (more likely their parents) are now forking over $56K in tuition (not counting cost-of-living expenses) per year to gain access to. It certainly looks like the rise of elitist networking in the British Eton etc. school model. The recent spate of college-admission-payola scandals also point in that direction.
Consider this writer's observation then juxtapose the crazy incident involving the Fifth Circuit Judge protest just a few day prior to publication of this article. It seems like a tale of two very different institutions. One where the students are victimized by a ruthless bureaucracy, and the other where the students are the true menace. The only common factor is a twisted administrative state.
I can understand how the "Stanford Student Party Policy" emerged and evolved (my own dorm at MIT was summarily shut down by the administration) though I do think it's a shame.
But I've attended several parties at Stanford faculty housing that were ragers, exceeding my own undergraduate memories (except no live bands). These are also on campus in the suburban faculty neighborhoods where tenured profs live. I'm even invited to one tonight that I expect will be lit (though I won't be there).
Yes, they do have "EANABs" but that's just because the hosts are grownups, and have kids so such things are table stakes.
I disagree with this author’s description of Meyer.
> But in August 2020, Meyer rode her bike past a football player who she believed engaged in sexual misconduct with one of her younger teammates. Suddenly and impulsively, she spilled the coffee she was holding onto him.
Impulsively throwing coffee on someone in the name of a #MeToo rumor. It's a tragedy she killed herself, but she also shouldn't assault people. An impulsive assault is still an assault. Shame on The Free Press for not seeing this. And shame on Stanford for not letting police and courts handle this. If she gets convicted of assault, expel her. Don’t do the “kangaroo court” thing.
The exact same thing happened/is happening at Carnegie Mellon. To the school, the undergraduates are nothing but PR and legal liabilities, therefore any fun or social life must be eradicated.
This is why fraternities need to begin pulling themselves away from these institutions. There is no upside to being affiliated with a university anymore.
I don't see what's the point of the article. It is supposed to be weird that uni bans alcohol from uni parties? At my uni being drunk was an instant expulsion without right to appeal, I don't see what's wrong with it. If you disagree, you don't have to study there.
Sounds like a combination of significant changes in student policies and enforcement over the last 40-50 years (accelerating in the last 20-25?) combined with very bureaucracy- and process-heavy set of enforcement mechanisms.
Editorializing a bit, this may reflect general social changes in the US - schools are seen as being "in loco parentis" though many of the students are legally adults, and parenting in the US has changed in the last 40 years from "go play at the park with your friends, but be back by sunset" to helicopter parenting and the very thought of unsupervised children at a park being something deserving of reports to Child Protective Services.
So, now the school is helicopter-"in loco parentis"ing, and covering its butt with paper to shield it from the actual helicopter parents.
I've been trying to compare the various football codes (soccer, american, gaelic, australian, etc). Mostly as a way to try to make up new codes. Get a big chart together, find permutations, viola, new game. It's going okay-ish.
However, when you start diving into this you run into where these games originated. And they mostly come out of the 'public' schools around London in the later part of the 1700s. What's amazing is that a lot of these codes are still played to this day. You can find YT videos of them, drone shots, the works.
One of the strangest ones is called the 'Eton Wall Game'[0]. The rules are pretty simple. You and 11 other 'friends' get together along a 100 meter long wall and smash into 12 of the other blokes. There's a ball too. That's pretty much it. The wiki is a bit funny when it compares it to rugby, since the Wall Game was invented 57 years beforehand.
But the culture of the Eton Wall Game (and we're coming back to the article now) is what is just bonkers (pardon the pun). The 'big game' is on Saint Andrew's Day, November 30th (and you do have to call out the Gregorian calendar now, as it's so old). Here the Collegers and Oppidans play each other for bragging rights.
An aside on UK 'public schools': These are, in US terms, very much very elite private schools. Only the richest of the rich go to these places. Like, I think every UK prime minister went to one of these few schools, many royals too. They are also, and this is important to remember, for ages 12-17 and almost exclusively male. At Eton, they all wear top hats and tails to class, as far as I can tell, every single day. They speak latin. It's like just totally wild to me here in 2023. Boris Johnson was the 'keeper' of the aforementioned Wall when he was there as a Colleger. Gives the Catholic Church a run on sticking to tradition. Also the Collegers number just 70 students, so I think just 10 in each year (not entirely certain here). Oppidans run about 1200 students, I think. But, I'm a rando from the US, so I know very little here about how things are post covid and whatnot. Etonians, please chime in.
