Abigail Schott-Rosenfield – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Mon, 02 Apr 2018 21:23:13 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-DailyIcon-CardinalRed.png?w=32 Abigail Schott-Rosenfield – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Civilization and its disconsents https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/01/civilization-and-its-disconsents/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/01/civilization-and-its-disconsents/#respond Sun, 01 Apr 2018 22:59:04 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1138541 Appearances to the contrary, consent politics is based not on “radical openness” but on occlusion. It systematically obscures the real conditions that make it impossible for us to own our bodies, by shutting down attempts to inquire into those conditions and become partisans for change.

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Everyone is familiar by now with the basic propositions of “consent politics”: “You have agency. You own your body. You own your story.” That’s a quote from Stanford’s Director of Positive Sexuality, but the sentiment is ubiquitous. To have agency means to have signed off on the deed to your own body and to exercise your inalienable right to declare opinions. Others may trespass on your body and in your personal narrative only to the extent that you let them. Consent, freely and affirmatively given, should be at the heart of any interpersonal interaction — sexual or otherwise.

Rape and sexual assault are the bad dreams of this notion of agency. They present problems it can never really address, no matter how hard it tries to camouflage that fact. If I own my body, how is it that it remembers the alien impact of trauma long after the traumatic event has passed? If I own my story, how is it that I have so little control over the circumstances in which it takes place?

When consent is violated, two responses prevail. The first is to capture the perpetrator and put him under the thumb of the law, however unsatisfying this may be. He has trespassed on another’s body, so he loses the right to his own. The second is to establish communal storytelling rites, which can give a kind of satisfaction: the queasy pleasure of airing wounds in public. Couching past trauma in narrative terms, the story goes, proves we have mastered it. In the process of listening, we learn everyone’s unique version of what’s “real and true.” Each version is equally (exchangeably) valid and is thus to be “respected” (not necessarily believed).

Both of these responses leave the “your body, your story” idea of agency intact. They fail to answer the questions posed above, questions unavoidable for any survivor of assault. This is why, appearances to the contrary, consent politics is based not on “radical openness” but on occlusion. It systematically obscures the real conditions that make it impossible for us to own our bodies, by shutting down attempts to inquire into those conditions and become partisans for change.

To see how this works in the realm of communal storytelling, let’s take the example of “Beyond Sex Ed,” an ongoing project at Stanford. Here, students take a course on constructing brief narratives about their sexual experiences, ranging from pedestrian to tragic. Last September, they presented these stories at MemAud, their individual tales sandwiched by commentary from the SARA office’s Director of Positive Sexuality. In her words, the purpose of the event was to reveal our traumas by “turning ourselves inside out,” thus discovering “what’s real and true for you.” In this circuit of “empathy” and “respect,” we feel “what it’s like to be human.”

Let’s take these propositions point by point, starting with the title “Director of Positive Sexuality.” The criterion of “positivity” implies not just that some kinds of sex are more pleasurable than others, but that some kinds of sex are worth more than others. All sex can be indexed to an already-existing metric. But whose metric? Who, or what, assigns sex its value?

We will return to this question in a moment. But first, let us be clear that any attempt to describe sex in the last instance as positive or negative is doomed to failure. There will always be a dimension of sex that escapes evaluation, that cannot be described as good or bad, weird or normal. Sex takes place, finally, as a break in fantasy, a glitch between imagination and embodiment. To say sex is essentially, interchangeably valuable is to conflate an abstraction with the whole of material reality.

Nevertheless, that is the illusion to which the Director carefully attends when she speaks of “human flourishing”: According to a Harvard study she cited in her opening remarks, youthful experiences of “warmth, intimacy, empathic capacity” predict success on the index of “human flourishing” well into later life. The human flourishing index, you may be glad to hear, accounts for income — the ultimate measure of positivity. Enough human flourishing points and you’ll be a 100 percent positive human, one presumes.

So how can you earn human flourishing credits? If you are unlucky enough to have been marred by an absence of warmth and intimacy, but still want to “feel what it’s like to be human,” you should turn yourself “inside out” (by telling your story). It’s jarring, to say the least, to hear a representative of the SARA office command, “Expose yourselves!” But on the market of sex, everything must become legible, communicable. Once a story can be told, you own it, and once you own it, you can sell it.

In fact, you must sell it. Because we are not really the ones this process is supposed to heal. It is, rather, the imaginary body of the “Stanford community” or “campus discourse” — something which has never existed except as semblance (what we think others are thinking). We must sacrifice ourselves to the body of this civilization to make it whole again. The painful, rupturing, fundamentally meaningless real of trauma must be forced to mean something. And what it means is always determined in advance: “everything’s okay, I’m right here.

All this is in no way to condemn the brave, difficult and necessary labor survivors do to discuss and understand and mourn their experiences. It is, however, to say that storytelling is not inherently political, radical or even helpful. Rather, it occupies an ambiguous position between healing and theatrical reentrenchment of a dangerous and hypocritical ethos. We must move not just “beyond sex ed,” but beyond consent as the foundation of our sexual politics.

I do not consent. I am disconsented.

I disconsent to the circulation of femininity on the mass market. I disconsent to registering my displeasure with the Office of Positive Sexuality. I disconsent to an ideal of the human that relies on commonsensical fellow-feeling, a humanity that “runs in my blood.”

What makes me human is not my innate ability to feel pain, to empathize, to have “normal” and “good” sex. It bears repeating: The glorification of “nature,” human or otherwise, has nothing to offer us! I was not born into my humanity, just as I was not born into ownership of my body, as though it were an inherited legacy. To be human is a laborious process requiring constant modification of what we thought possible, a process belonging to no one in particular.

It belongs, that is, to my fellow disconsented. We are the glitch in the fantasy and we cannot be evaluated. Arm yourselves, xenofeminists: only inhuman modification of our cosmic bodies will shield us from the consent towards which we are (t)ruthlessly pressed.

 

The reader is encouraged to view the article online and follow its hyperlinks.

Abigail Schott-Rosenfield posts on Chi Phi, an international platform for rationalist feminism. It recently spawned a workshop, “If Nature Is Unjust, Change Nature!”, held at Ng House. Contact Chi Phi at chiphidelity ‘at’ gmail.com.

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Students protest Palestine occupation, recent violence https://stanforddaily.com/2015/10/19/students-protest-palestine-occupation-recent-violence/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/10/19/students-protest-palestine-occupation-recent-violence/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2015 08:08:00 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1105137 Black duct tape over their mouths and cardboard signs bearing slogans in their hands, students gathered silently on the White Plaza stage Friday to protest the occupation of Palestine and the recent eruption of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

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(ABIGAIL SCHOTT-ROSENFIELD/The Stanford Daily)
(ABIGAIL SCHOTT-ROSENFIELD/The Stanford Daily)

Black duct tape over their mouths and cardboard signs bearing slogans in their hands, students gathered silently on the White Plaza stage Friday to protest the occupation of Palestine and the recent eruption of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) — a student group working toward justice and the recognition of universal rights in Israel and Palestine — organized the protest, which was attended by members of many other student organizations.

The action aimed both to honor those who have lost their lives in this month’s events and to show that these events are part of a broader context of years of Israeli occupation, said Fatima Zehra ’17, co-facilitator of SJP.

“We want to…shed light on the fact that this occupation has been going on for years, and so this conflict is a symptom of that rather than a cause to maintain the occupation,” said Zehra.

“Settler colonialism has killed 7 Israelis and 32 Palestinians this month,” read one protester’s sign. Other slogans included “Israel is an apartheid state” and “Stop Israeli militarism.”

A banner spread over the steps of the stage quoted Nelson Mandela: “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Many protesters duct-taped their mouths to symbolize the harassment and intimidation that pro-Palestine activists encounter on college campuses, as well as media silence on the topic of Palestine, said Kenneth Tea ’17, also an SJP co-facilitator.

“At Stanford, we have friends who have been called terrorists, members of Al-Qaeda, just for being more vocal than they’re expected to be,” said Tea.

“Because we think dialogue hasn’t really done much for the emancipation of Palestinians, we’re accused of being violent, militant, divisive,” added Zehra.

Cardinal for Israel (CFI), a student group dedicated to celebrating Israel’s achievements, hosted a vigil Sunday to commemorate Israelis killed this month. Zehra, however, found CFI’s emails advertising the event problematic because of they called Israelis who had been killed “victims of terror.”

“There’s implicit racism in that, because it’s like, all Palestinian Arabs are terrorists, as opposed to mentioning the 39 Palestinians who have lost their lives because of the [Israeli Defense Force],” said Zehra.

Every death resulting from the conflict is grievable and tragic, said Zehra, but these deaths must be examined in context.

“You can’t commit extrajudicial executions, home demolitions, you can’t maintain the illegal wall, you can’t bring in settlements and then name the people who are revolting as terrorists. There has to be some form of accountability,” Zehra said.

The protest gained support from so many other student groups — MEChA, the Black Student Union and Stanford Students for Queer Liberation among them — because these groups see parallels between their communities’ historical experience of state-sponsored violence and occupation and the experience of Palestinians, said Zehra.

As of Sunday, eight Israelis and over 40 Palestinians have been killed in this month’s eruption of violence, with many others wounded.

 

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Sigma Chi put on social probation for serving alcohol to minors https://stanforddaily.com/2015/10/05/sigma-chi-put-on-social-probation-for-serving-alcohol-to-minors/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/10/05/sigma-chi-put-on-social-probation-for-serving-alcohol-to-minors/#respond Mon, 05 Oct 2015 07:08:43 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1104296 Sigma Chi has been put on social probation for the duration of fall quarter as a result of an investigation by the Office of Community Standards, which found that the fraternity served alcohol to minors.

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(CATALINA RAMIREZ-SAENZ/The Stanford Daily)
(CATALINA RAMIREZ-SAENZ/The Stanford Daily)

Sigma Chi has been put on social probation for the duration of fall quarter as a result of an investigation by the Office of Community Standards (OCS), which found that the fraternity served alcohol to minors.

As a result, Sigma Chi is suspended from hosting social events for the remainder of the quarter. Drinking alcohol in public areas in the house is also banned, and all members of the fraternity will attend Office of Alcohol Policy and Education sessions.

The investigation was initiated last spring due to concerns of hazing during the pledge process last fall, but revealed no evidence of hazing, according to Sigma Chi president Johann Simpson ’16.

“I think the national fraternity has made a lot of changes in terms of saying that Sigma Chi doesn’t promote hazing, so when this was brought forward they looked into it, and they came out with the same [conclusion that we don’t haze],” Simpson said.

Simpson explained Sigma Chis generally feel that they have been treated fairly by the University and are willing to work with the administration going forward.

