Arnav Mariwala – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Tue, 13 Jun 2017 23:35:37 +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 Arnav Mariwala – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 The examined Stanford life https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/13/the-examined-stanford-life/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/13/the-examined-stanford-life/#respond Tue, 13 Jun 2017 23:35:37 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1128994 Take this column with a pinch of salt; there’s no single or perfect way to make the most of your Stanford career or your life, but one day you too can tell your peers how to be a little less of a dumbass.

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Writer’s Note: I am graduating in a couple of days. Tradition dictates that I leave with a pompous column imparting sage advice to those students who remain here for another year or three. However, I am no wise sage; I am simply a little less of a dumbass than I was as a freshman. Granted, I know a lot more about American weirdness, second-order partial differential equations, and the role of science in shaping a healthy political discourse and globalization in the pre-modern era than I did four years ago, but I still eat dino nuggets three times a week and occasionally chug acrid bagged wine. So take this column with a pinch of salt; there’s no single or perfect way to make the most of your Stanford career or your life, but one day you too can tell your peers how to be a little less of a dumbass.

Not many people know it, but the origin of the craziness that defined the 1960s and everything that came subsequently is a little place up on Sand Hill Road called Perry Lane. Today, Google calls it Perry Avenue and it’s merely an embodiment of suburban perfection, like what you would find in the rest of green and brown Silicon Valley. But 60 years ago, this is where a young Ken Kesey, having recently enrolled in Stanford’s graduate creative writing program, moved in with a group of beatniks and proceeded to disrupt their carefully curated lifestyle of wine and orgies. As a broke grad student, he volunteered at the Menlo Park VA’s psychiatric ward, where he was injected with multiple unpleasant drugs, until he was injected with an unusually pleasant drug called LSD, which he then took back with him to his band of beatniks. The young ones loved it and called themselves the Merry Pranksters; the old ones thought they were crazy, and the landlord soon evicted them all. Thus began the era of free love, Deadheads and annoying white people with flowers in their hair.

I discovered Kesey’s hallucination-inducing story through an equally hallucination-inducing book by journalist Tom Wolfe, appropriately titled the “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” toward the end of my sophomore year. Any romanticism that I might have had about the era of gentle people and the Vietnam War was simultaneously reinforced and burnt down with napalm. It was truly an amazing time, where young people could take psychedelics, drive a repurposed school bus across the entire U.S. and return to a home in the Santa Cruz mountains to party with the Beatles and do even more psychedelics. To my sophomore-slumped socially awkward brain that was still adjusting to life in a foreign country and smarting from the blows dealt to it by the Math 50 series, this sounded like heaven.

But it was also a time of selfish and destructive nihilism. Nothing displayed this better than a scene from the book where Kesey and his band of pranksters were invited to an anti-war rally in Berkeley, ostensibly to preach against the evil and unjust nature of America’s foray into Vietnam. Instead, Kesey pranked the entire crowd — first by saying that war had been around forever and nothing was going to change, then by making fun of the protest leaders by comparing one of them to Mussolini and finally by playing a harmonica solo, telling the crowd to turn their backs on everything and loudly saying ‘fuck it.’ It didn’t matter, argued Kesey, that the anti-war crowd and the warmongers in Washington had vastly different values; they both believed in the same underlying system. Turn on, tune in, drop out and the whole school would come crumbling down.

***

At the same time that I discovered the Day-Glo prose of Wolfe, I discovered something slightly more somber. Inspired by the writings of Sartre and other existentialists that I read for SLE, I picked up the Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz’s novel “Children of the Alley.” Set over four generations in the same fictional alley of Cairo, the novel aims to retell the stories of the fall of man, the rise of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the coming of modernity to the Middle East. At the center of the novel is the mysterious Gebelawi, the wealthy owner of the large mansion at the end of the alley, and the various factions that each lay claim to some fraction of his enormous inheritance. Each section of the book follows a hauntingly similar template: A group of the neighborhood residents, dissatisfied by the way the strongmen of the alley continue to mistreat them, rally around a leader who gets a revelation from Gebelawi or one of his close servants, telling him that he is the leader of the chosen people. As each group gains rights and a claim to a share of his estate, they proceed to form a new oppressive leadership and mistreat new entrants to the alley, restarting the cycle again.

In the very last section of the novel, the people of the alley grow tired and weary of being mistreated by the alley’s strongmen, cynically wondering if Gebelawi cares for them or is even alive anymore. Within this stultifying atmosphere of resignation enters Arafa, a magician and tinkerer with enough explosive tricks to make the strongmen’s lives hell. Convinced that Gebelawi is either dead or indifferent to his people’s suffering, Arafa tries to uncover his estate’s secrets, unwittingly killing him in a manner analogous to the Nietzschean death of God.

Predictably, Arafa is caught by the Chief Strongman, who blackmails him into using his magic to make the strongmen unquestioned dictators of the entire alley. The novel thus ends on an extremely bleak note — Arafa has disappeared, the strongmen rein supreme, Gebelawi is dead, and the people suffer no less than they did before. Modernity, with all its promises, did not leave much behind.

Mahfouz originally wrote this novel in 1959, at the height of Pan-Arabism and the rise of secular dictators in the Middle East, and at the same time that Kesey and his pranksters were beginning to discover LSD. Were he to write it today, I am sure he would add several more sections on the rise of Salafism, globalization, the religious Right and the democratization of technology. But at the same time, I doubt that the underlying mood of the novel would have been any different; for all the social and technological progress that has been made since the 1950s, much is still the same. No matter how values may have shifted, the underlying system hasn’t changed substantially. Thus, in many ways, Mahfouz provides a searing vindication of Kesey’s loud declaration at Berkeley. There is no point in bringing change without tearing down what everyone buys into — whether that is the promise of Gebelawi’s wealth or the promise of American exceptionalism.

***

When I read these books, I felt a tremendous feeling of cynical inadequacy. At Stanford — the university equivalent of Disneyland on Adderall — we’re constantly fed the narrative that we are the next generation of movers and shakers. We’re here to use our education to further the public good, make the world a better place and build successful lives. Yet, here I was, confronted by this realization that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Even the relentless optimism of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the other luminaries who cast long shadows on the engineering quad seemed undercut by the dark side of what technology brought us — whether that was the rise of the Alt-Right, the easy spread of terrorism or just a general sense of oversaturated exhaustion with everything horrible going on in the world. The attraction of simply saying ‘fuck it’ and moving to a farm grew stronger and stronger.

But there was something about Stanford that I found undercut all of that cynicism — the same way that at the end of Mahfouz’s novel, Arafa’s apprentice finds his book of magic spells in the trash, giving him renewed hope about freeing the alley from its tormentors.

Stanford is an incredibly hopeful place, filled with incredibly hopeful people — all writing their own books of magic spells. I’m not sure what Mr. Arrillaga has been putting in the water, but it’s good stuff. It’s the kind of stuff that made me want to chug the electric kool-aid that seems to permeate everything in the Bay Area — this notion of constantly wanting to make the world a better place. And it’s absolutely inspiring to be around people who genuinely believe it — whether they are future activists, scientists, entrepreneurs, public servants, historians, or artists.

This is my final column as an undergraduate for the Daily. I’ll be back next year as a graduate student, ready to drink more of the electric kool-aid. It’s been my greatest privilege to call this little slice of California home — and I hope it continues to inspire me to say ‘fuck it’ less and less.

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Magazine: The case for STEM https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/06/magazine-the-case-for-stem/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/06/magazine-the-case-for-stem/#respond Tue, 06 Jun 2017 07:35:12 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1127423 It is hard to talk about eradicating the banana plague or switching the entire electric grid to solar energy without some understanding of the basic biology or engineering that underlie both these problems.

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When it first came out in 1966, “Star Trek” predicted a lot of things — cell phones, tablets, automatic doors, human fondness for alien sexual relations — but not even the trippiest episode could predict a world where someone could snap a disappearing photograph, order a pizza, and send the President an invective-filled 140-character message while sitting on the toilet. Even though we never realized the moon vacations of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” technology nevertheless assumed the central role in our lives that we predicted it would — just in a different way and on a different scale. No wonder, then, that almost half of Stanford students major in a STEM-related field — the only “fuzzy” major among the top five declared last year was Science, Technology, and Society, and that has the first half of STEM in its name.

Given the prevalence that STEM enjoys at Stanford, I have not been surprised to encounter a steady stream of talks, lectures, thinkpieces and conversations about the value of the humanities for someone studying the sciences or engineering. A holistic education, so the argument goes, encourages critical thinking, instills an appreciation for diverse viewpoints, helps one discover a purpose to their work along with a sense of ethics and creates a well-rounded individual who is able to coherently and clearly communicate what they think. All of this is undoubtedly true — I pursued a history minor and took SLE as a freshman, both of which made me a better communicator and critical thinker while pushing me to think about the ethics and implications of my scientific work as well. In short, studying the humanities along with my primary field imparted me with useful, practical skills while contributing to my intellectual development. Just as the thinkpieces said they would.

However, the same should be said for the converse — that STEM holds immense intellectual and practical value for students of the humanities. Right now, as Amy Shen noted in the Stanford Review, it is possible to graduate without taking a single rigorous science, math, or engineering course — “Physics for Poets” and “Sleep and Dreams” are nowhere near as rigorous as core engineering or math classes. As I had mentioned in a previous column, even a class devoted entirely to critiquing technology had no technical material on its syllabus, making up for it with episodes of “Black Mirror.”

This is problematic on both a practical and intellectual level. On a practical level, it is obvious what the implications of a lack of STEM knowledge are. At least five of the ten biggest challenges facing humanity — food security, climate change, artificial intelligence, an open internet, universal healthcare — are problems that require knowledge of the natural sciences and engineering to solve, and this does not even include issues like WMD proliferation, natural disaster protection, and long-term survival of our species. These are the issues that Stanford students will use their education to address when they leave zip code 94305. It is fair to say that some depth of knowledge in the science underlying these processes would go a long way in improving the ability of future policymakers, intellectuals, and businesspeople in addressing these issues. It is hard to talk about eradicating the banana plague or switching the entire electric grid to solar energy without some understanding of the basic biology or engineering that underlie both these problems.

In addition to science and technology specific issues, more and more public policy relies on insights from cognitive psychology, large data sets and systems engineering. Indeed, these frameworks are changing the way we make policy from the city level to the national level. On the business side, it is more and more evident that a free and open internet is essential for commercial growth, that new and disruptive technology will upend markets that no one thought was possible to break into and that even something as fundamental as a contract may completely change in the future. Everyone addressing these issues need not be a data scientist or software engineer — but some structured engineering and statistics knowledge would go a long way in improving our ability to address them.