Back to the Wall Game. I want to remind that this is a predecessor game to soccer and rugby. It's like a coelacanth of sports. The Wall itself is on a field 'controlled' by the Collegers, so they are the ones that can practice on it. Not entirely sure about how that is ... possible for 12-17 year olds, but that's the super rich for you. The poor-boy Oppidans then hop over the wall, the Collegers walk up arm in arm, they then bash each other against the wall like so many pencil erasers for 50 minutes. The game is limited to the oldest boys, so just the 16 and 17 year olds. Scoring is seemingly rare and complicated. Suffice to say, a true-blue goal in the St Andrew's Day 'big game' was last scored in 1909, like over 100 years ago. Really. Also, these 'goals are just a shed door and a tree that's starting to get old now. Like I said, a living fossil of sports.
You'd think that the Collegers having the ability stop the Oppidans from, you know, practicing, would put a damper on the Oppidans chances, right? (And now here is where we get back to the OP article). But no! Because culture.
As far as my internet research can take me, it is tradition for the Collegers to be completely hungover during the game. Sometimes they have missed the game entirely.
Hang on a second. Hungover? Yes! The night before is a huge bash for the Collegers. They all get drunk, the only adult headmastery-person in charge leaves for the night to escape the riot, and the drunken older boys then go about terrorizing the younger ones, including beatings and strippings. I don't know what the last few years of reading the news has done to you, but drunk 16+ year olds without any adult supervision (culture) that are, like, super-hazing the younger boys is not a, let's say, bright place. Yes, okay, that's a dark place. I am not saying that assaults happen (because I do not have any evidence that I could lazily find online), but come on.
As far as I can tell, this has been going on for centuries. The current heir to the throne of England and his brother both went through this particular school. Like, most of the heads of the UK government went through this system and culture, these dark places, for years during their most formative times. After this dive into a strange little game, I don't wonder about the debacle that was Brexit.
So, bringing this all back to Stanford. Look, it's one of the elite schools here in the US. The culture of this school, like it or not, really does shape the minds of the future leaders of the US and beyond. When the admins do things to these young adults, whether by malice or beneficence or accident, then that has huge effects downrange. Making all these kids into nervous purebreds sure is a lot better than St. Andrew's Eve at Eton, but it's not the best thing either.
I don't know how the pressure is going to get let out, but it's gotta happen somehow. Otherwise we end up broken leaders like the UK has.
There are quite a few sites whose content is mostly skewed but which occasionally publish good articles that, for whatever reason, wouldn't get published by less tendentious sites. Our approach is to downweight such sites but not to ban them, and to turn the penalty off when an article seems good for HN—that is, intellectually interesting and not too repetitive of what has been discussed recently. Needless to say (I hope?), we do this irrespective of ideological orientation, so you'll find articles appearing here from all kinds of sources.
The longer we've had this policy, the better I think it's held up. For a community organized around intellectual curiosity, it's super important not to miss interesting outlier articles. Finding something interesting doesn't imply that one agrees with it, and turning off the penalty on a particular submission doesn't imply that one endorses everything else on a site.
Guilt by association has pros and cons—it can be a useful shortcut, but fails badly when it does fail, and when applied repeatedly it has a slippery-slope downside that can get pretty bad. Still, I don't think your argument is wrong; I just think it's a tradeoff and the question is which side of the tradeoff one should take.
In HN's case, many tradeoffs are resolvable by remembering that there's only one thing we're trying to optimize for*: intellectual curiosity. I think this principle (of evaluating articles rather than sites) follows pretty easily from that.
I find the Guardian's ideology annoying most of the time, but I occasionally click through HN links to their articles. When I find an interesting one that I might not have found elsewhere, I PayPal them $5. I probably give them $15 a year in that manner. So, thanks, and keep it up.
I think this article is a tough case. This is an interesting and intellectually curious article, but it is not separable completely from the rest of the website - there is a large "EXTRA! Listen to 'The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling'" which is ideological flamebait that would not be allowed on HN, along with most of the rest of the website.
Has HN ever considered amending the "original source" policy to use the internet archive rather than the original for specific websites which are almost completely flamebait but do sometimes have good quality articles?