“I would say the general consensus is that it’s not necessarily mistreatment, but there are definitely people who feel [mistreated], as well, just because they feel like we’re being singled out,” said Bradley Hammoor ’16, vice president of Sigma Chi and president of the Inter-Fraternity Council.

On the whole, though, the house is focusing on the potential positive impacts of the decision, Hammoor added.

While visiting the fraternity over the course of the investigation, University officials said that they realize there are fears about anti-Greek-life sentiment on campus, according to Simpson. They assured the brothers, however, that administrators support them and appreciate what they add to the campus community.

“I don’t think people have the sense that this is an overarching ‘get rid of fraternities’ thing – it’s just an unfortunate circumstance,” Hammoor said.

According to Simpson, Sigma Chi is unsure whether it will appeal the decision. The fraternity is currently working with the University to express their thoughts about the decision and make small changes to clarify its wording.

Associate dean and director of OCS Susan Fleischmann declined to comment, stating that she is not able to discuss particular cases or their outcomes.

Hammoor said the fraternity is trying to find the silver lining in the decision and is using the money they would have spent on social events on philanthropy.

 

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Science and Engineering Quad custodial staff hours restored https://stanforddaily.com/2015/05/22/science-and-engineering-quad-custodial-staff-hours-restored/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/05/22/science-and-engineering-quad-custodial-staff-hours-restored/#comments Sat, 23 May 2015 00:12:25 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1101433 Due to issues raised by a Student and Labor Alliance (SALA) petition, Science and Engineering Quad custodial staff hours were changed from graveyard shifts back to their original daytime hours on Thursday.

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Due to issues raised by a Student and Labor Alliance (SALA) petition, Science and Engineering Quad custodial staff hours will be changed from graveyard shifts back to their original daytime hours.

SALA, a student group dedicated to supporting workers on campus, had circulated a petition to either restore the janitors’ daytime hours or raise wages to compensate for a more challenging 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. workday. SALA also called the situation an abuse of workers’ rights.

The contractor employing the janitors, DTZ, offered workers back their hours in response to “community and worker demands,” according to SALA.

SALA delivered the petition to Associate Director of Quad Operations Luke Thivierge a week before the decision to restore the original hours.

“With over 1800 student, staff, and faculty signatures, we sent a strong message that we stand behind all members of the Stanford community,” said SALA in an email sent to petition signers.

SALA members were also present at the meeting between DTZ representatives and workers when DTZ offered the original hours back.

The details of the change in janitors’ hours will be worked out between DTZ and its employees in the coming days, said Senior Director of Strategic Communications Brad Hayward.

“We believe it will be a win-win outcome that will continue to meet the university’s needs, and we appreciate the engagement of both DTZ and SALA in addressing the issue,” said Hayward in an email to the Daily.

SALA’s email warned, however, that Stanford’s labor practices continue to fall short in other ways, citing night shifts at the Graduate School of Business (GSB) and failures to meet contractual obligations to dining staff regarding workplace absences as problems that remain to be faced.

SALA is currently advocating for the restoration of janitors’ daytime hours to take effect before the end of the current academic year, said Cenobio Hernandez ’18, a SALA member.

The group also plans to take up the issue of night shifts at the GSB soon.

 

This article has been updated.

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

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Petition against night hours for Engineering Quad janitors https://stanforddaily.com/2015/05/14/janitors-in-the-science-and-engineering-quad-seq-recently-had-their-hours-changed-from-regular-daytime-hours-to-middle-of-the-night-shifts-without-a-wage-increase-according-to-the-student-and-labor/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/05/14/janitors-in-the-science-and-engineering-quad-seq-recently-had-their-hours-changed-from-regular-daytime-hours-to-middle-of-the-night-shifts-without-a-wage-increase-according-to-the-student-and-labor/#respond Fri, 15 May 2015 05:00:38 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1100983 Janitors in the Science and Engineering Quad (SEQ) recently had their hours changed from regular daytime hours to middle-of-the-night shifts without a wage increase, according to the Student and Labor Alliance (SALA). SALA, a student group dedicated to supporting workers on campus, is calling the change a workers’ rights abuse and is currently circulating a […]

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Janitors in the Science and Engineering Quad (SEQ) recently had their hours changed from regular daytime hours to middle-of-the-night shifts without a wage increase, according to the Student and Labor Alliance (SALA).

SALA, a student group dedicated to supporting workers on campus, is calling the change a workers’ rights abuse and is currently circulating a petition to either restore daytime hours or raise wages to compensate for the more challenging 8 p.m.-4 a.m. workday.

The petition also asks that in the future, workers be consulted and have the opportunity to consent to changes in their hours before those changes are implemented. Over 1,600 students have signed the petition so far.

“Stanford falls short of its goal to create an enriching environment when workers’ rights are being violated,” the petition states.

According to SALA members Emma Hartung ’17 and Cenobio Hernandez ’18, who is also a recently elected ASSU senator, the new hours make it difficult for employees to manage childcare, healthy living, commuting to work and other daily tasks.

“I’m proud of going to Stanford, but I can’t say that if Stanford is disrespecting its workers,” Hernandez said. 

In a March email to SALA, Luke Thivierge, the associate director of SEQ Operations to whom the petition is addressed, indicated that the janitors’ hours were changed partly due to concerns regarding interruptions to classes and research and lack of janitorial access to spaces occupied during the day.

However, according to Hernandez, most students and faculty don’t find janitors to be a disturbance during the daytime.

“There’s been a majority of people that are involved in those Engineering Quad buildings…who believe that the janitors do not disrupt the work in any way, so I feel like it was a really excessive decision to make that change,” Hernandez said.

Of those who signed the petition, around 700 were students or faculty taking classes or doing research in the Engineering Quad, Hartung said.

“Interacting with […] staff during working hours creates a more diverse working environment and is important for everyone. Their daytime work has not interfered with any of our work, on the contrary it is beneficial,” wrote assistant professor of bioengineering David Camarillo along with his signature on the petition.

Francisco Capristan, a petition signatory and fourth-year Ph.D. student in aeronautics and astronautics, worked as a night-shift janitor for a year when he first came to the United States.

“Being a janitor is really hard, because a lot of people are insensitive to it, a lot of people don’t appreciate what you do. And then you have to work the nights, and working the nights is hard…you have to rearrange your life,” Capristan said.

According to Capristan, working those hours disrupts the worker’s sleep schedule. And for those who don’t have cars, public transportation or carpools can be difficult to arrange at irregular hours. 

It is unjust, said Capristan, for these significant inconveniences not to be additionally compensated.

Two SEQ buildings, Shriram and Spilker, have always used night shift workers for most cleaning tasks, said Thivierge in an email to the Daily. DTZ, the contractor employing the workers, suggested switching the other buildings, Huang and Y2E2, to night shift work because it is easier to clean unoccupied buildings. 

“This change has allowed our janitorial contractor to meet our objective to provide safe and clean space to support teaching and research,” wrote Thivierge. “We have no involvement in setting wages or working conditions for the janitors. Those are covered by their collective bargaining agreement with the employer.” 

There are few mechanisms in place to hold Stanford accountable for workers’ conditions, Hartung added, because workers are employed through DTZ, not directly by the University. 

Still, Hartung says that as a DTZ client the University can take a stand.

“There’s really no reason that respecting the agency and the rights and the humanity of everyone on Stanford’s campus shouldn’t be something that everyone can get behind,” Hartung said.

 

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu

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ISSU and MSAN work together to put on Islam Awareness series https://stanforddaily.com/2015/05/06/two-muslim-student-groups-are-cosponsoring-an-islam-awareness-event-series-in-an-effort-to-highlight-what-organizer-osama-el-gabalawy-15-called-an-overlooked-issue/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/05/06/two-muslim-student-groups-are-cosponsoring-an-islam-awareness-event-series-in-an-effort-to-highlight-what-organizer-osama-el-gabalawy-15-called-an-overlooked-issue/#respond Thu, 07 May 2015 00:36:50 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1100511 Two Muslim student groups are cosponsoring an “Islam Awareness” event series in an effort to highlight what organizer Osama El-Gabalawy ’15 has called an overlooked issue — Muslim identity and experience. The series is held by the Islamic Society of Stanford University (ISSU) and the Muslim Student Awareness Network (MSAN) every year. In the last […]

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Two Muslim student groups are cosponsoring an “Islam Awareness” event series in an effort to highlight what organizer Osama El-Gabalawy ’15 has called an overlooked issue — Muslim identity and experience.

The series is held by the Islamic Society of Stanford University (ISSU) and the Muslim Student Awareness Network (MSAN) every year.

In the last few weeks, the groups have held a comedy show, a spoken word performance and panels on women’s issues in Islam and how to create safe spaces.

Upcoming events include an interfaith Friday prayer and lunch open to the whole community on May 8 and a panel in which converts to Islam will discuss their Muslim identities on May 15. Another panel on Islamophobia in America is still in the works.

“I think not too many people are familiar with what it’s like to be Muslim American, or even a lot of the things that affect the Muslim world and the people that live there,” said El-Gabalawy, a member of both groups.

Though we may not realize it, microaggressions against Muslims happen at Stanford all the time, said El-Gabalawy.

“People are like, oh, I can see where that’s happening elsewhere, but not on my campus, not my Stanford,” he said.

El-Gabalawy added that not everyone at Stanford may understand where Muslim students are coming from — in terms of the Islamophobic experiences they’ve been through, or in terms of the ways they navigate common issues like alcohol and sexuality that can be different from the average Stanford student’s.

For Kate Bridges-Lyman MA ’15, the ISSU Vice President, the most important thing about the series is getting people from the broader Stanford community to come to ISSU and MSAN events.

“I think Muslim identity is usually kind of pushed into the corner as a political identity and nothing else, and I think that understanding other aspects of Muslim identity is really important,” Bridges-Lyman said. “So I hope this series can touch on some of those other topics.”

In another effort to improve the experience of the Muslim community on campus, the ISSU is pushing for the Office for Religious Life to hire a Muslim spiritual leader, Bridges-Lyman said.

“I think that having an actual Muslim chaplain is something that’s really important to help Muslim students with religion-specific questions, like, what does the Qur’an say about this, or how do I deal with Islamophobia — those are issues that people outside the faith might not have a lot of insight into,” Bridges-Lyman said.

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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ASSU Execs reflect on past year https://stanforddaily.com/2015/04/20/assu-execs-reflect-on-past-year/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/04/20/assu-execs-reflect-on-past-year/#respond Mon, 20 Apr 2015 20:04:21 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1099358 Though this has been, at times, a tumultuous year for the Stanford community, according to the current ASSU Executives Elizabeth Woodson ’15 and Logan Richard ’15, they will leave office confident that the work they did to address mental health issues, sexual assault and funding reform will have a lasting impact.