More fundamentally, however, the university owes it to its students to ensure that they grow intellectually in all directions. The entirety of human civilization rests on a pale blue dot shooting through space — but the natural world extends for billions of light years beyond it. A truly holistic and liberal education would thus encourage the study of the natural world, not deemphasize it. It is as important to learn how to think systematically, work with data, and apply first principles with mathematical rigor to draw insights about the world around us as it is to learn how to appreciate diverse perspectives, communicate ideas effectively, and contemplate the ‘big questions’ of life. Even as the latter influences the interaction of science and the public, the former has the potential to change the way we think about and create history, literature and the arts.

There is a stereotype of the snooty humanities student — someone who dismisses STEM as somehow intellectually impure or a pursuit solely for a material end. I have met very few students like this. The majority have been like me — we were inspired by a natural world that is amazingly complex, beautiful and rich with knowledge. I personally have found elegance and beauty in equations of physics to rival the greatest paintings of Van Gogh — it still amazes me that a set of only four simple differential equations underpin all the modern electronics that we take for granted today. As I reflect on my last few weeks here as an undergraduate, I hope that more students will be able to find that sense of amazement as well.

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Nonpartisan, not bipartisan https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/05/nonpartisan-not-bipartisan/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/05/nonpartisan-not-bipartisan/#respond Fri, 05 May 2017 07:49:47 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1127056 Fair reporting, therefore, means presenting the facts honestly while bringing out the nuances. But more importantly, it must involve recognizing that opposing views are not always ethically or intellectually equivalent.

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Last week, the New York Times caused a stir when it published the first column of conservative commentator Bret Stephens. In his column, Stephens argued that the inherent uncertainty of empirical data meant that the certitude of scientists in the predictions of climate models was misplaced. The implications of this were that we ought to spend more time and energy debating the nuances and uncertainty of climate models in lieu of taking decisive action to mitigate its effects now.

This argument is, of course, patently absurd. There is ample evidence and scientific consensus to indicate that climate change is both an immediate and existential threat, and the uncertainty of this conclusion is miniscule. Stephens rather insidiously makes a classic climate change denier argument where he calls into question the scientific method’s foundation in empiricism instead of making factual claims that can be debunked with a quick Google search. Instead of asserting that warming is part of some sort of natural cycle, or isn’t really happening, he simply says that the data are uncertain, therefore we must not act immediately.

To illustrate this absurdity, let us consider the probability of an individual in a room dying of asphyxiation because all the air molecules in the room spontaneously relocated to the opposite side, as a consequence of their random thermodynamic fluctuations. Sure, this is a possibility, but a simple calculation tells you that the probability is really, really small — on the order of 10^(10^-22). You would therefore not be worried about spontaneously dying as you sit reading this.

In the same vein, although climate models are inherently uncertain, the uncertainty has been minimized to a point where we are reasonably certain of the disastrous effects and consequences of climate change, just as we are reasonably certain we won’t spontaneously die from asphyxiation. Thus, the potential cost of doing nothing far exceeds any upfront cost from taking decisive action against climate change. This ought to be obvious to anyone who works with data to make informed decisions regularly — which is why numerous scientists, business leaders, generals and even fossil fuel companies are urging climate action.

The Times went on to defend Stephens by asking readers to “tolerate views they did not like,” noting that they were trying to “bust up the liberal echo chamber” and bring a “diversity of opinion” to the opinions pages. Most reasonable people would agree with such sentiments; as a general principle, echo chambers have little intellectual benefit and diversity of opinions is integral to a free thinking society. However, Stephens’ opinion is more than just a view that liberals do not like; it is based on falsehoods, it is intellectually dishonest and has potentially harmful real world consequences. To put it bluntly, it has no intellectual value and comes from a place of malicious intent as well. As such, there is no reason for the Times, a self-professed guardian of “the truth,” to give Stephens a soapbox to spout his BS.

However, the Times’ actions are symptomatic of a much larger problem within political discourse. There is a notion that everything reported in the media must be “fair and balanced,” i.e., it must present the facts without bias while showcasing a diversity of opinion on a given topic as well. Few reasonable people would disagree with this notion — making complex collective decisions requires hearing the views of as many stakeholders in as intellectually honest a way as possible. Fair reporting, therefore, means presenting the facts honestly while bringing out the nuances. But more importantly, it must involve recognizing that opposing views are not always ethically or intellectually equivalent — one could not reasonably justify treating the opinion of a qualified doctor the same as that of a healing crystal hippie on how to cure AIDS, because the healing crystal hippie is clearly an idiot. In the same vein, one could not justify treating a lung cancer researcher and a tobacco industry lobbyist the same, because the lobbyist has a clear financial incentive to misrepresent the impact of cigarettes on lung cancer.

Reporting on this case fairly would mean accurately describing the scientific consensus on tobacco’s carcinogenic effects, clearly highlighting outstanding questions over the consensus, as well as providing context on the effects that anti-smoking policy might have on the tobacco industry’s profits. In this case, it’s very clear that the scientific consensus does not show the tobacco industry in a good light. But that is because it is objectively in the wrong here — it is an empirical fact that its products have contributed to millions of deaths, and there is no way to spin that positively. As such, the reporting is clearly fair – but it is not “balanced,” and nor should it be, because doing so would mean treating a lie — that tobacco products don’t cause cancer – as having the same intellectual and ethical weight as the truth.

However, it is clear that there has been a dearth of fair reporting recently, especially when it comes to contentious political issues like climate change and free trade. Media organizations tend to opt for what one calls “balance instead — i.e., a policy of always presenting an opinion on a topic along with an opposing view. Sure, this sounds good — it’s important to lay out cases for and against intervention in a foreign war, for example — but too often it metamorphoses into a platform for idiocy, hate and plain falsehood. We see this with Stephens in The New York Times and with a number of prominent conservative climate change critics with ties to the fossil fuel industry, but we also see it in the recent debate over the Affordable Care Act’s repeal, with Republican leaders openly lying about the effects of their new bill and also with the anti-GMO movement on the left.

It is therefore time to acknowledge that a truly fair media isn’t one that treats all views the same, but is one that is willing to call out bullshit and focus on arguments built on empirical fact. We don’t seem to be too far away from a “Liberals say sky is blue, Conservatives say it’s orange” headline.


Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Why science must get political https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/21/why-science-must-get-political/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/21/why-science-must-get-political/#respond Fri, 21 Apr 2017 08:10:23 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1126268 It is extremely worrying to see that the new administration does not seem to care at all about data collection.

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Writer’s Note: This Saturday, millions of people are planning to take to the streets for the March for Science. In this column, I explain why such directed action is necessary for the public good.

One of the more baffling things to come out of the 1990s was a Congressional appropriation that banned the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from funding research that “may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” This effectively ended all federally funded studies on gun violence, to the point where even private nonprofits rarely carry out such studies. Even an executive order from President Obama could not stimulate this research; Congress refused to appropriate money for it.

Refusing to collect and analyze data on a problem faced by one’s company would get even the most charismatic of CEOs fired. This is an obvious problem: as Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross noted in his confirmation hearing, anything that you cannot measure, you cannot manage. It is therefore both absurd and troubling that for almost 20 years, Congress has refused to even measure the problem of gun violence, indicating that it has no intention of managing it. As a result, attempts at enacting reasonable gun control — i.e., in a manner which reduces gun violence while protecting gun owners’ right to bear arms — have been killed over and over again. Without hard data, it is pretty much impossible to craft a solution that achieves both these goals, and we remain stuck in gridlock while thousands more people die from gun violence.

It is therefore extremely worrying to see that the new administration does not seem to care at all about data collection. In the administration’s budget proposal, it proposes gutting the research budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and eliminating a number of NOAA’s coastal research grants, halves the budget for the EPA’s Office of Research and Development and eliminates data-transparency programs like Energy Star. Additionally, it removes almost a fifth of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science budget and eliminates programs that improve access to energy efficiency data, it cuts the National Institute of Health’s budget by 19 percent and it cuts $667 million from disaster mitigation programs. Forget solving any of our problems like climate change, dirty energy, disease and poverty; the Trump administration has no intention of even pretending to manage them.

At the same time, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has resurrected the chimera of “reefer madness,” ignoring the mountains of data that detail the relatively benign effects of marijuana on consumers and the outsize harmful effects of the war on drugs. He has also pledged to get “tough on crime” while crime rates have consistently gone down and to support an enhanced crackdown on illegal immigrants, especially from Mexico, when their numbers have been declining already and removing them further would create immense economic cost. If one wanted to describe Sessions’ thought process, it would be to take a look at all the data we have and do the exact opposite of what the data indicates we should do.

Any reasonable person would characterize this behavior as stupidity. One does not achieve better results by continuing the same failed policies of previous years or ignoring empirical data. Nor does one solve problems by pretending that they don’t exist, as this administration hopes to do with climate change. Yet, we see this phenomena on both the right and the left; on one side we have climate-change deniers, on the other side we have anti-GMO crusaders, and on both sides of the aisle we have anti-vaxxers. However, one party has elevated anti-science and anti-data beliefs to its party platform, while the other has not. That same party controls the Federal Government. It is thus beyond time to address the politics of science and empiricism.

As I have stated in previous columns, the state of scientific literacy among both politicians and the public is abysmal. As abysmal is the state of rational discourse; millions of Americans believe in nonsense conspiracy theories and creationism. While paranoid lunatics have always been a part of politics, they now have more power than they did before. The damage done to the collective by the fringe will therefore be much more than it ever was; the laws of physics will continue to work even if the President calls them “fake news.”

It is thus imperative that we have a movement to restore science and empiricism to the center of policy decision-making. It is also imperative that we renew public enthusiasm for fundamental science research. Without both of these things, not only will we fail to solve the most significant issues facing humanity, but we will actively take decisions that make the status quo worse based on the whims of cranky old men.

 

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Tech hasn’t gone nearly far enough https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/07/tech-hasnt-gone-nearly-far-enough/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/07/tech-hasnt-gone-nearly-far-enough/#respond Fri, 07 Apr 2017 07:30:44 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1125472 Forget replicators, warp drives, and robot butlers - our future is expected to be a hellish scramble for resources, not an age of limitless prosperity.

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Last month, one of my fellow columnists at the Daily argued that the cause of our generation’s alleged decline in happiness is due to the relentless onslaught of technology in our lives in a piece titled “Has Tech Gone Too Far?” Technology, Harrison writes (while offering little evidence), has “limited the depths of our relationships and created a society where individualism thrives while the collective suffers.” Furthermore, he argues, technology has allowed wealth inequality to proliferate and happiness to decline.

Harrison presents zero evidence to back up any of these claims; indeed, among teenagers and young adults (i.e., the generations most likely to make technology integral parts of their lives), the percentage of people saying they are happy has increased since 1972. To be fair, so have rates of anxiety and depression among young people, while suicide rates have decreased. But it is far more likely that people are anxious about the future because people in the Western world live in an era where an expensive college education is necessary for most future jobs, and where we are still recovering from the effects of the Great Recession. Add to that the effects of wage stagnation from the 1970s, and chances are you’re going to be less happy even if you can order marijuana to your doorstep and find someone to have sex with using a smartphone. Indeed, simplicity might be the key to happiness, but living a simple life isn’t cheap, and life is undoubtedly made simpler with technology, which also costs money, and so on.

