Stanford’s War on Social Life
Palladium | GINEVRA DAVIS
An account of how Stanford, once a quirky school that combined brainy kids with a Californian free spirit to create a culture of spontaneity, individual difference, community and rule-breaking, has since been molded by bureaucrats into a controlled and equitable uniformity. “Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus, a growing administrative bureaucracy has destroyed almost all of Stanford’s distinctive student culture…what happened at Stanford is a cultural revolution on the scale of a two-mile college campus.”
“[Stanford’s] new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting.”