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ASSU Executives Elizabeth Woodson '15 and Logan Richard '15 have seen great change during their term (Courtesy of Elizabeth Woodson).
ASSU Executives Elizabeth Woodson ’15 and Logan Richard ’15 have seen great change during their term (Courtesy of Elizabeth Woodson).

Though this has been, at times, a tumultuous year for the Stanford community, according to the current ASSU Executives Elizabeth Woodson ’15 and Logan Richard ’15, they will leave office confident that the work they did to address mental health issues, sexual assault and funding reform will have a lasting impact.

“I think there’s much more that could have been done, and there’s much more to be done, but I very much feel that there’s no more that personally we could have given,” Woodson said. “And that feels good.”

The Execs’ projects include helping create a residential counseling pilot program to go into effect later this year which pairs resident CAPS counselors with certain dorms.

In addition, next year’s student ID cards will have emergency phone numbers printed on them, and all freshmen will take guided tours of CAPS and Vaden. A new chart to guide students to the appropriate mental or sexual health resources is in the final stages of development.

Woodson also co-chaired the Task Force on Sexual Assault Policies and Practices, created by Provost John Etchemendy last year to reexamine Stanford’s approach and response to sexual assault, which released its findings on April 8.

Woodson and Richard made it their goal to work with University institutions like CAPS and the Provost’s office — not just within the ASSU — so their achievements would have an impact for years to come, regardless of changing ASSU leadership.

“I’m proud to say that…every one of the more tangible accomplishments…was made possible through an inclusive collaborative process, whether that’s directly reaching out to students or combining those efforts and working with administrators as well,” Richard said .

Richard and Woodson came into office without any prior ASSU experience, and their on-the-job education made for a steep learning curve.

“There’s so much we didn’t know, we made so many mistakes — every day, really,” Woodson said.

Still, they’ve accumulated some kernels of wisdom during their term to share with future execs.

“If you want to be effective, you must understand that everything has happened at least five times in the past already,” Woodson said. “And if you do not scour The Daily archives, you’re going to waste a lot of time and energy.”

There’s also an important difference between doing what feels gratifying and what is actually productive, Woodson noted.

“You’re never the smartest person in the room, and I think to really value the relationships that you build with those around you [is important],” Richard said.

“The Notorious B.I.G., rest in peace, said you can’t help others if you can’t help yourself and I’m indebted to [Elizabeth] because all of this was made possible through the love and support that we share for one another,” he added.

This year has been a particularly hard one for Stanford, the Execs agreed.

“It’s been quite a different year than past years have been in just the volume of issues of deep meaning and importance and also pain,” Woodson said.

The campus faced incidents of sexual assault and suicide. Divestment and funding reform led to sometimes heated dialogue.

“To see this all culminate within a year is a Stanford I’ve never seen, and a Stanford I really hope to never see again,” Richard said .

Yet based on the success she’s seen in smaller dialogues, Woodson is confident that an understanding of shared experience across differences is attainable.

She encourages students to acknowledge others’ fears, assume best intent and take the time to have the conversations that bridge differences.

“It takes time and dinners and talking and shaking hands…it’s time-intensive, it’s resource-intensive, it’s hard, it’s emotionally straining, so the constraints are a lot,” Woodson said. “But we feel that that is now what Stanford needs.”

Woodson and Richard will send a final report on their term in office to the entire student body within the next few days.

 

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Q&A with Liodakis and Jones https://stanforddaily.com/2015/04/14/qa-with-liodakis-and-jones/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/04/14/qa-with-liodakis-and-jones/#comments Wed, 15 Apr 2015 06:48:26 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1098982 Nikos Liodakis ’16, a management science and engineering major, and Dottie Jones ’16, a history and psychology double major, decided to run together because they represent different sides of campus and different Stanford experiences and hope to bring those together in achieving their goals next year. They have three main goals: redefine mental and sexual health, reform funding for student groups and restore campus unity. The Daily sat down with them to talk about these goals and their perspectives on Stanford.

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Dottie Jones (left) and Nikos Liodakis (right).

Nikos Liodakis ’16, a management science and engineering major, and Dottie Jones ’16, a history and psychology double major, decided to run together because they represent different sides of campus and different Stanford experiences and hope to bring those together in achieving their goals next year. They have three main goals: redefine mental and sexual health, reform funding for student groups and restore campus unity.

The Daily sat down with them to talk about these goals and their perspectives on Stanford.

The Stanford Daily (TSD): What are some of your favorite things about campus?

Dottie Jones (DJ): The thing that I like about Stanford is that every person has their own story. Whenever you meet someone — and this is true of life in general, but especially somewhere like Stanford that’s so difficult to get into and has so many amazing people — if you just take a second to ask someone, “Where are you from?” or “What are you interested in?” you can be shocked… I’m constantly inspired by people that I meet.

Nikos Liodakis (NL): I think the biggest thing that I would say is that Stanford creates a really strong community. I think regardless of where you look, even if you just take a look through the ASSU lens, our student funding and the way we support our organizations here doesn’t compare to any other campus throughout the United States. We do an amazing job of making sure that student groups have an ability to make an impact and are supported financially in a way that you wouldn’t believe.

It even goes beyond student groups. Our RA program has changed my life… That type of program you don’t really experience at other universities. The way that they put you in there to help students, being like an ally rather than a rule enforcer, is really different.

Regardless of where you are, there’s always a place that you will fit, and there’s always a group trying to make sure you feel comfortable on campus, which I think is amazing.

TSD: What is one favorite class you’ve taken?

DJ: My favorite class at Stanford has been Cultural Psych, which I took last spring with [Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences] Hazel Markus. I didn’t realize I would like it as much as I did. I love psychology; I think everything is psychological. But it’s something that made you realize where people come — the different interactions you have with people, people’s families, everything, can really shape who a person is.

It just really opened my mind to… how everyone has a story.

You can never judge someone from even a first meeting, because you never know what a person’s gone through. And it just made me that much more aware of how everyone has that story, and [it made me want] to listen to that story more… It just made me really happy, and it made me have confidence in the world and in people.

NL: I took Engineering 145. It’s an intro class for entrepreneurs who want to do their own startup… You work in a team, and you come [up] with an idea, make a prototype, present to VCs… You actually meet VCs who mentor you through the program, and then you’re actually presenting to them at the end.

I think that goes back to the Stanford community and how they really push you. I think start-ups in this area are huge, and I had never been in a class that was so industry-related that you could actually take our idea and go apply to a VC and get funding for it. So I thought it was amazing… Even coming from high school and all the other classes I’d taken, you never really have a class that’s so applicable to your life, especially if you’re interested in startups, which I am, being [an MS&E] major.

I think that class really showed you that if you sit down and you identify what the problem is, you can really create a solution that, one, would make a lot of money and, two, would have an impact on the greater world, which was awesome.

TSD: What are a couple of the things you’ve struggled with at Stanford?

DJ: I think something I’ve struggled with at Stanford is trying to figure out who I really am… Coming here, when there’s so much thrown at you, it’s really hard to be like, “What do I want to do?”

You can be interested in a lot of different things, but trying to think about those things that you can really put your energy and passion into and make an impact in is so much more important than trying to spread yourself thin where things may not be making you happy. So just trying to keep into perspective what things I enjoyed doing and where I could really help people and make an impact on campus was something I struggled with.

And that was just in terms of figuring out what I wanted to major in. I came into Stanford thinking, “I want to be a HumBio major. I’m going to go pre-med.” And having that identity crisis, “Maybe I don’t want to do that, but I want to do this” — I think that’s something a lot of people may struggle with… especially at a place where everyone is so talented.

NL: Similarly, I would say that the biggest struggle that you can take from being at Stanford — just being an RA and seeing a lot of our residents — it’s very easy to get overwhelmed in the now. And a lot of people start stressing out about what they need to do, what internship they really want for the next year, what classes they need to get into, how much work they need to do, how many units they need to do, when are they taking their MCAT, when are they taking their GRE. And I think, being someone who likes to have a detailed calendar and sitting down and planning all my things, I think it’s easy to sit down and let the future consume what you want to be doing right now.

I think having a checklist is really dangerous. And I think taking a step back, looking at the now, walking on a nice day, relaxing and being like, “We’re at Stanford! This is awesome!” is something huge.

Anyone who struggles with that definitely should remember that we’re in an awesome place, having an awesome time and just living in the now.

 

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Students learn liberation theology in Nicaragua https://stanforddaily.com/2015/04/14/in-a-ramshackle-farmhouse-doubling-as-a-church-stanford-students-and-nicaraguan-peasants-stood-side-by-side-waiting-to-receive-an-unusual-communion-the-altar-was-a-beat-up-blue-table-draped-in-a-s/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/04/14/in-a-ramshackle-farmhouse-doubling-as-a-church-stanford-students-and-nicaraguan-peasants-stood-side-by-side-waiting-to-receive-an-unusual-communion-the-altar-was-a-beat-up-blue-table-draped-in-a-s/#comments Tue, 14 Apr 2015 17:00:48 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1098945 In a ramshackle farmhouse doubling as a church, Stanford students and Nicaraguan peasants stood side by side, waiting to receive an unusual communion. The altar was a beat-up blue table draped in a simple white cloth. The villagers couldn’t afford wine, so the blood of Christ was missing. There was no priest to bless the […]

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Courtesy of Pastor Geoff Browning
Students learn about the history of the Nicaraguan Revolution in Matagalpa. (Courtesy of Pastor Geoff Browning)

In a ramshackle farmhouse doubling as a church, Stanford students and Nicaraguan peasants stood side by side, waiting to receive an unusual communion.

The altar was a beat-up blue table draped in a simple white cloth. The villagers couldn’t afford wine, so the blood of Christ was missing. There was no priest to bless the Eucharist; instead, a woman in jeans and a t-shirt presided over the mass.

A Pope would never have recognized the service as legitimate. But for several of the students in attendance, the homegrown communion ceremony captured the spirit of why they had chosen to spend spring break in Nicaragua.

The week-long trip was the culminating adventure of an application-based winter quarter course, Religious Studies 188A: Issues in Liberation. The class centered on liberation theology: the idea that religion naturally leads to active opposition of unjust political and social structures.

On the trip, the class, taught by two Presbyterian ministers and Stanford religious studies professor Thomas Sheehan, saw liberation in action as they met with historians, religious leaders, environmentalists and women’s rights activists fighting to improve the quality of life in Nicaragua.

Students also visited a fair-trade coffee plant, spent time at a center for child victims of sexual abuse, toured churches and museums and stayed a night with Nicaraguan host families.

As they ran through a packed schedule of tours and events, students confronted their own obligations to speak up for the marginalized – potentially by changing an unjust status quo.

“In Nicaragua, a lot of [students] began to say, ‘How do I use my privilege to change the world… to make life better for people who don’t have that privilege?’” said Reverend Abby Mohaupt, a co-teacher of the class. “And I think that’s just been a really stunning question to be asking – such a really humbling and important question.”