> This is an interesting and intellectually curious article, but it is not separable completely from the rest of the website
It sounds like we're agreeing. See what I wrote above about tradeoffs; I was editing and might have added it after you posted (sorry).
> there is a large "EXTRA! Listen to 'The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling'" which is ideological flamebait that would not be allowed on HN, along with most of the rest of the website
Yes, that's one problem with tendentious sites: it's hard to evaluate an article independently of the provocations one encounters in situ. I think that's what we have to do, though. It's probably helpful to remember that this approach ends up irritating everyone in the long run—that is, whatever any reader's buttons are, something's going to occasionally appear on HN that pushes them—at least, if we're applying the policy correctly.
> use the internet archive rather than the original
I don't think that would help; it would just push the provocation to a different spot under the carpet. For example we'd get second-order flamewars about why site X was getting that treatment but not site Y. And I think it's pretty core to HN to have the (original) domain displayed beside a title.
"Witch Trials" I read as more tongue-in-cheek than provocative, given the content of the Harry Potter books. A decent pun, by my standards.
I already listened to much of it, but gave up on the 5th episode in frustration. For a podcast series about J.K. Rowling, there is very little of her voice in it. It's mostly audio from an interview recorded a year or more ago that has been padded out immensely by inclusion of often-immaterial commentary from frankly bloggers and video streamers. Judging by accent, almost all are Americans, not British, and their analyses are invariably superficial. Essentially, the interviewer asks them to give an impression of what was happening years ago on the online fora where they were spending their time.
If they just released the audio for the interview alone, only interrupting for adding context and not commentary, it would be interesting. A desire, I think, to milk it for all it's worth ruined it for me.
And to the point of the original article posted, whatever you think of its contents, my God was it badly written!
If anything, "The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling" is intellectually rich and fascinating. Almost everybody who bothered to open their minds and actually listen to it is incredibly positive about it. It's incredibly thorough. Not only does it discuss the controversy from different angles, it also does a deep dive on the roots of online activism. It's near impossible to not learn something from it.
It's not "ideological flamebait", it's a well-researched master piece.
Had you given some right-wing/left-wing cheap shot, you'd have a point, but this isn't it. Perhaps the time you spent on silencing articles or entire publications should be spent on actual curiosity.
It's not against intellectual curiosity to avoid flamebait. Based on your recommendation I wanted to give this a chance, but as it's hours of podcast without transcript that's unlikely.
"The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling" seems to qualify as clickbait, it's title is intended to provoke, while reading the podcast episode summaries it seems to be well researched and interesting. I admit, I did not research it beyond the provocative title and that most other articles on the site are ideological flamebait.
It's usually not worth it. And this equally applies to publications with a left-liberal bent, like say the Washington Post. I appreciate the rec, though.
Thanks for admitting that you had not even bothered to listen to it yet confidently labelled it as ideological flamebait regardless, and then used this made-up assessment in a discussion with this site's admin to suppress another article.
I honestly appreciate your recommendation, it encouraged me to look past a clickbait title. It was a poor example but dang charitably understood me and I don't regret asking.
I don't think it's necessary to be this combative, and I think it's responses like these that encourage people to never admit any wrong on the internet. HN typically _tries_ to be above this.
I didn't try to suppress any articles, but I do encourage you to suppress your anger, because, it's probably not worth it :)
Your hypocrisy angered me, in particular because it puts you on the side of the problem: dysfunctional discourse in politics, anti-intellectualism, suppression and silencing based on a whim, etc.
I was firm but not out of hate. I was hoping that you'd take it as a lesson learned whether you would publicly admit to that or not. It's admirable that you did. We all make mistakes and we're not static creatures.
This conversation is progress.
Further, I'm dutch and from the 80s. This would actually be my most well-behaved mild tone on a good day. A special adaptation for HN.
Thanks. I really am not advocating for silencing but this site is meant to be a relatively curated list, there are plenty of places to go to view political/ideological content. It's not silencing to suggest that something might not belong here.
Since I may have you emotionally captive here, I'm really curious:
What is your strategy for separating interesting wheat from flamebait chaff? I try to do my "due diligence" but it is exhausting and frequently frustrating to follow what appears to be clickbait and see where it lands. But I'm a'merican zoomer so maybe that's, just, not my vibe, or whatever.