However, one of the great paradoxes of our age of on-demand marijuana is not just our increased anxiety and depression, but also the nature of our science fiction. A time-traveler from the era of the Jetsons and Star Trek would be rather disturbed to see that some of our most popular stories of the future involve children fighting to the death in a zero-sum game for wealth and glory, humans leaving earth after obliterating the environment, and the establishment of a totalitarian theocracy in modern-day America. Forget replicators, warp drives and robot butlers — our future is expected to be a hellish scramble for resources, not an age of limitless prosperity. If Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber had proclaimed today that we would have more vacation than work days in thirty years, we’d tell him to quit being such a hippie and get back to work.

In his 2011 essay titled “The End of the Future,” billionaire tech investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel argues that our exponential advances in computing power and information technology have disguised a troubling stagnation in more fundamental innovation. Life at its core, argues Thiel, has remained fundamentally unchanged since the Space Age. We do not zip across the planet at 2,000 miles per hour, we do not take vacations on the moon and increasingly, our economic system is becoming more and more of a zero-sum game. Today, Thiel writes, the Manhattan Project would not get off the ground, politicians do not have the courage to substantially increase research and development funding and people prefer to buy Victorian homes.

A quick look at America’s energy landscape confirms Thiel’s hypothesis. Almost 80 years after splitting the atom, nuclear energy only accounts for 20 percent of our electricity production, with coal and natural gas accounting for two-thirds of it and solar, wind and geothermal energy accounting for less than 6 percent. 92 percent of the energy we use for transportation comes from fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency does not see a radical shift away from our reliance on fossil fuels by 2040, even though renewable energy will play a much bigger role. Thus, our sources of energy will remain largely the same as they were in the Carter years.

This is a tremendous problem. For meaningfully improving standards of living and transforming our lives into something closer to the utopian dreams of Star Trek, we need cheap, abundant and clean (i.e., carbon-free) energy. Nuclear fission energy offers such a promiseyet mass public hysteria against the perceived dangers of this technology have significantly increased hurdles against its adoption. California, the largest state in the country and the world’s capital of innovation, still prohibits the construction of new nuclear plants due to a misguided 1976 referendum. In Thiel’s words, the hippies are winning this fight; the 1950s promise of limitless energy from the atom is now nothing but a passing thought.

Critics of nuclear power will argue that something that produces the potential for large catastrophe and non-trivial amounts of dangerous radioactive waste ought to be replaced by something better. Indeed, the so-called Holy Grail of the energy industry, nuclear fusion, offers the benefits of cheap, abundant, and clean energy without any of the current downsides. But like other moonshots, making fusion a reality requires immense amounts of dedicated research and development funding. Yet we spend less on research and development today than Richard Nixon did in 1972. Non-defense research and development constituted 6 percent of the federal budget at the height of the space race; today, it is less than 2 percent. While we have had several extraordinary breakthroughs in basic research since the space race, we also see fewer and fewer paths for this breakthrough science to reach the market and transform people’s lives — a phenomenon known cheerfully as the “valley of death.”

Fewer people live in extreme poverty today than fifty years ago. But truly conquering poverty, disease and other social ills while building a future we all aspire to means getting serious about technology and putting money where our mouths are. In Silicon Valley, it is too easy to conflate advances in tech with a new photo-sharing app and thus myopically make calls for less tech in our lives. We ought to be asking for more, not fearfully scrambling to extract every last bit of somniferous nostalgia from what already exists. Netflix ought not to be the final resting place of Star Trek.

 

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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A transformation from progressive skeptic to progressive https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/22/a-transformation-from-progressive-skeptic-to-progressive/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/22/a-transformation-from-progressive-skeptic-to-progressive/#respond Wed, 22 Mar 2017 07:35:22 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1124906 Framing free speech as a positive right means that the university ought to proactively ensure that marginalized voices are heard - eg. having a space dedicated to LGBTQ expression, or funding a Chicano studies center.

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Author’s note: Four weeks ago, I wrote a column on liberalism and free speech in universities, responding to one of my fellow columnist’s characterization of free speech as a positive right. Against the advice of my well-wishers, I decided to explore the comments section. There, I came across the Man with the Axe, who had this to say about my column:

“You wrote: ‘Framing of free speech as a negative right … tends to prioritize protection of what an individual already has, and in doing so, reinforces existing social inequities and injustices.’

No, it doesn’t. It allows both the haves and the have-nots to express themselves. If you are going to limit free speech as a means to correct social inequities, you are simply being a totalitarian. You are saying, ‘you marginalized people can speak, unfettered, but you rich people can only speak when we, the enlightened, say you can.’

You wrote: ‘The second thing that liberal critics of college leftists get wrong is that conservatives are somehow marginalized and wield little influence in the world, implying that colleges should therefore go out of their way to accommodate viewpoints that are not typically liberal, even idiotic ones like climate change denial.’

Why should only marginalized people, whatever that means, be allowed free speech? When colleges start only allowing viewpoints with which that liberals agree, how will liberals ever figure out what is wrong with what they believe? This sounds a lot like the medieval church wanting only to hear what it already believes. Other ideas are idiotic. Who says? Why, the liberals, of course.

You wrote: ‘ … platforms that enable speech have an obligation to help prop up the voices of those who typically have been excluded from the main channels of expression … ‘

This is exactly nobody. Are you telling me that blacks, lesbians, transgenders, et. al., are not being heard these days? I hear more about and from such people than I ever hear about or from conservatives, especially on campus.”

While I thought this individual was completely wrong, I recognized some of the frustrations that this commenter was expressing. I myself had voiced some of those in the past, during my first two years at Stanford. Therefore, I decided to respond to this commenter to illustrate what changed my thinking about progressivism and campus politics, and why it did so. This is my response.

Your main critique here is that framing free speech as a positive right goes to the extreme of promoting the voices of marginalized communities (i.e. communities that have been systematically discriminated against by both social and legal norms) at the expense of suppressing voices from groups that are usually named as complicit in or enablers of said marginalization (usually, this is said to be straight white men). You end your comment with the implication that conservative voices are unjustly drowned out on campus. I will address both these arguments here.

My article framed free speech as a positive right – which means that universities ought to enable voices that are not necessarily being heard to be heard. This is predicated on the status quo being one where said voices are not currently being heard – a “positive right” view of free speech aims to use the right to free speech to ensure that these voices are heard.

The distinction between positive and negative rights is not a value judgement, but instead a philosophical distinction between different rights that are enshrined in liberal democracy. A positive right is something that requires positive/constructive action on the part of an institution for some other individual to fully realize that right – e.g., your right to an attorney, in some cases, requires the government to provide you with one. A negative right requires what might be termed as a “negative duty” on the part of an institution/individual – e.g., “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of assembly” requires Congress to not make laws abridging freedom of assembly, instead of making laws that declare freedom of assembly to be legal. In the former case, the status quo is characterized by the absence of whatever abstract thing the law entitles you to – e.g., you might be too poor to afford an attorney, so a public defender will be provided to you. In the latter case, the status quo is characterized by the presence of that same abstract thing – you assemble with your friends/colleagues in different environments every day, therefore your freedom of assembly is predicated on the government doing nothing to stop you from assembling with your friends/colleagues in different environments.

I can illustrate my argument for framing free speech positively through the following example. According to the Fifth Amendment, no person shall be compelled to be held witness against themselves – i.e., you are under no obligation or duty to incriminate yourself if suspected of committing a crime. Now, consider a situation where a poor, uneducated individual is brought in for interrogation, and a confession is coerced out of them because they falsely believe that they are legally obligated to do so. If the Fifth Amendment is framed as a negative right, then this becomes a case of “caveat emptor,” where this individual ought to have known beforehand what their rights were. But, under the status quo, they didn’t, and were thus unfairly subjected to interrogation and trial. Framing this as a positive right would mean that investigators would have to proactively enforce the Fifth Amendment, i.e., inform this individual as to what their constitutional rights are, and provide them with appropriate guidance in fully exercising this right. Without proactively enforcing the Fifth Amendment, you would have a disproportionate number of poor and uneducated individuals being convicted of crimes that they did not commit, solely because they believed that they had to confess to something if taken into custody, even if they didn’t do it.

Applying the same framework to free speech within the context of a university means proactively making sure that marginalized voices are heard. These communities are referred to as marginalized because they collectively suffer worse socioeconomic and legal outcomes than the majority, mainly due to an immutable characteristic like race, religion or sexual orientation (e.g., black people are incarcerated at much higher rates for the same crime than white people, LGBTQ people are more likely to be homeless, women, on average, make less money than men). Framing free speech as a positive right means that the university ought to proactively ensure that these voices are heard – e.g., having a space dedicated to LGBTQ expression, or funding a Chicano Studies center.

Now that I’ve laid out that framework, the end of your comment says that you hear more from “blacks, lesbians, transgenders et al” than conservatives, especially on campus. You imply that these voices are no longer sidelined on liberal arts college campuses (and Stanford specifically), and that anybody with an Internet connection and a Medium account can make their voice heard, and that it is, in fact, conservatives who are the marginalized minority on campus. I have three points to refute this:

  1. While the voices of these communities might be heard on campus right now, said communities are still marginalized. At Stanford itself, you have disproportionately less representation of black and Latino people in the faculty, as the majority of faculty are still white men, and about 45-50 percent of the student body comes from higher-income backgrounds. This is below the levels expected based on the demographic breakdown of the United States, and a consequence of a history of exclusion of women, people of color and LGBTQ communities in higher education. Therefore, despite these communities now playing pivotal roles in campus discourse, their position is nowhere near dominant and is, in fact, precarious.
  2. It is evident that Stanford is both an elite institution and an engine of wealth creation and socioeconomic and political change. It is also evident that Stanford is not an insular ivory tower; our faculty and researchers effect massive change in the world beyond Palm Drive through their work and as a consequence of their reputations, and our students go on to do the same once we graduate. Indeed, our mission statement states that the purpose of the university is to “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence in [sic] behalf of humanity and civilization.” I doubt that anyone will argue that promoting the public welfare on behalf of humanity and civilization does not entail righting the wrongs of history. Given that Stanford has such an outsized influence on the world outside – a world where the aforementioned communities are disproportionately underrepresented in business, media, academia and government and face higher rates of poverty, poor social outcomes and violence – Stanford thus has an obligation to itself to help end marginalization on campus. One way to do so is ensure that their voices are prominently heard on campus.
  3. While it is true that the majority of students and faculty on this campus tend to identify as liberal/progressive/left-leaning, it is a bit of a stretch to say that conservative voices are actively suppressed on campus. The Stanford Review is an example of a conservative publication that’s widely read; we have columnists at The Daily critiquing liberalism/progressivism every week. This is all part of healthy debate, and the university has an obligation to provide a platform for such discourse. However, in the era of “alternative facts” and rising hate crimes, it is imperative that the discourse in which we engage is grounded in empirical evidence and free from the personal insults, bigotry and intellectually dishonest hogwash that the Right seems to have adopted these days. Therefore, I do not think that the university should host a speaker like Richard Spencer, nor that it should host a conference on widely-debunked pseudoscience. Nor do I think that hurling racial slurs willy-nilly should be without social or practical consequences. However, I think it is imperative for the university to have a reasoned debate between left-leaning and right-leaning approaches on ending poverty or combating climate change, assuming that these debates are rooted in empirical methods.