According to students, on-the-ground experiences like attending the rural mass in the El Trentino community made the ideas behind the theory of liberation even more real.

“I think it’s only through that deep engagement for a week, where it’s all that you’re thinking about, you actually get a sense of liberation theology…in a way that you can’t get by reading some history,” said Rehan Adamjee ’16.

[justified_image_grid ids=”1098785,1098787,1098788,1098789 ” row_height=250]

Rogue religion

The El Trentino ritual underlined the bottom-up nature of liberation theology – and the related sharp political divide between some Christian communities and church institutions.

In another community the class visited, many in the El Trentino congregation had fought a guerilla war against the Somoza dictatorship, a Nicaraguan political order backed by the Catholic Church. The former fighters considered themselves to be applying Jesus’ message to the struggle against oppression.

“[The community] see[s] their religion and their political issues all wrapped up together,” said Sheehan, who is the head teacher of the class.

Because the liberation theology form of Christianity is based in experience and does not follow an institutionalized dogma, believers consider themselves to be in solidarity with marginalized peoples everywhere – no matter where they fall on the religious spectrum.

The liberation theology movement allies itself with the fight for women’s rights, ecological justice and  change in dominant economic and political structures worldwide.

“People thought about religion not in terms of the doctrines or the rituals, they thought about the idea that struggle is spiritual,” Adamjee said. “And that idea is universal.”

For Adamjee, a rejection of the passivity preached by religious leaders who support state power is essential both to his own religious life and to the work he hopes to do with land reform in his home country of Pakistan.

Ramah Awad ’17, a Stanford Out of Occupied Palestine leader, also found that her personal activist struggle on campus connected unexpectedly with her experience in Nicaragua through ubiquitous Nicaraguan displays of support for the Palestinian cause.

“Having spent the last quarter working on these issues…a topic I thought to be completely different turned out to be entirely connected,” Awad said. “People are struggling for similar rights.”

Awad was moved to find support for her own cause in Nicaragua but felt her own contribution couldn’t end there.

“I could continue talking about my experience in Nicaragua, but what am I actually doing to then connect [my own struggles and those of the Nicaraguans]?” Awad said. “Because the trip was so real and raw, I don’t want solidarity to then just be in name or in phrase.”

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 Radical change

The class encouraged skepticism of today’s dominant politics and neoliberal economics and took a hard look at America’s track record of interference in Latin America.

According to Malachi Dray ’18, it’s difficult to find a Nicaraguan who hasn’t lost a loved one at the hands of the Contras, who were U.S.-backed counter-revolutionaries aiming to overthrow the democratically elected socialist government in the 1980s.

“It’s accepted by so many people that our foreign policy [is] doing something beneficial for the world, or that it’s pursuing some conception of freedom or so on, when in reality… it’s important to really closely examine how it’s actively not doing that,” Adamjee said.

Although many students who went to Nicaragua are willing to think critically about the U.S.’s role in foreign affairs, they recognize that there are certain barriers to bringing the trip’s lessons to a larger Stanford audience.

“The thing about a trip like this is that it self-selects for people who already think in a certain way,” Adamjee said. “So for me it’s reinforced certain things, and I’ve become more nuanced in how I think about this stuff, but my core has not fundamentally changed.”

Nonetheless, Adamjee and his fellow 11 students have returned to Stanford with an enhanced sense of the necessity of action.

Sheehan hoped students on the trip would reevaluate the purpose of a Stanford education, searching for the “liberational impulse” in their courses of study.

“What a radical idea, that you would educate yourself to stand on the side of the losers,” he said.

Courtesy of Pastor Geoff Browning
(Courtesy of Pastor Geoff Browning)


Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfeld at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu

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J Street U Stanford conflicts with national J Street organization https://stanforddaily.com/2015/03/30/since-februarys-assu-vote-to-support-divestment-from-corporations-profiting-from-human-rights-abuses-in-israel-and-palestine-the-heated-campus-debate-over-the-conflict-has-died-down-but-the/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/03/30/since-februarys-assu-vote-to-support-divestment-from-corporations-profiting-from-human-rights-abuses-in-israel-and-palestine-the-heated-campus-debate-over-the-conflict-has-died-down-but-the/#comments Tue, 31 Mar 2015 03:50:59 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1097952 Since February’s ASSU vote to support divestment from corporations profiting from alleged human rights abuses in Israel and Palestine, the heated campus debate over the conflict has died down. But the conversation is just beginning for J Street U Stanford, a pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-two-state solution advocacy group. Julia Daniel ’17, J Street U Stanford co-president, […]

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J Street U hosted their national conference in Washington D.C. over spring break (Courtesy of Moshe Zusman Photography Studio).
J Street U hosted their national conference in Washington D.C. over spring break. President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, spoke at the event. (Courtesy of Moshe Zusman Photography Studio)

Since February’s ASSU vote to support divestment from corporations profiting from alleged human rights abuses in Israel and Palestine, the heated campus debate over the conflict has died down. But the conversation is just beginning for J Street U Stanford, a pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-two-state solution advocacy group.

Julia Daniel ’17, J Street U Stanford co-president, warned her audience at the first Senate hearing on divestment that a vote either way would not resolve the issue – that everyone in the room must do more to change an “unacceptable status quo.”

As part of that work, Daniel, along with a delegation of 31 other Stanford students, traveled to Washington, D.C. over spring break to attend the J Street Annual Conference.

Around 3,000 students and activists from across the country gathered to attend panels and discussions, talk strategy and meet with members of Congress. Over the course of four days, attendees heard from a diverse group of people – from members of the Israeli parliament to seasoned Palestinian activists to the White House Chief of Staff.

In many ways, all of this served Stanford J Street’s goals: to foster evenhanded, productive debate; to educate; and to take action in support of a two-state-solution.

For some attendees, the conference was a continuation of the spirit of respectful dialogue – a healing experience after the ugly tenor of Stanford’s divestment debate, as member Rachel Roberts ’18 put it.

But for others, the rhetoric at the conference was imperfect as well and highlighted the difficulty of having inclusive conversations about the conflict.

Tied to this problem is the friction between J Street, the more conservative national organization that casts itself as catering mostly to Jewish interests, and J Street U, the more liberal coalition of student activists on college campuses throughout the U.S.

 

“Young Jewish Activists”

Though J Street is officially “the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans,” the conference was geared towards a Jewish audience.

Jewish religious services and Kosher meals were provided, and speakers frequently referred to the students in attendance as “young Jewish activists.” At plenary panels, an Israeli flag and an American flag stood side-by-side on the stage, but the Palestinian flag was not present.

Non-Jewish students like Eric Ballouz ’17, a J Street U Stanford member, felt alienated at times and said that the J Street leadership had let him down.

“I understand the demographic is mostly Jewish, but the way it’s structured and the actions they ask of us sometimes exclude the non-Jewish students,” he said.

Ballouz himself is happy working with J Street U on Stanford’s campus, he said, where the group does not focus as much on working within the Jewish community. But when he was asked to join J Street leadership at the national level, he did not feel ready to do so.

While the J Street U Stanford Facebook page calls the group “Pro-Israel, Pro-Palestinian, Pro-Peace,” J Street national calls itself merely “pro-Israel, pro-peace” – which affirms divide between the organization’s national and local chapters, said Izzy ben Izzy ’18, a Stanford J Street member.

Izzy felt uncomfortable with the conference’s focus on the two state solution as essential to Israel’s security and suggested that there should have been more discussion of Palestinian interests. Daniel also emphasized the need to address the issue from different perspectives.

“The Jewish community’s voices are overwhelmingly privileged in [the American political] conversation, and in order to take advantage of that privilege and use that voice for productive change, it is important to engage with it,” Daniel said.

However, Daniel added that it is not productive to exclude other voices from the conversation, and non-Jewish students are an essential part of J Street’s work. J Street U Stanford will continue to work to make non-Jewish students feel included.

 

The Divestment Problem

J Street U Stanford prides itself on providing a space where anyone can come to ask questions and float ideas without feeling attacked or excluded.

“Many, many people have come to us and said that [they’re] very glad about what [we] did,” Daniel said.

Partly for that reason, though J Street as an organization is officially anti-divestment, Stanford J Street did not take a position for or against the divestment bill.

J Street U is still deciding whether to take a stance on divestment in the future, and whether they can do that without compromising their values.

For Rachel Samuels ’17, the Senator who changed her vote on divestment from a no to an abstention, Stanford J Street’s impartiality was an invaluable resource in the hectic months leading up to the decision.

“As a Senator I was trying to be as informed as I possibly could, and I knew J Street would give me a [view]…that recognized both sides,” Samuels said.

However, Samuels said the conference highlighted the difficulty of both maintaining dialogue and taking action.

“I’m realizing the huge spectrum of beliefs within J Street, and while it’s really, really wonderful, it’s also a little bit frustrating as a lobbying group when it comes down to, okay, how do we decide what we stand for?” Samuels said.

Rachael Stryer ’17, a member of the Stanford J Street U board, emphasized that taking a stance on divestment was not the goal of the organization.

“Our goal on campus is not to be there to fight divestment or to support divestment – that’s not really what our theory of change is about,” Stryer said.

For Stryer, action is the most important part of J Street’s vision. While the conference provided the opportunity to lobby members of Congress and advocate J Street’s aims, J Street U Stanford has yet to decide how to bring that kind of action to campus in a way that is inclusive to all.

“We’re hoping that in the spring, there will be much more productive conversations about this,” Daniel said.

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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https://stanforddaily.com/2015/03/30/since-februarys-assu-vote-to-support-divestment-from-corporations-profiting-from-human-rights-abuses-in-israel-and-palestine-the-heated-campus-debate-over-the-conflict-has-died-down-but-the/feed/ 4 1097952
Obama Chief of Staff recommends reevaluation of relationship with Israel https://stanforddaily.com/2015/03/26/obama-chief-of-staff-recommends-reevaluation-of-relationship-with-israel/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/03/26/obama-chief-of-staff-recommends-reevaluation-of-relationship-with-israel/#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2015 20:58:59 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1097793 On Monday, Denis McDonough, President Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, said that America must reevaluate its already strained relationship with Israel as a result of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent declaration that there would never be a Palestinian state during his time in office.

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On Monday, Denis McDonough,  President Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, said that America must reevaluate its already strained relationship with Israel as a result of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent declaration that there would never be a Palestinian state during his time in office.

“We cannot simply pretend that those comments were never made,” McDonough told attendees at the annual conference of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel, pro-two-state-solution advocacy group. Thirty-two Stanford students attended the conference.

Instead, McDonough said, the Obama administration would need to “re-evaluate our approach to the peace process and how we pursue the cause of peace.”