Care to back that up with any facts or is it just because you disagree with her?
From what I've read she's a pretty run-of-the-mill liberal who's had some disagreements with the current orthodoxy of the left. That doesn't make her a tiki-torch bearing radical.
Since leaving nyt and even shortly before she's been almost completely focused on the censorship-of-conservatives moral panic and the anti trans crusade. Moderate-right and far-right projects respectively. She uses her newsletter to publish and amplify voices of the right, and writes from their perspective about issues they care about.
I think your mistake is thinking in terms of a left-right divide. It's very possible for people to have a mixture of opinions. Dismissing this as moral panic is just silly.
I'm not trying to ascertain the true politics of her soul or her exact x-coordinate on a political plane or whatever. I'm saying she does a lot of right wing shit so can be reasonably described as right wing regardless of her previous professional affiliations or statements about her political preferences.
There's nowhere else to go if you do not subscribe to left wing orthodoxy. Even centrists and center-left nowadays aren't ideologically pure enough, and thus also "right-wing".
Recently a feminist on Twitter expressed this problem quite well. She was pushing back against the toxic parts of radical feminism which she considered counter productive. But in doing so, got a lot of heat from the radicals. She's very much left-wing, progressive, and reasonable. The side effect of her pushing back against left-wing extremism is that she gained a lot of attention from the right wing. Actual right wing, not "anybody that slightly disagrees".
She didn't ask for that nor does she want to chose between these two extremes, but that's the dynamic right now.
That sounds like an interesting dynamic but not really relevant to bari weiss consistently endorsing right wing positions and figures and so being accurately described as a rightwing attention seeker, which was the original topic.
I don't know anything about the specific situation you're alluding to so can't responsibly comment. But "the leftists made me turn to the right" has been an excuse as long as I can remember and it's a thin one. Radicals simply aren't responsible for the actions their opponents choose to take.
It's not "leftists made me turn right" in all cases, it's also formerly progressive points (equality instead of equity, freedom of speech, science over safetyism) shifting into being seen as right-wing positions. The position didn't change, the label did.
As to whether this is the case with Weiss, supposedly not. I believe you.
Radicals may not be responsible for the actions of opponents, but for sure they are accountable. Or at the very least deal with the predictable back-lash.
> it's also formerly progressive points shifting into being seen as right-wing positions.
This is just the nature of these things. They aren't fixed. They're descriptions of views of different groups of people at a certain time, and change with time.
My childhood overlapped with the aftermath and social remnants of jim crow. Back then, there, a moderate position was that integration was inevitable and necessary for technical constitutional law reasons and to prevent wider upheaval, but that it should not have been welcomed and was allowed to progress too quickly. Only a radical leftist would hold that black and white people were fundamentally equal and the law and social norms must be immediately brought to respect that.
Within my memory, a centrist position was that gay men should be medically treated for that "disorder" rather than pursued criminally for it. A radical leftist position was that they should be allowed to openly participate as full members of society without restriction.
You're right that what is considered left or right changes. Center positions do often become far right positions with time. Sorry lol. It still isn't the fault of leftists.
I'd say you're cherry picking the exact examples where a radically left position ultimately became mainstream. That strongly implies that radical left positions are correct, fruitful and destined to become the norm if only given enough time.
In reality it's much more of a mixed bag. Some ideas are impractical, downright destructive or achieve the exact opposite.
Unappealing unhinged ideas that alienate large groups and act as the perfect recruitment tool for the right wing? Absolutely the fault of leftists.
Hacker news doesn't exist purely to curate tech articles. It's really for anything that people here find interesting. There are countless posts here every day that are about systems or policy or non-tech science or just simply something thought provoking.
Ironically, the guidelines specifically allow non-technology stories, but advise against complaining about non-technology submissions. So, if you want to be a stickler about the rules, check out the guidelines document, already linked.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
I am just extremely salty because in my experience there is a clear right-leaning bias on HN for when politics is allowed. By allowed I mean not flagged. I am very much an indie, but I find this HN characteristic really unfun.
Party hosts must also provide “EANABs,” or Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages, to “contribute to an inclusive and inviting experience” for all partygoers. Hosts are also required to take an online “Party Planning Course” before submitting their applications. "
Is this normal!?! I feel sorry for this generation. Attempts to make their world risk free has turned it into "fuck up once and we'll destroy you".