When living within the bounds of zip code 94305 (colloquially known as the “Stanford bubble”), it is easy to think that conservatives do not exist or have little power. I used to think this during my first two years – suddenly, I was uncomfortable saying things that I would never have gotten flak for in high school, or I felt that I could not positively assert an opinion contrary to what was popular. The biggest example of this was the movement to divest from companies that did business with the Israeli government – I thought then, and I still do now, that the BDS movement is wrong.

However, spending six months away from Stanford reshaped my perspective drastically. Outside of Stanford, the world was still unfathomably cruel towards marginalized communities and voices. Whether this was Republicans in Congress bullying climate scientists for doing their job, right-wing political groups pouring money into campaigns to defang consumer and environmental protections or governments around the world using state apparatuses to silence journalists and dissidents, it was evident that real power still belonged to traditionalists and conservatives, and that whatever power the Stanford Students of Color Coalition had was drastically reduced the moment you crossed El Camino and entered Palo Alto.

Nor was it apparent that marginalized communities had made the astronomical gains towards equality that the Right keeps harping on about. I felt this particularly as an Indian-American and de facto immigrant interning for a Congressman on Capitol Hill. A number of my boss’s constituents had no qualms about asking me if I was here legally or employed by a call center when they called in. I was shocked to find out that there was only one Indian-American Congressman in the Capitol during my time there. But what really got me was the reaction of an Indian-American couple in their 70s to whom I gave a tour of the Capitol. At the end of the tour, they were both moved to tears – never had they imagined, they said, that they would have a college student with the same accent as them showing them around the center of the American government. Within the rainbow coalition that is the Stanford student body, I had never imagined that such an experience would be unimaginable to anybody, but here was the proof, right in front of me.

Outside of the liberal arts university, there is a huge network of right-wing think tanks, non-profits and advocacy groups. Usually, these groups are well-funded, work hand-in-glove with big business and harken back to a past where government did not provide so many positive rights and certain communities were much more marginalized than they currently are. Their reasons for this range from narrow self-interest towards concerns over the modern technocratic state exceeding appropriate limits of state power. While there are also large networks of left-leaning think tanks, non-profits and advocacy groups, one thing that is indisputable is that there are few groups representing marginalized communities that can be said to have that much power – looking at electoral outcomes alone, it is clear that the Koch Network wields more power than the NAACP.

Conservatives on campus have always called on the Left to leave their coastal enclaves and look at the “real world.” Leftists/progressives/liberals have been doing so for years, and they have rather truthfully concluded that the real world sucks, especially for specific communities – black people, poor people, LGBTQ people, etc. Universities are one institution where their voices and demand for respect can be heard – and that, too, is only up to a limit and still with significant pushback from skeptics such as you and me.

One of the most impactful experiences of my time on the Capitol was a meeting with Senator Cory Booker ’91. Having grown up in an era of campus activism as frenetic as ours, he knew what we were thinking and what values we had in common. As we were leaving, I remember him giving us the following warning:

“You’d be amazed at the kinds of things people say over here. Stuff that you could never repeat in public on campus. But you have to live with it, and keep moving forward.”

One of the ways we can move forward is by promoting the voices of those who aren’t being heard enough outside of the university. Is it really a problem if the university attempts to elevate these voices and makes them heard to a larger audience, or if students from those communities develop the courage to voice themselves with strength and conviction? I do not think so.

 

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Books to read in 2017: ‘The Sellout’ by Paul Beatty https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/24/magazine-the-sellout-by-paul-beatty/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/24/magazine-the-sellout-by-paul-beatty/#respond Sat, 25 Feb 2017 02:46:23 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1121952 Realizing what failed to go right means confronting it head on in all its naked glory, and there is no book better for that than Paul Beatty’s Booker-prize winning novel The Sellout.

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Many people around the planet expected the election of the first black leader of the free world to usher in a new era of diversity, multiculturalism, openness and that vaulted post-racial society. It was seen as a seismic event where the evils of the past would slowly dissipate into nothingness, where Michael Jackson wouldn’t need to sing about skin color not mattering and where businesspeople, scientists and politicians would be comprised of different ethnicities in roughly the same proportion as the general population. It was a world where we expected America to vote for the first woman president, where the U.K. would remain in the European Union and where Vladimir Putin would soon decay into Europe’s Kim Jong-Un.

Instead, we got an overgrown 12-year-old now occupying the Oval Office while dissing anyone smarter than him, we got the U.K. deciding to become Little England and we got another reboot of an evil empire in Eurasia. Probably the only positive was the schadenfreude us brown folk felt at watching the Western World crumble and gasp under the flood of refugees pouring in, and even that was undercut by all the dead children.

As one sits in the few post-racial-ish spots that remain after that promised world was eviscerated by know-nothing populist fire, one wonders where it all went wrong. And then one realizes that it was never right in the first place — that people of color didn’t stop getting screwed after the first black leader of the free world was elected, that escaping the weight of a racist history was not so simple as blocking out memories of Jim Crow, internment camps and offensive Hollywood stereotypes. Realizing what failed to go right means confronting it head-on in all its naked glory, and there is no book better for that than Paul Beatty’s Booker-prize winning novel “The Sellout.”

The narrator of “The Sellout,” a surfing marijuana and artisanal watermelon farmer with a talent for cultivating “cantaloupes that taste like multiple orgasms,” is faced with such a problem of history. His fictional hometown of Dickens, a historically black urban farming community within the Los Angeles area, has suddenly been wiped off the map, ostensibly because affluent California wanted to get rid of this dark stain that was keeping its “property values down and blood pressure up.” This particularly distresses Hominy Jenkins, a (fictional) former child actor and member of the Little Rascals troupe, because Dickens’ disappearance meant he stopped receiving fan mail and visitors, giving him little purpose to continue living. After the narrator — who goes by the nickname Bonbon — saves Hominy from committing suicide, Hominy becomes convinced that he is now Bonbon’s slave and refuses to be freed.

Early on in the book, Bonbon muses that if you tell someone you’re from Dickens, then you have to immediately apologize and reassure them that you’re not going to shoot them. But the Dickens he portrays is pretty normal, minus the occasional shooting, the weekly attempted suicide and a resident parliament of foppish thinkers known as the Dum-Dum Donut Intellectuals. While Bonbon is glib, nihilistic, easygoing and sarcastic, the Dum-Dum Donut Intellectuals spend their time coming up with politically correct novel retellings and African-American versions of PowerPoint. If one of them read this book, they would probably get a righteously indignant heart attack. Not just from the pretensions laid bare, the liberal swearing and Hominy’s nostalgia for his vaudevillian past, but also from Bonbon’s plan to bring back Dickens. The plan? Bring back segregation.

It’s hard to explain where exactly Bonbon comes up with this idea. Maybe it starts with Hominy, who follows up on his voluntary servitude to Bonbon with an even more bizarre request for his birthday: the opportunity to give up his seat on the bus to a white person. Bonbon thus convinces his bus-driving girlfriend Marpessa to place “priority seating for whites” signs at the front of her bus. But after Marpessa forgets to take down the signs, someone notices that her bus has inexplicably become the safest place in Dickens. So naturally, Bonbon decides to segregate the whole town, starting with the middle school, in the hope that it will unite Dickens, end violence and bring back some communal feeling. Unfortunately, it only remains a matter of time until the authorities catch onto Bonbon’s wildly illegal city revitalization plan, and he ends up at the Supreme Court, on trial for reinstituting slavery and segregation in Dickens.

NPR, The New York Times and even the Man Booker Prize committee all refer to this novel as satire of the greatest order. But it’s more than that; reading this book will not make you laugh out loud like a Little Rascals short, but it will leave you amused and bemused, uncomfortable and mildly offended. “The Sellout” manages to disembowel, then roast every sacred cow of racially-conscious, liberal/progressive, woke-but-not-quite-woke, white-with-some-brown-sprinkled-in upper-middle-class America to a fine crisp, then mix the ashes into chocolate milk and force them down the reader’s throat.

The Civil Rights movement? The only tangible benefit, Beatty writes, is that “black people aren’t as afraid of dogs as they used to be.” Black History Month? He introduces Whitey Week, where the local black and Latino children can listen to “white music” and choose whether they want to experience Regular Whiteness, Deluxe Whiteness or Super Deluxe Whiteness. The N-word? So liberally sprinkled throughout the book that if it were salt, it would give you a heart attack. Hell, the book itself begins with Clarence Thomas screaming “N*****, are you crazy?” to Bonbon, who has just openly smoked marijuana on the steps of the Supreme Court and is in the process of rolling another joint during his lawyer’s arguments.

Beatty pushes every button, eviscerates every convention of multicultural polite society and ultimately makes you ask yourself some very tough questions. Are you a racist for finding his plantation jokes funny? Do you subconsciously put on blinders when someone brings up redlining, Japanese internment, the Tuskegee experiment, Blackface, Rodney King and Tamir Rice? Are you like the fragile white underemployed actress that Bonbon hires for Hominy’s birthday party, who is so convinced that people of color get all the jobs and that racism is nothing more than class discrimination? Or are you, like Foy Cheshire, the head of the Dum-Dum Donut Intellectuals, preoccupied with erasing history to make yourself feel better? Approaching this novel as someone who isn’t African-American is tricky; you won’t get all the references, you will be wary of being appropriative while reading it and you will keep asking yourself these questions.

The book ends with Bonbon reminiscing about President Obama’s inauguration. Foy Cheshire, of the Dum-Dum Donut Intellectuals, is proudly waving an American flag and honking his horn, proclaiming that the United States has finally paid off its debts. Where, Bonbon wonders, does everybody else — the Mexicans, the Native Americans, the Japanese, the poor, the forests, the air and water — collect their payment? Eight years later, it looks like that payment has bounced. Paying off the debts of history is a much trickier process than it would seem.

 

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Free speech: Liberals are not the problem https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/10/free-speech-liberals-are-not-the-problem/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/10/free-speech-liberals-are-not-the-problem/#respond Fri, 10 Feb 2017 10:13:44 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1122784 There are three things that critics of college protestors constantly seem to get wrong.