He did not elaborate on what this revised policy would look like. However, he emphasized that advancing a two-state solution is a cornerstone of American policy, “because it is the only way to secure Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state.”

“An occupation that has lasted for almost 50 years must end, and the Palestinian people must have the right to live in and govern themselves in their own sovereign state,” he said.

McDonough stressed, however, that the U.S. will remain unwaveringly committed to Israel’s security and will do everything in its power to negotiate a favorable nuclear deal with Iran.

Stanford students attended the conference as members of the Stanford J Street chapter or out of interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

 

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

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Some families can’t afford Parents’ Weekend travel https://stanforddaily.com/2015/03/02/some-families-cant-afford-parents-weekend-travel/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/03/02/some-families-cant-afford-parents-weekend-travel/#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2015 01:50:47 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1096859 Alex Paramo ‘18 would have liked for his family to join him on campus this Parents’ Weekend, but unfortunately, that was out of the question. The flight from his home state of Illinois plus the cost of overnight accommodations was prohibitively expensive. Paramo is one of many students whose parents face financial barriers to making […]

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Alex Paramo ‘18 would have liked for his family to join him on campus this Parents’ Weekend, but unfortunately, that was out of the question. The flight from his home state of Illinois plus the cost of overnight accommodations was prohibitively expensive.

Paramo is one of many students whose parents face financial barriers to making the trip to Stanford for Parents’ Weekend. Unlike the travel grants given to some prospective students to attend Admit Weekend, Stanford does not offer aid to students’ families to travel to the event.

Paramo said he is used to the idea of his parents not being able to make it to things — in his childhood, they worked during the day and were unable to attend most events — and it’s not a big deal that they can’t come this time.

“I kind of already knew that it’s impossible for them to fly out here,” he said.

Some feel the exclusion more acutely, though.

While many parents attended Parents' Weekend, the financial burden proved to be too much for some families (Courtesy of Linda A. Cicero).
While many parents attended Parents’ Weekend, the financial burden proved to be too much for some families
(Courtesy of Linda A. Cicero).

“I hate Parents’ Weekend,” reads one recent anonymous post on Class Confessions, a Facebook page created by the First-Generation Low-Income Partnership (FLIP) that highlights issues of socioeconomic class identity at Stanford.

The post continues: “Every year I’m reminded that my parents don’t have the kind of jobs or the kind of money to fly here for a weekend. Every year Stanford emails my dad with the invitation and every year I hate that he feels like he needs to apologize to me for not being able to come.”

Jennifer Telschow ’14, alumni advisor for the Diversity and First-Gen (DGEN) Office, says that for her first four years at Stanford, her mother couldn’t make it to the event and felt guilty about it.

“That weekend falls on her birthday, so I would always mention that it was Parents’ Weekend, and she would always feel really bad that she couldn’t come…and she always felt like she was missing out on something,” Telschow said.

Her mother was able to make it once, but only by rearranging her work schedule so travel for her job took her to California and the trip was paid by her employer.

Shanika Pelpola ’15, co-president of FLIP, says that those sentiments were echoed at a discussion group FLIP held last Friday on the topic of Parents’ Weekend.

According to Pelpola, attendees at the discussion expressed a general sentiment that the way the University celebrates Parents’ Weekend, there seems to be an expectation that everybody should be able to participate.

“The fact that a lot of parents couldn’t come because of the financial burden, that automatically excludes a bunch of students,” Pelpola said.

Airfare and hotel rooms aren’t the only problem, she added: Parents’ Weekend festivities begin on a Friday, but not everyone can afford to take a day off work.

Marcus Alvarez ’16 has never been able to bring his family to Parents’ Weekend due to the expense. Like Paramo, he doesn’t mind too much: the event is not the most important thing to him.  But he knows it’s been a big issue for some of his peers, and says that Parents’ Weekend can feel “very exclusionary.”

“I personally feel that Stanford does have the funds, and that they should pay for the small number of students who are really having difficulty getting their parents here. I feel like that should not be a problem at all,” Alvarez said.

The University has explored options to provide assistance in the past, but currently has no aid program, said University spokesperson Lisa Lapin in an email.

“There are numerous obstacles, including tax implications and other regulations, to providing aid to non-students for non-academic purposes,” wrote Lapin.

A financial aid program would be the ideal solution to the problem, says Pelpola, but in lieu of that — or in addition to it — the event should be restructured in a way that makes it possible for students of all backgrounds to participate.

Even when family members can make it to campus, cultural barriers may arise. For one thing, the title of the event itself is in a way exclusionary, said Telschow: It implies a traditional “two-parent” family structure.

Telschow worried that her single mother would not feel welcome when she came to Parents’ Weekend.

“I, as a student and as a daughter, was concerned about how affirmed she would feel in those spaces,” said Telschow.

FLIP recently sent out to several email lists a list of suggestions for making the event more inclusive, as well as an op-ed advocating for these changes.

Suggestions include renaming the event “Parents and Families Weekend” and avoiding well-intentioned but sometimes alienating questions like “Where did you go to college?” or “What do you do for a living?”

To help support students whose families can’t come to campus, FLIP holds several Parents’ Weekend events. One of their most popular this year was a “Crafts-n-Chill” session, where students were invited to hang out, eat snacks, and make cards to send to families back home. Another was a luncheon for both FLIP families who could come to campus as well as students whose families were unable to come.

“We want to continue to make those spaces available and expand them in the future,” said Pelpola.

 

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfeld at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu.

In a previous version of this article, Jennifer Telschow’s quotes were incorrectly attributed to another student. The Daily regrets this error. 

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Students, faculty adapt to MCAT changes https://stanforddaily.com/2015/02/23/the-medical-college-admission-test-mcat-scheduled-to-be-released-this-april-will-look-different-from-previous-mcats-featuring-a-new-section-to-emphasize-the-importance-of-diverse-understandings-and/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/02/23/the-medical-college-admission-test-mcat-scheduled-to-be-released-this-april-will-look-different-from-previous-mcats-featuring-a-new-section-to-emphasize-the-importance-of-diverse-understandings-and/#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2015 02:09:15 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1096351 The revised version of the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scheduled to be released this April will place greater emphasis on biochemistry and the social sciences. The revised MCAT is a step towards a new and improved “premedical paradigm” that integrates scientific and social fields of study, said Stanford associate professor Donald Barr M.S. ’89, […]

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The MCAT changes in April, putting more of an emphasis on the empathy side of medicine (KAREN WANG/The Stanford Daily)
The MCAT changes in April, putting more of an emphasis on the empathy side of medicine (KAREN WANG/The Stanford Daily)

The revised version of the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scheduled to be released this April will place greater emphasis on biochemistry and the social sciences.

The revised MCAT is a step towards a new and improved “premedical paradigm” that integrates scientific and social fields of study, said Stanford associate professor Donald Barr M.S. ’89, Ph.D. ’93.

According to pre-med advisor Yunny Yip, Stanford’s history of interdisciplinary cooperation may make it uniquely situated to help students meet the challenges of the new test and its underlying assumptions about what kinds of skills make the best doctors.

Changes to the MCAT include a new section on the psychological, social and biological factors that influence health, which is intended to emphasize concepts doctors need to know to understand and relate to a diverse group of patients. There’s also a greater focus on biochemistry, a field at the intersection of two disciplines.

For over a hundred years, admissions to medical schools have been based on the assumption that a prospective doctor’s performance in the natural sciences will accurately predict the quality of his or her professional practice.

“[That] turns out not to be supported by scientific evidence and in fact the scientific evidence questions that,” said Barr, who is trained in both medicine and sociology.

As an “unofficial advisor” to the writers of the new MCAT, Barr advocated a more holistic approach to premedical education—one that deals with biology, physics and chemistry as interrelated subjects, not as discrete fields. Barr also advocated for the inclusion of social science and humanities components like psychology and ethics.

Barr has implemented these ideas in his teaching at Stanford. Last quarter, he taught HUMBIO 165: Early Roots of Human Behavior, a class that considered the forces shaping human behavior beginning in childhood through the lenses of sociology, psychology and biology.

“You can take psychology, you can take sociology and you can take biology, and the theory is that you would get all the stuff that’s on the test. But it turns out you actually don’t get it all,” said Barr.

Despite this, Barr is the only professor so far who has taught a Stanford class that could be said to be designed to meet the needs of the new MCAT, says Yip.

She and her fellow advisors have been directing students to standard introductory psychology courses to prepare themselves for the test.

According to Yip, there is a great deal of breadth in the curriculum at Stanford compared to small liberal arts schools. She says that majors such as Human Biology incorporate various fields of science and sociology in a way that readies students for the test’s new approach.

“The diversity of courses that most students will have here will train our students well so they really have a strong foundation for the test and they don’t have to feel like they have a big gap,” said Yip.

She thinks, too, that students tend to come to Stanford looking for a broad education.

“Stanford is very interdisciplinary in its approach… Stanford students are adaptable, it’s the message you get when you first come here,” she said.

Many pre-med students don’t seem fazed by the changes – in fact, some welcome them.

“I think it’s very important for the premedical path…to branch out from just organic chemistry and chemistry and biology and physics to actual real life fields like psychology and biochemistry,” said Brian Levin ’16.

“In the future most of the medicine practice will be very much patient-centered, very much collaborative, so I think it’s very important to understand…in addition to the hard science skills, the sociological issues,” said Robin Cheng ’15, co-president of the Stanford Premedical Association.

Maheetha Bharadwaj ’16 took the old version of the MCAT last year but plans to take the revised one this spring, hoping for a better score this time.

“Taking the new one and studying for the new one will prepare me better to be a doctor because I’ll be learning those behavioral concepts, and I think that will be an asset,” Bharadwaj said.

And at the end of the day, though, Bharadwaj says it’s more important to her to learn from and be inspired by her classes than to study just what’s on any given exam.

“Honestly, it’s just a test, how much can you hate it and how much can you love it?” Bharadwaj said.

 

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ’at’ stanford.edu.

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Stanford Amnesty International seeks non-exclusive activism https://stanforddaily.com/2015/02/05/its-a-hectic-time-on-campus-for-stanford-amnesty-international-a-chapter-of-a-worldwide-organization-that-campaigns-for-human-rights-during-last-tuesdays-meeting-in-additi/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/02/05/its-a-hectic-time-on-campus-for-stanford-amnesty-international-a-chapter-of-a-worldwide-organization-that-campaigns-for-human-rights-during-last-tuesdays-meeting-in-additi/#comments Fri, 06 Feb 2015 01:20:45 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1095070 With the divestment movement pushing human rights into the campus spotlight, one organization has staked out a position firmly in the middle of the discussion. During last Tuesday’s meeting of Stanford Amnesty International, a chapter of a worldwide organization that campaigns for human rights, the group discussed the role they want to take in Stanford’s […]

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Stanford Amnesty International members write letters to political figures each week. (Photo Courtesy of Emily Witt)
Stanford Amnesty International members write letters to political figures each week. (Photo Courtesy of Emily Witt)

With the divestment movement pushing human rights into the campus spotlight, one organization has staked out a position firmly in the middle of the discussion.

