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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21929 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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I read a long essay about how Stanford was crushing social life, somewhat relevant

https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-life/

What happened at Stanford is a cultural revolution on the scale of a two-mile college campus. In less than a decade, Stanford’s administration eviscerated a hundred years of undergraduate culture and social groups. They ended decades-old traditions. They drove student groups out of their houses. They scraped names off buildings. They went after long-established hubs of student life, like fraternities and cultural theme houses. In place of it all, Stanford erected a homogenous housing system that sorts new students into perfectly equitable groups named with letters and numbers. All social distinction is gone.

Unlike Harvard, which abruptly tried to ban “single-gender social organizations” and was immediately sued by alumni, Stanford picked off the Greek life organizations one by one to avoid student or alumni pushback. The playbook was always the same. Some incident would spark an investigation, and the administration would insist that the offending organization had lost its right to remain on campus. The group would be promptly removed.

When Stanford could not remove a student organization for bad behavior, they found other justifications. One such case was the end of Outdoor House, an innocuous haven on the far side of campus for students who liked hiking. The official explanation from Stanford for eliminating the house was that the Outdoor theme “fell short of diversity, equity and inclusion expectations.” The building formerly known as Outdoor House was added to Neighborhood T.

Lonely, frustrated students are less safe than happy ones. Within four weeks of school starting, ten students had to be taken off-campus to get their stomachs pumped, a Stanford record for alcohol-related “transports” in such a short period of time. Occasionally, my Row house is rented for parties which are always overrun with freshman and sophomores. They’re not particularly good ones; still, I see freshmen in the corner of the events, drinking until they pass out. Despite the safety rhetoric, the new atomized campus culture isn’t even safer.

They’re not particularly good ones; still, I see freshmen in the corner of the events, drinking until they pass out. Despite the safety rhetoric, the new atomized campus culture isn’t even safer.

That makes perfect sense to me. My memory of freshman year at a school that had a big Greek system, but I wasn't in it, was a lot of really crappy "parties" like that. The students wanted to socialize, meet people, and have fun, but no one really knew how to do it. Partly because they were all 18 and didn't have money or a proper space for it, but also because they just literally didn't know how to throw a good party. So you ended up with these shitty "parties" that were just kids sitting around drinking, hoping that if they got drunk enough it would magically start becoming fun. Also way too crowded and hot, so the drinking was a way to handle social anxiety.

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