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Last week, noted troll Milo Yiannopoulous was scheduled to speak at U.C. Berkeley, the home of our favorite hippie arch rivals and noted free speech enthusiasts across the bay.  To the surprise of absolutely no one, people turned out — not to hear Milo speak, but to protest the extension of a public platform to a deliciously punchable platinum-haired douche. This protest was then hijacked by one of the many radical anarchist groups that have made the Bay Area their home since America’s Golden Age of Terrorism.

As predictable as the protests against Milo was the outrage spewed against the protestors from left, right and center. Most articles condemning their actions structured their argument along the following lines: central to liberalism is protection of individual liberty, including freedom of speech; freedom of speech must necessarily include protection for speech that is not palatable or agreeable to the majority (or minority); Milo, however unpleasant or unpalatable his opinions might be, must therefore be accorded the same free speech protections as anyone else speaking at a college campus, i.e., he ought to be granted a platform to express his views and that violent action in protest is a form of censorship that ought not to be tolerated.

The typical American liberal response to this, as summed up by my friend and fellow columnist Nick Pether, is that a constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech is strictly a right to express your views without the threat of physical or material violence, or censorship on the part of the state. Expressions of dissent towards controversial viewpoints, including termination of employment, withdrawal of speaking invitations, internet petitions and peaceful protest or civil disobedience, are also forms of protected speech. Therefore, protecting the espouser of a controversial viewpoint from people actively expressing their displeasure through non-violent means infringes on the free speech rights of those dissenting. Under this framework, had the protesters at Berkeley been completely non-violent, they would be in the clear.

Nick goes on to argue that this free speech framework is dangerous because of its framing of free speech as a negative right, i.e. a protection against violence or deprivation. This, he goes on to say, is a typically libertarian or right-wing mindset, which tends to prioritize protection of what an individual already has, and in doing so, reinforces existing social inequities and injustices. Contrast this with what Nick calls positive rights, i.e. rights to proactively access and benefit from something — healthcare, education, a social safety net, etc. The latter viewpoint intends to empower the underprivileged, improve their status within society and provide support to artists, activists and others who typically might not succeed in the free-market-driven society that we live in. Framing free speech as a negative right therefore opens up the field to an extremely slippery slope of arguments advancing regressive goals, Nick concludes — including slashing public funding of universities for teaching leftist material, defunding of abortion providers like Planned Parenthood and discriminating against LGBTQ individuals on the grounds of religious freedom. After all, if U.C. Berkeley can tell Milo to shove it, then why can’t conservatives, who currently control 25 state governments and the federal government, decide to defund universities for spending resources on the arts and identity politics?

The implication, of course, is that maybe woke progressives on university campuses shouldn’t try to shut down a right-wing provocateur like Milo because the cackling supervillains on the right will in turn try to shut them down by withdrawing funding or declaring criticism of police a hate crime. This is a major cause for concern, specifically given the right’s attempts to censor and undermine academic freedom recently.

However, there are three things that critics of college protestors constantly seem to get wrong. The first is that all speech of conservative figures like Milo is protected speech. While this is true for issues that are implicitly part of public debate (e.g. gay marriage, abortion rights, etc.), there is a rich history of exceptions to free speech within liberal democracy that most reasonable people would agree to. These include incitement, libel and provocation or fighting words. Key to all of these exceptions is a reasonable expectation of violent or harmful outcomes from the speech as well as the personal targeting of individuals. So when Milo goes on stage and calls people ‘retards’ and worse, or publicly humiliates a trans woman for no good reason, then it is nearly impossible to characterize what he says as protected speech — liberally insulting people for shits and giggles isn’t exactly a conservative viewpoint. This is further compounded by the fact that Milo himself admits that this behavior is done entirely to provoke and incite protesters, giving credence under the Fighting Words doctrine to those who want to either shut him down or protest him. It’s not so much about stopping the free flow of ideas as much as it is about calling out a bully.

The second thing that liberal critics of college leftists get wrong is that conservatives are somehow marginalized and wield little influence in the world, implying that colleges should therefore go out of their way to accommodate viewpoints that are not typically liberal, even idiotic ones like climate change denial. The truth is that Republicans now dominate U.S. politics, business and wealth. Sure, while encased in the bubbles of academia and urban America, it might be easy to think that progressivism has won and that our main task at hand is to keep the excesses of the left in check. Many of us on campus railed against the divest from Palestine movement for being too extreme, while conveniently forgetting about the many ways in which legitimate criticism of Israel has been thrown aside wholesale as anti-Semitism.

More often than not civil disobedience or artistic expression is the only way for liberals, particularly those from marginalized communities, to express their dissent against the more destructive ideas coming from the right. If free speech is supposed to be a positive right, then platforms that enable speech have an obligation to help prop up the voices of those who typically have been excluded from the main channels of expression — and those tend to be the very people protesting Milo. At the end of the day, Milo/Tomi Lahren/insert troll here still get to spew vitriol on Breitbart and the Blaze and make appearances on the Daily Show, while a trans student activist has to drop out of college because Milo publicly humiliated her.

Finally, there is this notion that students on the left are simply “snowflakes” that do not want to engage with ideas or people that make them uncomfortable. Evidence for this is given by the withdrawal of several high-profile commencement speakers from universities, usually after social media campaigns highlighting their past history with homophobia, neoliberal economics or wars of questionable legality. Further evidence is also compounded by concepts such as trigger warnings, which critics deride as methods of protecting students from uncomfortable or controversial ideas.

This is a load of hokum. Protests at colleges are probably older than your parents. The difference was that academics and politicians didn’t run away because a few not-fully-formed adults told them that their career had promoted global oppression. People, including leftists, have disagreed and railed against members of the establishment for decades. One would expect noted academics like Condoleezza Rice and Christine Lagarde not to bow down to a few hundred anonymous signatures on the internet. Indeed, even those Smith college students who protested the choice of Lagarde as a commencement speaker were dismayed by her decision to withdraw, since it robbed them off the chance to raise awareness about the perceived harms of neoliberal economics.

Similarly, trigger warnings are nothing new — we just used to say things like ‘parental advisory’, ‘rated R’ or ‘viewer discretion advised.’ The reason these labels were attached to music and movies was because they contained material that people might find shocking or alarming — such as gratuitous violence. When professors freely choose to warn students about content that might be graphic as part of their course material, it’s not because they think students are too fragile to study colonialism — it’s mainly because we live in a society where we are more mindful of trauma and mental health issues, whether they are faced by survivors of rape, war veterans, or bystanders of terrorist attacks.

If free speech is to be a positive right, then it ought to serve its end goal of bringing in marginalized and non-mainstream voices. But let’s put the blame where it ought to lie, and not at the feet of students who are rightfully angry about a platinum-blonde creep doxxing their classmates.

 

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Journalism, authoritarianism and alternative facts https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/27/journalism-authoritarianism-and-alternative-facts/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/27/journalism-authoritarianism-and-alternative-facts/#respond Fri, 27 Jan 2017 09:55:42 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1122012 A recurring theme since the campaign began is the Trump camp’s unwavering distrust of the ‘mainstream’ media - ostensibly for its inability to say anything ‘nice’ about him, or anything sympathetic to the modern, mainstream version of the conservative movement.

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Anyone who thought our new president would become presidential after officially becoming president was in for quite a shock this week. The former president-elect has continued to spew juvenile one-liners in all caps on Twitter, signed a number of possibly illegal executive orders, put his new U.N. ambassador in a tight spot over calls to restrict funding to the body and had his counselor go on television to posit the existence of so-called “alternative facts.” And that’s barely scratching the surface. It’s no surprise that he’s become a laughing stock around the world – hell, even the Dutch are in on it.

A recurring theme since the campaign began is the Trump camp’s unwavering distrust of the ‘mainstream’ media – ostensibly for its inability to say anything ‘nice’ about him, or anything sympathetic to the modern, mainstream version of the conservative movement. One of my fellow columnists at The Daily has also weighed in, labeling the current intellectual environment in the media as “putrid,” and lamenting the loss of so-called “fair and balanced” news coverage. I think he’s wrong.

Talk of liberal bias in the media is nothing new, having gone on since the first half of the 20th century. Trust in the media, however, has plummeted globally, and more so in the USA – less than a third of Americans have at least a fair amount of trust in the news media anymore. This is about half as many as in 1972, in the wake of the Watergate investigations and arguably the media’s greatest moment. The drop in trust of the news media has also been heavily politically polarized: Only 14 percent of Republicans say they trust the mass media, vs. 30 percent of Independents and 51 percent of Democrats. In 1997, those numbers were 41 percent, 53 percent and 64 percent.

Conservatism, it turns out, has drifted far away from “mainstream” or centrist viewpoints in the last decade or so. Online networks of Trump voters tended to be much more isolated from opposing viewpoints than networks of those who voted for Clinton; 40 percent of Trump voters also relied heavily on a single, right-leaning news source (Fox News) during the election. The highest percentage of Clinton voters who were informed by a single news source was 18 percent. The right, it turns out, just does not engage with the left or the center anymore. As with other kinds of monopolies, this partisan news monopoly has opened up a new can of worms – distrust in facts.

Although left-wing and right-wing news outlets both shared a non-trivial amount of fake news on social media during the election, right-wing sources such as Freedom Daily did so at three times the rate of comparable left-wing sources. And even though majorities of both Clinton and Trump voters believed some notable, there were consistently more Trump voters who believed them – the differences ranged from three percent more to 29 percent more. Indeed, one of the bigger fake news publishers noted in an interview how much easier it was for him to spread fake news among conservative groups – to the point where a Colorado state legislator tried to pass a law criminalizing the use of food stamps to buy marijuana because one of the fake articles he had written said it was happening.

Trump’s campaign did not help this. He regularly spewed nonsense about about illegal immigration, urban homicides, voter fraud and the founding of ISIS while spending time with the crackpot conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Since the election, he has not stopped, continuing to lie about voter fraud, inauguration crowd size and the amount Americans care about his tax returnss. At the same time, his administration has taken unprecedented steps in stifling scientific research on climate change and trying to exert political control over what government scientists are allowed to publish; no wonder scientists are planning their own March on Washington. When empirical facts are seen as being politically inconvenient, then there is without a doubt a massive problem with whatever conservatism in American electoral politics has become in the 21st century.

This disregard for empirical fact, however, is not unique to Trump. There were 182 climate change deniers in the last Congress, all of them Republican — including the chairman. Republican legislatures all over the country have enacted restrictive voter ID laws that are undeniably racist in their application (and sometimes in intent as well), on charges that in-person voter fraud is rampant, despite the mathematical impossibility of this particular method being used to sway elections. Conspiracy theories of a secret ring of Democratic child molestors operating out of a pizza parlor, Hillary Clinton’s secret illness and President Obama’s birthplace were promulgated not just by the alt-right fringe, but by the son of Trump’s new national security advisor, a former mayor of New York and our current President. Lies and malarkey are no longer the purview of tinfoil hat-wearing survivalists living in decrepit cabins in the mountains, but are now part of the establishment.