During last Tuesday’s meeting of Stanford Amnesty International, a chapter of a worldwide organization that campaigns for human rights, the group discussed the role they want to take in Stanford’s potential divestment from companies profiting from the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The debate made the meeting a little “frazzled”, said Emily Witt ‘15.

The group does not take an official stance on any divestment campaigns, so they had to come up with another way to engage with the conversation and advance their mission of raising awareness at Stanford of worldwide human rights issues.

“We were trying to put together some constructive way to contribute our human rights knowledge of the situation,” said Witt.

Members had varying ideas of how to do that. Some thought creating a space for open dialogue would be the best way to contribute, while others said that would not be the most effective way to address the issue.

In the end, Amnesty International members came up with a plan to put together an informational display of human rights violations on both sides of the conflict to give to the larger community, or at very least the ASSU, who will soon be voting on the issue.

Divestment wasn’t the only issue on the table. When choosing which human rights issues to engage with, the group takes its cue not only from campus climate, but also from Amnesty International’s worldwide campaigns and from the interests of individual members.

“We’re kind of a nonexclusive, all pro-human rights group and we’re kind of the only one at Stanford that has that label. Everyone else has a much narrower focus, and we have the ability to participate in the broader discussion of human rights in general,” said Witt, who has been involved with Amnesty since joining her high school’s chapter.

Right now, the group is planning an event on the Senate intelligence report released last December, which documents the C.I.A.’s program to detain and torture terrorism suspects in the years after 9/11.

To do this, the club is reaching out to other groups on campus and a handful of U.S. Senators to build a speaker panel that highlights the political aspects of torture, not just the physical and psychological aspects of torture.

Witt thinks people tend to be under one of two assumptions about torture.

On one side, says Witt, by believing torture is obviously unsupportable and therefore not worth discussing, you might never learn the details of the C.I.A.’s actions. On the other side, if you believe torture is acceptable when it gets results, you might never learn that the C.I.A.’s program did not get those results.

The group hopes the event will educate more people about the Senate report.

“Even in the larger outside-of-Stanford world it’s kind of faded from public consciousness,” said Witt. “We’re really trying to bring that back because it’s such an important issue that people don’t realize.”

Amnesty’s key form of activism, though, is letter-writing. Almost every week, the group writes an action letter to send to a head of state or policy leader.

“It allows us to focus on different [issues] even if we’re working on a bigger topic,” said Financial Officer Emily Taing ‘17.

This week’s missive was an appeal for Elena Klimova, a Russian journalist fined for ostensibly promoting homosexual behavior among youth through her website, Children 404, which supports LGBTI teens. The letter, addressed to a prosecutor in the region, asked for the end of Klimova’s prosecution and the repeal of the law against “homosexual propaganda.”

Amnesty also runs larger letter-writing campaigns. Last November they held Write for Rights, in which they set up camp in dining halls around campus, bringing with them copies of letters related to ten human rights issues for interested passersby to sign and mail.

“Not only are we having direct action by sending these letters, but we also are engaging in a very educational campaign and making people engaged in these issues,” said Co-President Matthew Rodman ’16.

This November, the Stanford Amnesty chapter mailed 300 letters.

Halfway through the school year, Amnesty is still recruiting. Last Tuesday’s meeting was the first for Isabel Leon Calle ’18.

She had always been interested in politics, but hadn’t tried out any related Stanford clubs till her roommate recommended Amnesty.

“I feel like they were being really real, and also very passionate about it,” she said. “It’s not just like, I have to do this to get an A…and I like that.”

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Stanford’s first interdisciplinary humanities + CS class met with success https://stanforddaily.com/2015/01/20/stanfords-first-interdisciplinary-humanities-and-cs-class-met-with-success/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/01/20/stanfords-first-interdisciplinary-humanities-and-cs-class-met-with-success/#respond Wed, 21 Jan 2015 04:05:55 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1094112 In CS 27: Literature and Social Online Learning—inspired by the new CS + X joint major offering—students with backgrounds in the humanities and CS worked together to create websites and apps intended to give people new ways to interact with literature through technology.

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Stanford’s first interdisciplinary computer science and humanities class has left both students and teachers hungry for more.

In CS 27: Literature and Social Online Learning — inspired by the new CS + X joint major — students with backgrounds in the humanities and CS worked together to create websites and apps intended to give people new ways to interact with literature through technology.

Within 10 weeks, the class went from brainstorming to testing to publicly releasing their creations, which include Cureador, a platform for sharing favorite books with friends; ParallelLit, a site that lets readers compare various literary translations side by side; and a series of eBooks that pair poems by Yeats with audio of the author reading his work.

It’s unusual to apply such a project-based approach to the humanities, but for the developers and co-teachers of the class, Petra Dierkes-Thrun of the Comparative Literature department and her husband, computer science professor Sebastian Thrun, there’s a clear need to do just that.

“Our biggest interest was to see if we could bridge that gap and be truly interdisciplinary, specifically kind of use technology…to find new ways to make literature attractive to people,” Thrun said.

Ellie Redding ’16, an English major who has taken several CS classes, chose the course both for its novelty and for the important issues it tried to address.

“The question that they presented the class as trying to answer was, how do you make literature more accessible, more exciting, more interesting, more engaging, digitally,” Redding said.

“The more I thought about that question, the more I didn’t have an answer, and the more I felt that it was something that really needed to be answered.”

The class didn’t give her a final solution, Redding said, but it did give her an opportunity to think about it — and to argue the point with her classmates.

Thrun, too, believes the class started a productive discussion.

“I think the students morphed from a mild skepticism of the other side of the field…to an understanding that people other than themselves can make significant contributions,” he said.

The Think’der Debate

For Thrun, the most interesting dialogue happened on the last day of class.

As students presented their final projects, an impassioned debate broke out over Think’der, the creation of Farhan Kathawala ’17 and Baris Akis ’16.

Think’der, a more erudite take on the dating app Tinder, shows users a quote from a philosopher or author or sociologist. If you’re intrigued, you swipe down for a 200-word description of the person in question. If you’re not, you swipe sideways for another quote.

For some, like Redding, the project presented a moral problem.

“It felt to me that they were trying to reduce these really complicated philosophers that people have been reading and thinking about and struggling with and arguing about for hundreds and hundreds of years into little snippets that you can put on an app,” Redding said.

“I’m really uncomfortable with that. I think it’s totally impossible and it’s also really dangerous.”

As a CS + English major who’s read Plato and Aristotle in depth, she worries that reading 200-word summaries may give people the impression that they’re qualified to seriously discuss these thinkers when all they’ve really been given is the briefest of starting points.

Kathawala, another CS + English major, sees where the pushback is coming from. He and his teammate considered the issue throughout the creation process, and posed the question to the class during the final session.

“Is it worth it to try to get someone to ingest anything from a certain work or any type of a certain thought rather than not at all…if they’re not willing to put the time into it?” Kathawala asked. “The good thing about the class was that everyone was able to see both sides of every argument,” he added.

Redding and the authors of Think’der came to an eventual compromise: They could add a third level of detail to the app, where users could swipe one more time and be taken to a Wikipedia page.

This kind of discussion is exactly what Thrun and Dierkes-Thrun had hoped to provoke.

“We live in times that have very different technology, very different attention span, very different styles of living than the times in which some of these great pieces of literature were created,” Thrun said. “And the question is how we can adapt — if it is even valid, but if so, how we can adapt to those digital ages.”

Continuing the Conversation

The dialogue isn’t over for Redding, though, and she doesn’t want it to be. She and her co-creators plan to continue working on their project, ParallelLit, with Professor Thrun’s guidance.

“People want to do this kind of stuff, people want to bridge disciplines that we don’t usually think should be bridged,” Kathawala said.

Especially as a CS + English major, Kathawala hopes classes like these will be a fixture within a few years.

“I kind of wish that these joint majors had been designed around classes so that you could really have both skills when you come out rather than trying to juggle both of the majors and then say, ‘Oh hey, look, I did something with both of these once,’” he said.

He’s keeping an eye out for more classes like this one, and he’s not alone: according to Thrun, every student in the class was enthusiastic about the possibility of future project-based CS-humanities courses.

Both professors hope to teach the class again as well.

“I can tell you, some great magic happened in this class which I would love to see replicated in my own teaching in the future,” Thrun said.

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Autism cases may be linked to the corpus callosum, School of Medicine researchers find https://stanforddaily.com/2015/01/05/autism-cases-may-be-linked-to-the-corpus-callosum-school-of-medicine-researchers-find/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/01/05/autism-cases-may-be-linked-to-the-corpus-callosum-school-of-medicine-researchers-find/#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2015 06:51:38 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1093298 Faulty communication between the halves of the brain could be the cause of some cases of autism, according to a Stanford School of Medicine study that points autism research in a new direction.

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Faulty communication between the halves of the brain could be the cause of some cases of autism, according to a Stanford School of Medicine study that points autism research in a new direction.

“This is our first glimpse of autism’s underlying biological framework, and it implicates a cell type and region of the brain that have not been extensively studied in this disease,” said Michael Snyder, professor and chair of genetics and the senior author of the study.

Rather than directly analyzing the cells of the corpus callosum, which facilitates communication between the two hemispheres of the brain, Snyder and his fellow researchers analyzed previously published data on the human interactome, a giant network of interacting proteins. They then sequenced the genomes and exomes of autistic individuals to confirm their conclusions.

They found that problems may arise not only from defects in neurons themselves, as was previously suspected, but from mutated oligodendrocytes, which create the insulating myelin sheath that covers neurons’ arms and speeds the transmission of electrical signals.

This may explain why the corpus callosum is often unusually small in autistic individuals.

The study will not necessarily lead to immediate new therapy methods, according to Joachim Hallmayer, one of its co-authors, but it may make it easier to divide patients into smaller, more homogenous groups based on which genes are mutated.

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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History Corner: Leland Stanford’s vision of Stanford https://stanforddaily.com/2014/12/23/leland-vision-of-stanford/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/12/23/leland-vision-of-stanford/#comments Tue, 23 Dec 2014 09:08:27 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1092805 Leland Stanford, though himself a multimillionaire and a “robber baron,” was not the die-hard capitalist we may presume him to be, according to the research of alumnus Lee Altenberg Ph.D. ’84 PD ’85.

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Leland and Jane Stanford at the laying of the University cornerstone in 1887. (Courtesy of Lee Altenberg.)