Would-be authoritarians from around the world have used propaganda and nonsense to strengthen their political standing. Stalin had Lysenkoism, Kim Jong-Il had the best golfing handicap in the world, Narendra Modi had genetic engineering and plastic surgery in Ancient India, and the Chinese Communist Party tries to stop air quality warnings from being issued. Trump is going the same way.

As members of the press, it is our job to fight back against the Orwellian drift toward a fact-free reality, where those with power are able to set the narrative even when the exact opposite of what they say hits them in the face. When we say that reality has a “liberal bias,” what we are saying is that liberalism today has a greater basis in empirical reality, whereas self-described grassroots conservatives appear to exist in their own parallel universe of BS.

As Hannah Arendt notes in ” The Origins of Totalitarianism,” simply fact-checking would-be dictators is not enough. It allows the setup of an us-versus-them mentality, with liberals, educated elites and the media playing the villain. In such a situation, it is not enough for the press to lay back and try to report on the news with an idealized, sometimes ridiculous notion of “balance,” a la “Democrats think the sky is blue, Republicans deny, say it is green.” The sky is objectively blue, climate change is happening, in-person voter fraud is practically non-existent and ancient India did not have genetic engineering. Nor is it enough to hope that saying nice things about Trump will bring back alienated citizens into the fold.

What the media needs to do is grow a backbone, and stop normalizing the Hugo Chavez-esque behavior of Trump and his lackeys. Doing so means listening to people, understanding the expectations of citizens living outside affluent suburbs and cities, and using that to hold government accountable at whatever level, through whatever ethical means necessary. Forty years ago, a number of courageous reporters took down one of the stickiest career politicians in the history of this country. Last year, after the Panama Papers were released, the Prime Minister of Iceland was forced to resign, the Argentinian President came under investigation and Panama began implementing institutional reforms. Since 2005, activists in India used whatever institutional measures they could to expose major scam after major scam, resulting in a swell of populist anger that delivered the ruling Congress Party its biggest defeat in independent India’s history and jailing several powerful business leaders and politicians.

Holding Trump accountable therefore means going beyond simply calling him racist, being nice to him or giving airtime to the alt-right. It means doing things that hit harder, that carry risks and don’t always generate clicks. Failure to do so now might condemn the American republic to something much worse.

 

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Letters from the front lines: The war on Christmas https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/13/letters-from-the-frontlines-the-war-on-christmas/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/13/letters-from-the-frontlines-the-war-on-christmas/#respond Fri, 13 Jan 2017 09:29:56 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1121369 However, there is a war being waged among the denizens of this land that is so delightfully, hilariously absurd that I at first did not believe it to be real. I am speaking, of course, of the legendary War on Christmas.

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Dear Bombay*,

It was an immense pleasure to spend the last three weeks in your warm, humid embrace as I walked around your cobblestoned contours with my compatriots, looking for the shawarma that had so brightened my drunken youth. Not even a week has passed and I still find myself drawn in by clickbait about the delicious and definitely unhygienic food that crowds your streets. And do not even get me started on the warm air of the Arabian Sea, or the video-game like pleasure I derive from driving around your lane-less streets filled with motorcycles and Maruti Swifts.

In a short while, I shall have readjusted to life in the land of Queen Calafia with its gentle people and plentiful marijuana, pushing you to the back of my mind until I touchdown at the airport named after the old Maratha king later this year. Nevertheless, you will always be running through my head. Normally, it would be after I imbibed some of the holy herb and began craving your one-of-a-kind schezwan cheese dosa. But this time, I am thinking of you for a different reason.

This land of Queen Calafia is situated within a larger land that derives its name from Amerigo Vespucci, the Ringo of the great European navigators. Now, this land of Vespucci has always believed itself to be the greatest at everything, even at things that nobody else cares about, like baseball. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly the greatest at one thing, and that is the art of declaring war.

In my three and a half years in the land of Queen Calafia within the States of Vespucci, I have heard wondrous, frightening and deliciously absurd tales of all the wars being fought. There is a war being fought on drugs and another on terror. There was a war on socialists until one of those accursed believers became a candidate for leader of the States of Vespucci. If you go back further, you will find wars being fought against poverty, wealth, cancer, health, fast food, organic food, pharmaceutical companies, homeopaths, technology, financiers, men, parents, children, gamers, athletes and many more such things.

Amongst the various tribes of this nation, there are two major confederations that constantly bicker with each other. One of these confederations has declared war on dumping excessive carbon dioxide and other contaminants into the earth’s atmosphere. The other one has declared war on the first confederation for declaring war on dumping these pollutants into the atmosphere. The former tribe has countered back by saying that dumping excessive carbon dioxide will kill both the confederations and most of the tribes, so they should work together to win this war. The latter tribe has told the former to go fly a kite because they smell of patchouli, listen to crappy folk music and who is science anyway to tell us not to burn black gold in unironically and unnecessarily large trucks? Such is the absurdity of the land of Vespucci.

However, there is a war being waged among the denizens of this land that is so delightfully, hilariously absurd that I, at first, did not believe it to be real. Like the war on dumping carbon dioxide, it is being fought between the two aforementioned confederations, each with an extra layer of tangled alliances among the smaller tribes and another layer of indifferent tribal units munching popcorn and watching the chaos from the sides. I am speaking, of course, of the legendary War on Christmas.

You see, the land of Vespucci has long prided itself on being the greatest at religious diversity and tolerance. For centuries, it accepted and welcomed Christians of all stripes – Anglican, Lutheran, Evangelical, Puritan, Episcopal, Presbytarian, Calvinist, Orthodox and so on. Sure, they had some problems with the Catholics and Mormons, but over time this nation blossomed into a beautiful melting pot where the diverse denominations of the same faith that believed in roughly the same things could gather in peace and sing Kumbaya, knowing that no matter their differences, when winter came around they could all walk around greeting each other with the refrain “Merry Christmas.”

Of course, this couldn’t last. Over the last 80 or so years, millions of heathens invaded the land of Vespucci, bringing with them flavorful food and new holidays. The not-so-original settlers of this land suddenly had to deal with replies of “thank you, but I don’t celebrate Christmas” when passing out holiday greetings. Stores began remaining open on Dec. 25, lamps and menorahs were added to winter decorations and public and private institutions started removing talk of the birth of Jesus (Christ, not Navas) from their Christmas celebrations. Companies that were once beloved by all the residents of the land suddenly threw shade at their customers, by passing over the refrain “Merry Christmas” for things like “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings.”

Even today, this war rages on. Starbucks, that seller of pumpkin coffee, has replaced all its Christmas-themed cups with plain red ones! How dare they undermine the wonderful diversity of Christianity that is so integral to the land of Vespucci! And how dare cities rename their Christmas trees as holiday trees! And death to all those companies that refuse to properly and adequately honor our lord and savior (not the lord and savior of the Sevilla football team, that’s a different Jesus).

Such is the rhetoric of the latter confederation, fighting on the side of Christmas. The former confederation for some reason seems to both care little and care a lot about this war. They appear to care little when they – rather accurately, I might add – assert that this war is predicated on pure idiocy and that no one wants to destroy the time-honored ritual of drinking eggnog and gifting presents to children in some misplaced goal of building a religion-free society. At the same time, they appear to care a lot by being overtly mindful about what they say to the more melanistic of us in the month of December, or how they use public money to celebrate the festivals of wintertime. How, they ask, should we celebrate this festival by making sure that none of the heathens who have recently arrived feel left out? How, they ask again, do we ensure that none of our behaviors oppress minority religious beliefs? And how, they keep asking, do we avoid the awkwardness of a steely cold reply that goes along the lines of ‘my people don’t celebrate Christmas’?

It is as I stand at the sidelines of the front lines of this war, ostensibly over the appropriate manner of greeting people in the month preceding December 25th, that I realize why I miss you, Bombay, and your wonderful multiculturalism. Not to mention your Anglo-Saxon inspired Christmas cake (apparently the settlers of Vespucci don’t have any).

I have very fond memories of Christmas in Bombay, ranging from my little brother’s insistence that we get a Christmas tree when I was five or so years old, to the large, end of year Christmas assembly that we had at school, to the decorations and smell of nutmeg that lingered around our local sports club. As I grew older, school Christmas parties started getting replaced with drunken nights out and we would give presents directly to each other, instead of leaving them under trees. But the city celebrated Christmas with the same gusto as it did every year – and interestingly, with almost as much enthusiasm as Ganesh Chaturthi, Diwali, Eid and Holi.

In a city where the two biggest religions are Hinduism and Islam, and where there are significant numbers of Christians, Jains, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Baha’is and Jews, festivals are simply a way of life. I remember fondly how my father’s Muslim employees would come wish us a “Happy Eid” every year before going to the mosque for prayers, and how my Zoroastrian friends would invite us over for a large dinner during Navroz. Not to mention schools closing during almost every major festival, the streets would be packed with revelers of all faiths during Holi and Ganesh Chaturthi, and that children of all backgrounds loved blowing up fireworks during Diwali.

Like other large cosmopolitan cities, I learned from you that being successfully multicultural doesn’t require much thinking. All that is required is a realization that festivals really are occasions to eat, drink, make merry and sing Kumbaya – and that the more this happens, the better. Presents, firecrackers, good food, and an excuse to throw colored water on each other have this amazingly universal appeal.

Being on the front lines of the War on Christmas is thus a most entertaining and simultaneously uninteresting experience, like an episode of Family Guy. I relish in laughing at the fact that the inhabitants of the land of Vespucci are not the greatest at some things, and will go to great lengths to try to make themselves the greatest at multiculturalism, despite the fact that they are going in the wrong direction in pursuit of this goal. Equally entertaining is the boiling blood of the defenders of Christmas, mindlessly equating a red coffee cup with the fall of Western Civilization. I often wonder whether or not it is worth it to just serve cake and firecrackers to everybody – but I guess that’s what the Fourth of July is for.

Now that it is January, there has been a ceasefire declared within this war – until November at least. Hopefully this year the ceasefire shall be extended, however unlikely that might seem. I personally am not too concerned – I will always have Bombay to go to.

Take care of your health. You know very well what is happening to your cousin Delhi.

With many warm regards,

Arnav

*I realize that your on-again, off-again, Muslim- and Bihari-hating, vada pav-eating ex made you change your name from Bombay to something else. That’s alright; no matter how many times you change your name, we all know who you really are.

 

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Critiquing science from outside https://stanforddaily.com/2016/12/08/critiquing-science-from-outside/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/12/08/critiquing-science-from-outside/#respond Thu, 08 Dec 2016 18:54:32 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1120848 All too often, critics of science and technology fail to understand the method that they are critiquing.

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One of my favorite stories of the perceived war between fuzzies and techies is that of the Sokal Affair. Increasingly irked by a faction of postmodern critical theorists who claimed, among other things, that the field of physics was unfairly masculine, the NYU physicist Alan Sokal submitted a hoax article to the journal Social Text. Liberally salted with nonsense about ‘morphogenic fields’ and the progressive political implications of quantum gravity, the article intended to highlight the lack of insight that critics of science and the scientific method had into the very ideas that they were supposed to be criticizing. The article was of course published, Sokal announced his prank, and physicists could be smug about their intellectual superiority until the Bogdanov Affair happened a few years later.

I started thinking about this story again a few weeks ago when I heard a friend mention a STS class titled “Critique of Technology.” While the syllabus mentions plenty of material about the social implications of technology, including clips from “Black Mirror,” sections of Heidegger, and manifestos for ‘technological resistance,’ it conspicuously avoids any actual scientific literature.

I noticed a similar pattern in a class I took on the history of science and exploration last quarter. Even though we discussed the impact of advances in navigational science on European expansion throughout the world, we did not spend time diving into the details of these technological advancements, instead restricting ourselves to a discussion of their implications alone. As the only person with a science background in the class (I am a physics major), I was slightly perturbed by the fact that so many people in the field of history of science did not meaningfully distinguish between the different branches of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, and mathematics, instead lumping disparate advances in these fields into a catchall category broadly defined as ‘science’ or ‘technology.’ The impact, and implications, of advances in string theory are vastly different from those of genetically modified microbes.

As we move into a world where science and technology play increasingly central roles in our lives, we must have a healthy debate about the implications of things like artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and the internet of things. However, it is imperative that those engaging in these debates have at least a cursory understanding of the physical processes that drive these technologies and of the thinking that underlies our understanding of the natural world. Otherwise, we might be left with important people believing the implications of joke ideas over and over again.

Much has been said about requiring a humanities core for STEM students at Stanford. However, let us remember that the point of this core is to have all our students go through a broad, liberal education. It would do us well to require humanities students to do the same, especially when it is possible to fulfill breadth requirements without taking a single serious math, science, or engineering class.

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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No Country for Brown Men https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/11/no-country-for-brown-men/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/11/no-country-for-brown-men/#respond Fri, 11 Nov 2016 09:35:55 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1119723 It has been a dark couple of days. Donald Trump has now been elected the 45th President of the United States. He will be the 44th white man to occupy this office and the only one to do so after receiving a Stone Cold stunner. He will become the only President-elect to have more open […]

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It has been a dark couple of days.

Donald Trump has now been elected the 45th President of the United States. He will be the 44th white man to occupy this office and the only one to do so after receiving a Stone Cold stunner.

He will become the only President-elect to have more open lawsuits against him than California’s electoral votes combined. He will be testifying in court for one of them later this month about how his Ponzi scheme of a university defrauded hundreds of naive people.

No presidential candidate in the history of the United States has ever come into office with so many conflicts of interest, many of which have him indebted to foreign, state-owned businesses in countries that aren’t exactly friendly with America. Nor has any candidate ever come into office after displaying this level of utter stupidity, blatant racism and misogyny, lack of regard for civility or civil rights and criminal, disgusting behaviour.

This isn’t even getting to his policy proposals, which if enacted will almost certainly destroy the poor and working class, create a Stasi-like deportation force, blow up the deficit, turn American Foreign Policy into a disaster, destroy any hope of successfully dealing with climate change, make 22 million Americans lose access to healthcare, walk back LGBTQ rights and significantly increase hate crimes, particularly against Muslims. Not to mention the appointment of odious characters like Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and Jeff Sessions or his call for the U.S. military to commit war crimes.

I am disgusted.

I am furious that almost half the country I grew up looking up to — that my grandfather, parents, brother, friends and extended family embraced and admired even as we lived our lives in India — has voted for someone unfit to be the leader of a Cub Scout troop.

I am even more furious that this pathetic excuse for a man is President, despite the fact that Secretary Clinton clearly defeated him in the popular vote. The vote of millions of people of color in California matters less than the vote of some pissed-off white dudes in Wisconsin. I am deeply saddened that my fellow millennials and people of color did not turn out to stop this thoroughly unqualified man from getting any nearer the Presidency than the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

I have no sympathy for the Greens or Libertarians, who vacuumed up precious votes in critical states that could have prevented this madman from becoming President. And I am astounded by the level of blatant voter suppression that went on in a number of swing states.

Thanks, White America. You’ve really done it this time. You’ve decided to vote for a goddamn meme over the most qualified presidential nominee in U.S. history. You voted for a lying scumbag who spent the better part of the last eight years trying to undermine our first black president’s identity with a crackpot conspiracy theory. I hope you’re proud of yourself. Because no one else is. Except for such kindred spirits as Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, Rodrigo Duterte and ISIS.

The entire media and political establishment have been engaged in frantic soul-searching and a post-mortem about what went wrong with the election. Many commentators and politicians have said that we must “come together as a nation and reach out to those who feel “left behind from globalization. So are many of my friends and acquaintances on social media.

With all due respect to President Obama, Senator Sanders, Secretary Clinton, my friends and the New York Times Opinions Section, I call BS.

I do not plan to unite with the white supremacists that crawled out of the woodwork to support a candidate that ran on a platform of taking America back to its deplorable past. I reject the tired narrative of this being only an angry cry for help from communities left behind by globalization. While economic anxiety is clearly a part of the puzzle, it’s pretty clear that this was not the driving force behind his almost completely white voter base. Hell, it’s right there in his message: deport the illegals, ban the Muslims, make America great again. It’s right there in their angry voices, just aching to throw things around and bring down the “establishment.”

To paraphrase Langston Hughes, America was never great to people like me. Until now. Until fair immigration laws, strong civil rights enforcement and a shift to an open, welcoming, cosmopolitan culture allowed people like my parents and I to come here, study at the best universities in the world and create lives for ourselves in a closer, freer, more connected planet.

Sixty years ago, people who looked like me would almost never have been given a seat at the table. Even today, neither Congress nor Big Business fully reflect the new, colorful demographics of this country. Nevertheless, women and ethnic minorities today are visibly represented in the workforce, in politics and in positions of power like never before.

Trump’s victory was a whitelash against all that. It was an open signal that we globalized, diverse elites need not be respected; half the country voted for a man who sexually harassed his female employees, tried to destroy a federal judge’s credibility because he was of Mexican origin and called for an entire religion of mainly brown people to be banned from this country.

Donald Trump’s victory has shown that it doesn’t matter if you studied hard, stayed out of trouble and got a good job. In the eyes of him and his supporters, all the uppity women and people of color need to be put in their place. We need to go no further than the calls to execute Clinton or the violence against black protesters or the unsubtle anti-semitism that made up his rallies.

I refuse to stand by and let the angry white man tell me that this isn’t my country. Yes, globalization and automation have devastated the white working class, and they have my sympathies. But I have no sympathy for the crazy racist idiots of Middle America who came out to vote for the crazy racist idiot candidate. I am angry that this election was stolen from those who believed in progress, facts and decency and from the overwhelming majority of young people, women and people of color who voted for someone actually qualified for the Presidency. Before we pontificate about how much the white working class is hurting, let’s stop and appreciate that this was a loud, resounding scream directed to the brown and queer men and women who have succeeded; it was a scream telling us we weren’t wanted.

There is immense work to be done to stop Trump from dragging the nation down with him, and maybe that work will involve reaching out and empathizing with the bushel of deplorables that voted for him. We cannot let any of those good intentions supersede the progress we have made in making America great for people who didn’t look like America until recently.

 

Contact Arnav Ravi Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Trumpism after Trump https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/04/trumpism-after-trump/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/04/trumpism-after-trump/#respond Fri, 04 Nov 2016 12:24:00 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1118041 If 2016 is going to be remembered for anything, it will be remembered as the time when the news and digital media finally faced the music for their inability to grow a backbone and stand up against Trumpism and idiocy.

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Earlier this month, conservative blogger Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report tweeted that warnings over Hurricane Matthew were a government lie intended to make an “exaggerated point about climate change.” Ridiculous as it sounds, this was not the first time a prominent self-identified conservative had made claims about a vast conspiracy among government agencies intended to exaggerate the threat posed by climate change. Earlier this year, the chair of the House Science Committee, Lamar Smith, repeatedly attempted to intimidate and harass scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), whose findings indicated that climate change was speeding up, not slowing down, on the grounds that they were doctoring their findings to get the “politically correct answer.”

While elements of this paranoid fringe continued to point fingers over numerous fictional conspiracies, the rise of Donald Trump brought that same fringe into the mainstream. If you didn’t know who or what Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopolous, 4chan or the alt-right were before the election, you sure as hell do now. This is the scummy underbelly of American society that was the center stage of the Republican National Convention and has been the core of Trump’s campaign since it became clear he was going to win the primaries. While the actual rise to center stage of these crazies may have been an accident, the factors leading to that rise were anything but accidental.

If 2016 is going to be remembered for anything, it will be remembered as the time when the news and digital media finally faced the music for their inability to grow a backbone and stand up against Trumpism and idiocy.

It is painfully obvious that Donald Trump is anything but a conventional candidate. From the outset, his statements fell outside the norms of decency and into outright racism, misogyny and xenophobia; his rallies were marked by Nazi-inspired chants and violence; he was endorsed by David Duke, the American Nazi Party and the National Enquirer; and he himself had a history of engaging in fraudulent behaviour and sexual assault. And yet, the news media repeatedly failed to do its duty and ask him the tough questions about policy, his lack of experience and his outright racism. He was treated with kid gloves during the primary, given more airtime than any of his opponents, and at least one major news organization failed to disclose their conflicts of interest while reporting on him. And he was given $2 billion worth of free airtime before the primaries ended.

Meanwhile, The Associated Press ran a non-story about the Clinton Foundation this August that fanned flames about “corruption” with zero evidence for the assertion. This is only one example about how Clinton “scandals” turned out to be little more than hot air, or how she is taken to task for indiscretions that pale in comparison to those committed by Trump. WikiLeaks exemplifies this tactic of smearing the most qualified presidential nominee in history by releasing her campaign manager’s Social Security number but doing little to emphasize how clearly and dangerously unqualified her opponent is.

Critical coverage of Clinton or any other politician is usually a good thing. But when that coverage of minor indiscretions, badly worded statements or a general lack of forthrightness with the media is treated the same way as a blowhard talking about committing war crimes, it indicates that the news media is not, in fact, effectively fulfilling its job within a democracy. Successful democracies rely on a well-informed populace; as the conduit through which the public accumulates information about the nation, the media has a responsibility to treat con artists and conspiracy theorists as con artists and conspiracy theorists, not as conventional, serious candidates or public figures. Their failure to do so has legitimized the alt-right, the Alex Joneses and the Stormfront contributors of the world.

While Donald Trump is almost certain to lose this election, Trumpism as a phenomenon will not go away soon. It is time the news media grew a backbone and took a definitive stand against it. This not only means calling Trump out when he tells a lie; it means refusing to give conspiracy theories airtime, treating Clinton’s “scandals” for the non-stories that they are and taking politicians like Blake Farenthold and Lamar Smith to task for spewing nonsense.