Leland Stanford, though himself a multimillionaire and a “robber baron,” was not the die-hard capitalist we may presume him to be, according to the research of alumnus Lee Altenberg Ph.D. ’84 PD ’85.

Rather, Altenberg found that Stanford championed the idea of a world where business was controlled not by monopolies but by laborers, founding a university that he hoped would foster this vision — a hope the Stanford University of today seems to have forgotten, according to Altenberg.

“This piece of Stanford history has fallen through the cracks of the institution’s collective memory,” said Altenberg, who published his findings in a 1990 issue of the Stanford Historical Society’s journal “Sandstone & Tile.”

In letters and speeches, Stanford reiterated the idea that “when money is controlled by a few it gives that few an undue power and control over labor and the resources of the country.”

In the University’s Grant of Endowment itself, Stanford declared that it would be the duty of the Trustees “to have taught in the University…the right and advantages of association and co-operation.”

Altenberg, an evolutionary theorist, became interested in the issue while doing postdoctoral work at Stanford in the 1980s.

He’d heard rumors that Leland Stanford was interested in cooperative living. After doing some research, he found a plethora of archival evidence showing Stanford’s serious commitment to the values of cooperation.

The result would surprise anyone who thinks of Leland Stanford solely as a titan of monopolized industry.

“He was deeper than what that success conferred upon him,” Altenberg said.

As a United States senator, Stanford introduced two bills — never passed — which were decried as “fully impregnated with socialistic ideas.” His politics struck such a chord with the Populist Party, which advocated the interests of farmers and laborers, that there were calls within the movement to nominate him for the 1892 presidency (Stanford, elected as a Republican, declined.)

Though he proposed some of the most radical economic policies in the Senate, Stanford could not have been called a socialist, according to Alternberg.

Instead, he took a “third way,” advocating free enterprise in the form of direct worker ownership.

The magnate of the Central Pacific Railroad emerged as a representative of the interests of the common man.

“In the unrest of the masses I augur great good,” Stanford said. “It is by their realizing that their condition of life is not what it ought to be that vast improvements may be accomplished.”

Stanford emphasized many times that he wished Stanford University to reflect his principles.

One of the main objectives of the university was to be “the independence of capital and the self-employment of non-capitalist classes, by such system of instruction as will tend to the establishment of cooperative effort in the industrial systems of the future,” wrote Stanford.

And he welcomed non-capitalist classes most particularly to the University:

“The few very rich can get their education anywhere,” Stanford said. “They will be welcome to this institution if they come, but the object is more particularly to reach the multitude — those people who have to consider the expenditure of every dollar.”

As to why this important aspect of Stanford’s dream for his university is not common knowledge, Altenberg can only speculate.

During Stanford’s 1985-91 Centennial celebration, Altenberg and then-Stanford professor Henry Levin hoped to bring a prominent historian of the Populists to campus to talk about Stanford’s ideas about cooperatives.

“We found [Leland Stanford] really fascinating,” Levin said.

“I mean, there’s this really rich guy who had a lot of wealth, who had accumulated it in some questionable ways, and all of a sudden he’s talking about democratic organizations, he’s talking about workers who participate in the decision-making,” he added.

The two thought the Centennial would be a good opportunity to remember Stanford’s “forgotten vision.” The planning committee, however, rejected their proposal.

Altenberg suggests that this may be because this aspect of Stanford’s history doesn’t contribute to the current ‘branding’ of the institution, which stays far away from the idea of critiquing the current industrial system and envisioning alternatives to it.

Altenberg also proposes that part of the reason Stanford’s ideals didn’t stick with the university over the years is that Leland Stanford died a mere two years after the University opened, and with him died the impetus behind his plans to have “association and co-operation” taught there to all students.

After the election of President William McKinley in 1896, widespread support for the Populist movement, aligned with Leland’s aims, died out, and neither Jane Stanford nor the staff of the University carried on this part of his wishes.

Regardless, Altenberg believes that there is still an obligation to share and discuss Stanford’s ideas rather than forget them over time.

“This particular story of Stanford’s history is important with the idea of preserving the diversity of ideas about things, and approaches, and ways of doing,” Altenberg said. “[It’s] a part of showing us that there can be a lot of diversity in thinking that gets lost, and we need to take active steps to cultivate our reserves of concepts.”

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Faculty Friday: A chat with art scholar Alexander Nemerov https://stanforddaily.com/2014/11/14/faculty-friday-a-chat-with-art-scholar-alexander-nemerov/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/11/14/faculty-friday-a-chat-with-art-scholar-alexander-nemerov/#respond Fri, 14 Nov 2014 17:54:06 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1091664 The Stanford Daily recently sat down with Professor Alexander Nemerov, renowned art scholar, to discuss his thoughts on art criticism and his experience teaching at Stanford.

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The Stanford Daily recently sat down with Professor of Art and Art History Alexander Nemerov, renowned art scholar, to discuss his thoughts on art criticism and his experience teaching at Stanford.

 

TSD: Do you have a particular philosophy that you’ve drawn from art [as a whole], or is it a different philosophy with every piece you look at?

Alexander Nemerov (AN): That’s a great question —  I mean, there are so many artists and works that I like. My course is a lot about painting, so I guess I’m really enamored of painting as a medium. I think ever since I was a little kid there’s been something really magical about paintings for me. But I also like Hollywood film, and I’ve found many breathtaking moments in that for me too.

Which raised the sort of interesting follow-up point, which is that, how do you take a personal insight, like something that matters to oneself, and translate it for students, let’s say, or how might they do the same thing for the people in their lives? And of course, there’s no easy way to do that, if it’s indeed at all possible.

So one answer I always have is, I’m not so much as it were telling my students to like what I like, but I am activating for them, so I hope, the capacity that they like something and that they might become aware that what they like and how they like it has a tremendous import, and that a life without those kind of direct connections and passions to works of art is a life less well lived.

TSD: Is that the role of criticism as well as teaching?

AN: I hope so. I wish it were more so. I think a lot of criticism and historical accounting is more about making an argument about something. Of course that can be a form of powerful criticism unto itself, but a lot of it is disenchanting. I’m more interested in how not just artwork, but the writing and speaking about artwork, can be a form of enchantment.

TSD: Who taught you to learn to love art in that way?

AN: Well, my father was a poet, and my aunt was a photographer. And I think although I couldn’t have ever really realized this when I was your age, I think as I now am in my middle age I’ve really come to value their fearless, unapologetic belief in the special power of art — whether it’s poetry, photography, painting — to reveal things about the world. And so it’s really not so much a direct teaching thing, because sometimes people imagine that I must have grown up in a household where we had nightly poetry readings and painting lessons and so on but actually I just sat around watching sitcoms and going to sports, going to baseball games and hockey games, you know, hanging out with my friends. So in that sense it wasn’t a kind of direct formal education, it was more an atmosphere, almost unspoken and implicit, of just what matters in the world.

TSD: You’re often inspired by poetry in your own writing. I wondered if you could talk about that, the inspirational role of poetry in your work.

AN: Well, again, my father was a poet. I was an English and art history major and to me the interconnections between poetry and painting have always seemed pretty important and even obvious and therefore worth stating, but I don’t actually usually read poetry in class, though ironically I did today, and I really enjoy doing it. I think one wants words to matter and one wants the voice to matter and the tonality of the voice, the intonation, things like that. Poetry is, as you know, this special, more ceremonial way of using language where things are crushed down to their essences or somehow resolved into some kind of crystalline vividness that those same words don’t have when we go to Tresidder and order lunch. I guess that’s a big reason why poetry is important to me, because I wish that language were always held in the veneration that a poet holds it in. And I try not to be disappointed by the world at large, but I’m really grateful that there’s an opportunity given to me to teach and to write that honors that more intensified use of language.

TSD: You teach a class here on the history of Western art from the Renaissance to the present [which you also taught at Yale]. Is it different at all teaching it here than it was at Yale?

AN: My class here is much smaller. It’s probably a third or a fourth the size. So that’s a big difference.

I really like, though, the Stanford students. I feel that this group that I’m teaching now is actually my best audience I’ve ever had for this class, which I’ve taught about eight times now, at Yale and at Stanford. You can draw whatever inferences you’d like about the differences in enrollments. I’m sure you’re well versed about the differences between Yale and Stanford and I for one am a little played out on trying to describe the different atmospheres of Yale and Stanford, but I just try to approach things positively here and really enjoy teaching and be grateful for the opportunity to do so.

TSD: It is kind of an obligatory question, isn’t it, the question of how the techie-fuzzy divide supposedly affects life on campus.

AN: Yeah, it’s such a terrible distinction here that, like many clichés, has this staying power which substitutes for real thought. Or for real subtlety or nuance. Especially when I meet so many brilliant scientists of different kinds here among the undergraduates who are incredibly observant and sensitive about works of art. So I lament the cliché more than anything, because it’s a cliché people live by externally, but I think there are many, many people here who internally don’t live by that at all.

In that sense I feel like my classes are potentially as valuable if not more valuable to people in the sciences because it’s a place where those of them that are observant and sensitive in the ways I’ve described can really find a place to develop that particular passion.

TSD: You’d especially want to reach out to the students who already have that observant capability?

AN: Among the scientists? Yeah, I think so. I’m not a converter, so if people are not interested, that’s great — I mean it’s a free country. But it seems to me a failure of nerve and of courage if you are interested and you don’t take advantage of that because of a prevailing atmosphere about what is or is not important or relevant.

TSD: So there’s a limit to how much the opportunities Stanford offers will affect how much students take advantage of them — it’s the role of the student to try and find opportunities to think about art?

AN: Well, there are a million opportunities, and I think Stanford does a great job of encouraging more and more students, no matter what their intellectual orientation, to take art or literature classes or whatever, but at a certain point, it’s up to the student to make their own choice.

This piece is part of a continuing series of faculty spotlight pieces.

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

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Researchers find new method to predict contraction of age-related macular degeneration https://stanforddaily.com/2014/11/10/researchers-find-new-method-to-predict-contraction-of-age-related-macular-degeneration/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/11/10/researchers-find-new-method-to-predict-contraction-of-age-related-macular-degeneration/#respond Tue, 11 Nov 2014 04:47:17 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1091830 Stanford University School of Medicine scientists have found a new, smarter method of predicting if and when patients with age-related macular degeneration will contract the most damaging form of the disease.

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Stanford University School of Medicine scientists have created a new, smarter method for predicting if and when patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) will contract the most damaging form of the disease.

The technique, which relies on computer analysis of retinal scans already commonly collected by ophthalmologists and optometrists, will enable doctors to accurately calculate whether any given patient is likely to progress to “wet” AMD — the later stage of the illness that causes blindness if not treated in time.

AMD, the leading cause of vision loss in adults over 65, results from deposits called drusen in the retina. In dry AMD, drusen buildup can damage the macula, the area of the retina most key to sight. Wet AMD, a far more debilitating version of the disease, occurs when abnormal blood vessels also accumulate behind the retina and leak. Blindness can quickly ensue.

There is no feasible way to treat wet AMD preemptively. And until now, there was no way to tell with certainty whether dry AMD would become wet AMD. Patients just had to hope their next doctor’s visit would come at the right time to detect and head off any further deterioration before it was too late.

Thanks to the new computer algorithm, ophthalmologists can now predict whether a particular person’s AMD will progress within one, three or five years, enabling doctors to tell their patients much more accurately when their next visit should be.

“A larger follow-up study is needed,” said the study’s senior author, Daniel L. Rubin, assistant professor of radiology and of biomedical informatics in a Medical School report.

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New Stanford Historical Society president calls for younger members https://stanforddaily.com/2014/11/05/new-stanford-historical-society-president-calls-for-younger-members/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/11/05/new-stanford-historical-society-president-calls-for-younger-members/#respond Wed, 05 Nov 2014 16:57:00 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1091430 The mission of the Stanford Historical Society (SHS) is to support “the documentation, study, publication, and preservation of the history” of the University. It holds lectures and programs, records relevant oral histories and publishes a journal, Sandstone & Tile.

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Troy Steinmetz wants you to join the Stanford Historical Society.

The recently elected and youngest ever president of the Society is making it a major goal of his term to reach more of the Stanford community and involve more graduate and undergraduate students in the retiree-dominated organization.

The mission of the Stanford Historical Society (SHS) is to support “the documentation, study, publication, and preservation of the history” of the University. It holds lectures and programs, records relevant oral histories and publishes a journal, “Sandstone & Tile.”

Of its 900 members, around 10 are graduate and undergraduate students. The rest are alumni and retired and current faculty and staff. Steinmetz, age 27, would like to change that.

“Part of me…being on the younger end of things and having more recently been a [Stanford] student is to think about how can we engage undergrads, how can we engage graduate students,” Steinmetz said.

Steinmetz, who considers himself a “history nerd,” first joined the Society in his junior year after getting hooked on “Sandstone & Tile” while using it to research a paper on David Starr Jordan, Stanford’s first president.

He acknowledges that Stanford history may not be something that everyone loves. Also, given the number of opportunities for students at Stanford, it can be hard to convince people to join.

But he believes students stand to gain a lot by getting involved.

“[Stanford is] an institution that is fascinating to study, to understand. And for me, history is a way of understanding where we are now,” Steinmetz said. “Also…it’s just interesting on its own merits; the stories that you hear and the people you interact with, or the people you hear about, are fascinating.”

The Society is still exploring its options for how best to recruit students. Steinmetz plans to use the upcoming 125th anniversary of Stanford’s opening to appeal to more people. In the meantime, strategies include papering a bulletin board in the History building with SHS paraphernalia to get the attention of history buffs.

“Our hope is that the people who have an interest in Stanford history will find us, or we’ll find them and plug them in in some way,” Steinmetz said.

The easiest way to get involved is to become a member of the Society. For current students, the fee is $10. Members receive a subscription to “Sandstone & Tile” and invitations to the Society’s free lectures and programs.

There are plenty of opportunities for undergrads and grad students to do more. In past years, students have sat on the SHS board, worked on the annual Historic House and Garden Tour, interviewed retired faculty as part of the oral history project and submitted to the Society-sponsored Beyers’ Prize for Excellence in Historical Writing.

Oral Histories

Students can volunteer with Allison K. Tracy, the Society’s Oral Historian, to interview retired faculty about their lives and careers at Stanford — and pick up a unit of class credit along the way.

Tracy is currently working on a project called Pioneering Women, which focuses on recording the stories of the first women who came to Stanford. She is interviewing multiple generations of faculty to shed light on how the experience of women at Stanford has changed over the years.

She teaches her volunteers how to use recording equipment, do research for interviews, craft interview outlines and “elicit historically substantive information” from the people they talk to.

Last year, the student who worked with her on Pioneering Women received a unit of independent study credit through professor Estelle Freedman and her work on feminist studies.

“We are hoping to offer that opportunity for undergraduates again,” Tracy said.

She is primarily working on Pioneering Women, but students who have other projects in mind may still be able to get class credit.

Beyers’ Prize

The Society also sponsors the annual Beyers’ Prize for Excellence in Historical Writing for the best essay written by a Stanford undergraduate or grad student on an aspect of Stanford history.

The winner earns $500 and a free yearlong membership to the Society.

“The essays can reveal the most fascinating things,” Steinmetz said. “[For example] there were tunnels in the foothills that were built during the World Wars…[because] they actually housed troops there for a while.”

Another winning essay, a version of which the Society will soon publish, covers the history of coeducation at Stanford. In the past, women lived on one side of campus, men lived on the other. The essay explores the ways change was effected.

“Not enough people compete” for the prize, said Professor Emeritus Peter Stansky, who co-chairs the SHS Programs Committee. “We generally have five or six entries.”

This year’s deadline to submit to the contest is April 6, 2015.

Programs & Publications

Steinmetz sees the role of the SHS as twofold. Its first job is to assist in preserving stories and information about Stanford that might interest future historians. Its second job is to get stories out there.

“I think that’s some of the best work we do, is through our programs and our publications, to put a lens on what is a very large institution with a very large history,” Steinmetz said.

The SHS holds five or six public programs each year that investigate particular topics of Stanford history, from “LSJUMB 101: 50 Years of Stanford Band History” to “Victor Arnautoff, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Stanford.”

These programs can reveal little-known facts about Stanford — and they don’t always depict the University in a rosy light.

Professor Stansky, for example, remembers a talk about religion at Stanford revealing that, though Stanford was from the beginning nondenominationally Protestant, non-Protestant religious organizations were not allowed offices on campus for many years.

According to Stansky, the Society doesn’t exist to glorify or praise Stanford.

“[It exists] to discover aspects of it, to find out the story of it, of its past,” he said. “And…particularly Stanford people would find that interesting.”

Besides “Sandstone & Tile,” the Society also frequently publishes books and in-depth historical essays.

Past publications include “Stanford Street Names: a Pocket Guide,” which covers the stories behind the names of famous Stanford streets, and “Stanford’s Red Barn,” an essay on the architectural centerpiece of “the Farm.”

Ultimately, Steinmetz hopes that Stanford students will utilize all these resources to learn more about their school. The visionary contents of the Founding Grant, the history of student activism on campus, Stanford’s role in creating Silicon Valley — these are topics he wants all undergrads in particular to explore.

It’s part of contextualizing the experience of the present-day Stanford student,” Tracy said.

“The resources available to undergraduates [are] just so incredible at Stanford,” she said. “There’s things that students have access to today that have roots in events that happened 50 years ago, and so I think being able to understand that trajectory is really important.”

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford.edu

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Library archivists face contractual, technical challenges in preserving digital materials https://stanforddaily.com/2014/10/30/library-archivists-face-contractual-technical-challenges-in-preserving-digital-materials/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/10/30/library-archivists-face-contractual-technical-challenges-in-preserving-digital-materials/#respond Thu, 30 Oct 2014 08:32:17 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1090916 Archivists at Stanford libraries face contractual and technical challenges in keeping an increasing amount of digital material, like eBooks and email, safe and accessible for future generations.

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Archivists at Stanford libraries face contractual and technical challenges in keeping an increasing amount of digital material, like eBooks and email, safe and accessible for future generations.

For one, words in paper books don’t spontaneously disappear, but words in eBooks can. Because eBooks and electronic journals are licensed, not owned, libraries may not be able to ensure long-term access to them. Depending on the contract between the publisher and the library, publishers can sometimes remove or alter content without the library’s consent.

According to Hannah C. Frost, services manager at the Stanford Digital Repository, this issue is a long-standing problem for research institutions like Stanford.

“Sometimes we’ve invested a considerable amount of money in those subscriptions and then…the publisher changes their mind, or goes out of business, and suddenly we don’t have access to content that we had paid for,” Frost said.

Peter Chan, digital archivist at Stanford’s Born-Digital/Forensics Lab, said libraries have become “smarter and smarter” at standing up for their rights. Now that they know what to expect when negotiating with publishers, they can insist on long-term access.

To assist in this negotiation, Stanford created LOCKSS, or Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe, which is the first and only mechanism to apply the traditional purchase-and-own library model to electronic materials.

Participating publishers agree to make their digital books available to libraries over the long-term. Libraries can then place their electronic collections safely in online LOCKSS Boxes — digital bookshelves that the libraries control access to. Stanford started LOCKSS, but any library can join.

“Collaboration with other institutions is a really important part of all of this,” Frost said.

Of course, even if libraries can secure perpetual access to content, that content still has to be laboriously preserved. This is where technical challenges arise.

“Digital preservation is much more difficult than preserving paper or physical artifacts,” Chan said. “You can’t just keep hard drives in a climate-controlled box and expect them to stay readable.”

“Digital media can corrupt much more easily than paper,” he added.

Instead, Chan builds tools to extract the data from CDs, floppy disks, computers and the like and transfer it to more stable storage on Stanford’s servers.

There’s also the issue of ensuring that files are preserved in a stable format, which is similar to the eBook problem. Because of licensing, if a company that makes a particular kind of software goes out of business, files built to be read with it will be unreadable (records without a record player). So, data extracted from disks and computers also has to be converted to the kind of format that doesn’t depend on the consumer technology market.

The sheer volume of material archivists deal with can be overwhelming, too.

“There is sort of a backlog of legacy stuff that had come in…20, 25 years ago,” said Glynn Edwards, manager of the Born-Digital Program. “Nobody’s staffing levels are sufficient to keep up with…processing.”

But the longer you wait to extract data from a floppy disk, the more danger there is that the data will deteriorate. If data isn’t captured quickly enough, the means of capturing it may become obsolete.

Just a few years after Chan built two machines to capture data from 5.25-inch floppy disks, the company manufacturing the necessary components to make such machines stopped making them.

However, extracting the information is just half of the battle. The information must be accessible in the future.

“You can take the data off a hard drive and stick it in a digital repository and say it’s preserved,” Edwards said. “[But] no one can access it, no one can discover it, no one can use it.”

Edwards and Chan are working together on ePADD, a tool that will allow individuals and repositories to interact with email archives. ePADD will enable users to search, for instance, poet Robert Creeley’s email correspondence for information regarding a particular person or place name.

“I would emphasize that it’s important not to take the ease with which you produce and use digital content…for granted,” Frost said. “As amazing as [technology] is, it’s also a vulnerability, because of how things can change. And things will change, that’s the one thing we know.”

Contact Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott ‘at’ stanford ‘dot’ edu.

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