 

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Regressive progressives https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/27/regressive-progressives/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/27/regressive-progressives/#respond Fri, 28 Oct 2016 03:46:26 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1118778 Last week, the State of New York banned rentals of unoccupied apartments for fewer than 30 days on Airbnb. The move was not without controversy, resulting in a protest in front of Governor Cuomo’s office, immense public debate and a federal lawsuit citing “irreparable harm” to the company. It is not hard to see why […]

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Last week, the State of New York banned rentals of unoccupied apartments for fewer than 30 days on Airbnb. The move was not without controversy, resulting in a protest in front of Governor Cuomo’s office, immense public debate and a federal lawsuit citing “irreparable harm” to the company.

It is not hard to see why this move would do such harm — not just to the company, but also to the millions of travelers and hosts — largely young people looking to travel on a budget and make some extra money to afford crippling rents. And yet, it is the attitude of the framers of such laws that is the most troubling. When asked about how the law would affect individuals renting their homes to make ends meet, New York Assembly member Linda Rosenthal brushed it off with a naive statement about how “tourism will always increase,” and then blaming rising rents on shadowy commercial operators buying up properties by the dozen to rent on Airbnb.

The problem with this assertion is that it is just patently false. Less than 10 percent of Airbnb listings in the United States are commercial properties, and a host in New York earns approximately $5,000 a year from renting their property on the platform. That is good money in an era when rents in large cities regularly lurch upwards of $1,000 per month. It does not help that the law appears clearly designed to help the hotel industry stave off any form of competitive disruption that might help consumers travel more affordably. Now, other cities are considering similar de facto bans on the service, ostensibly to maintain “quality of life” or keep housing affordable.

These moves are wrong, stupid and self-serving. However, they are the latest in a long pattern of major cities aggressively fighting against disruption from the tech industry — specifically the app-enabled “sharing economy.” Earlier this year, the burgeoning tech hub of Austin, Texas passed prohibitively harsh regulations on ridesharing services, prompting both Uber and Lyft to withdraw services from the city. Nevada had banned the use of Uber for a year until legal permission was granted again in fall of 2015. Germany, France and Spain have all clamped down on ridesharing in the past few years. And San Francisco, the Mecca of the tech world, has forced Uber and Lyft drivers to obtain business licenses for $91 per year while also enacting laws to punish Airbnb for listings similar to those just banned in New York.

As with Airbnb, concerns over Uber’s and Lyft’s effects on cities are widely misplaced. Ridesharing services can allocate resources more effectively, resulting in lower congestion, reduced drunk driving and cheaper options for commuters across the board. However, proponents of such laws seem to disregard the data while enacting these regressive laws — almost as if they were trying to please multiple interest groups.

Cities like San Francisco and New York have become booming centers of the 21st century because they have been hosts to companies creating disruptive innovations in technology and business models. While that rise has been accompanied by serious problems such as gentrification, skyrocketing rents, an increase in inequality and potentially shady business practices, the answer to these problems is not to kill and stifle innovation with idiotic regulations.

Instead, managing the perils of this new prosperity must include elements of the same approach that disruptive and innovative companies have taken in their paths to success. That means using data-driven solutions, listening to multiple stakeholders and taking bold, decisive and intelligent action. Aggressively increasing the housing supply and reducing onerous regulations on taxis might be a good place to start instead of trying to kill services that are actually serving consumers well.

Tech hubs tend to be seen as centers of progressive, forward-thinking ideas and policy. The largely liberal and Democratic governments of these cities ought to embrace that same ethos and put an end to government overreach that serves little purpose except to line the pockets of hoteliers and prevent taxis from providing decent service.

 

Contact Arnav Ravi Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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ASSU Senate votes to divest from The Daily https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/01/assu-senate-votes-to-divest-from-the-daily/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/01/assu-senate-votes-to-divest-from-the-daily/#respond Fri, 01 Apr 2016 09:18:45 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1112805 The ASSU Senate voted in a special session on Thursday to block all funding for the Stanford Daily and prevent all current Senators, Executives, interns and class cabinets from associating themselves in any manner with the newspaper.

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The ASSU Senate voted in a special session on Thursday to block all funding for The Stanford Daily and prevent all current senators, executives, interns and class cabinets from associating themselves in any manner with the newspaper.

This unprecedented move was ostensibly taken in response to a perceived grammatical error in the last Senate recap article, an infraction which allegedly “served as the last straw” and gave several senators palpitations.

“[Daily Writer] Fangzhou Liu committed an act that was wrong, irresponsible and, quite frankly, stupid,” said Senator Matthew Cohen ’18 as he gesticulated his arms wildly. “By failing to use an Oxford comma in the lede of Tuesday’s Senate recap, she made us look like a bunch of uncouth, uncultured hippies more suited to the pot-smoking wasteland that lies over there.”

Cohen did not elaborate what he was referring to with the phrase “pot-smoking wasteland.” Inside sources are conflicted as to whether he was talking about Synergy or Cal.

Three senators had to get up and leave the special session while debate over the resolution was taking place in an effort to “calm down, smell the flowers and remember that the world is still full of bunnies, rainbows and unicorns,” according to Molly Horwitz ‘16. While these senators were burrowing around for flowers in the Old Union courtyard, Senate Chair Sina Javidan-Nejad ’17 attempted to keep debate civil. His efforts were frustrated, however, by a cacophony of phrases like “grammar Nazi,” “goddamn techie” and “Harry Elliot’s low-achieving younger brother.”

Ultimately, Javidan-Nejad “had enough” and used his superhuman, discus-throwing abs to hurl the Senate table out the window of the Nitery, shock everyone into silence and allow the motion to be voted on. It passed with 10 votes in favor and five senators not voting.

Several Senate candidates have expressed disgust at the events that occurred at this meeting, with perennial candidate Sheev Palpatine pledging to “restore order to the Force” and “throw all the goddamn grammar-loving Wookies out of the galaxy.”

However, other students greeted the news. Ilya Mouzykantskii ’16, creator of the Fountain Hopper, stated he was happy that the ASSU Senate would no longer be supporting The Daily.

The ASSU Senate has voted to divest from The Daily after a dispute over Oxford commas (MCKENZIE LYNCH/The Stanford Daily).
The ASSU Senate has voted to divest from The Daily after a dispute over Oxford commas (MCKENZIE LYNCH/The Stanford Daily).

“I am very pleased that the ASSU is not condoning The Daily’s consistently abysmal journalistic standards,” Mouzykantskii said.

When asked to comment on the controversy, Daily Editor-In-Chief Andrew Vogeley ’17 said that the Senate could “shove it,” noting that The Daily had over 5,000 Facebook likes compared to the ASSU’s paltry 660, as well as “mouth-gasm granting pizza every day” and “a dank meme stash to rival Bernie Sanders’.”

Vogeley then returned to his weekly activity of knocking golf balls off the top of Memorial Church while smoking a cigar and drinking expensive scotch in a limited-edition salmon-pink Vineyard Vines shirt.

 

Editor’s Note: The use of a serial comma, while mandated in some style guides, is not considered an integral part of English grammar. Some style guides require it, others don’t and others simply don’t care. While the ASSU may think that the use of such a comma is integral to a satisfactory Stanford education, we at The Daily think this is stupid and that the ASSU is stupid for thinking so as well. As a result, we have prohibited the practice in all articles. If this hurts your sensibilities, we are legally obligated to direct you to the grammar-induced trauma division of Vaden Health Center, where you will experience restorative therapy pioneered by the author E.B. White in partnership with Grammar Cat.

Real Editor’s Note: This article is part of The Daily’s April Fools’ Day coverage. All attributions in this article are not genuine, and this story should be read in the context of entertainment only.

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‘Voices of Partition’ discusses stories from India-Pakistan partition https://stanforddaily.com/2016/02/24/voices-of-partition-discusses-stories-from-india-pakistan-partition/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/02/24/voices-of-partition-discusses-stories-from-india-pakistan-partition/#respond Wed, 24 Feb 2016 08:13:07 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1111475 Sixty-nine years ago, at midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, over 300 million people rejoiced as the era of the British Raj drew to an end, and two new nations arose from what had been British India. Little did they know that the ensuing months would lead to the greatest movement of people in human history, […]

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Sixty-nine years ago, at midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, over 300 million people rejoiced as the era of the British Raj drew to an end, and two new nations arose from what had been British India. Little did they know that the ensuing months would lead to the greatest movement of people in human history, with over 14 million people displaced from their homes and two million dead after the violence had subsided. India and Pakistan were born in this bloodshed, and they still bear the scars of this era today.

Some of these scars were showcased at Stanford last Thursday, at an event co-hosted by the Center for South Asia and the 1947 Partition Archive, a Berkeley-based nonprofit committed to collecting and preserving oral histories of the Partition. Founded in 2013 by Guneeta Singh Bhalla, a physicist from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the archive was inspired by oral histories of Hiroshima and the Holocaust, and aims to collect 10,000 stories by 2017.

“We have only now begun to look at the effects of the Partition on people,” said Jisha Menon, Associate Professor from the Center for South Asia and moderator of the event panel, as she described how projects like the archive are reshaping the state-centered narrative that surrounded discussion of the Partition till now.

“This event has still not ended … and it sparks memories with contemporary moments of religious and ethnic tension,” she added.

The event featured three survivors of the Partition, followed by one of the archive’s “citizen historians,” Arshad Mirza, who recounted how he collects stories from survivors to add to the archive. Faced with the lack of a single repository of survivors’ accounts, the archive has crowdsourced its investigations, and trains volunteers to look for and interview survivors. Most of these survivors, like those who spoke at the event, are well over the age of 70 and speak a variety of languages. Although the archive has collected over 2,000 stories in 10 languages from 157 cities, thousands of witnesses remain unreached with their stories left untold.

“I wish that Partition had not happened,” said Om Kumari Baveja, one of the survivors speaking at the event, as she recounted some of the horrors she saw. “It is a curse, and should never happen in any country. Only the people suffer.”

The violence was especially close and poignant for all of the survivors, having affected both them and their families. Baveja’s husband had migrated from Lahore in Pakistan to Amritsar in India, arriving on one of the many blood-drenched trains and leaving behind two dead uncles. For Ali Shan, one of the other featured survivors, the violence was particularly personal; he lived through a bloody massacre that killed most of his family when he was six years old.

“We were in a village called Raha, just outside of Ludhiana in India,” he began, recounting in gory detail what happened next. “I saw hundreds of men dressed in white with swords and spears … The elders went to negotiate while the women and children stayed hidden in a room … They were all killed and the village was attacked.”

The violence Shan described did not end there.

“Two men burst through the roof and told us that if we didn’t open the door they’d burn us alive,” he said. “As we walked out, a gunman was standing there letting women and girls out but killing the men and boys … My mother found a white sheet and wrapped my brother and I in it so that we looked like girls … They sat us down below a tree outside the village, took the jewelry from the women, and then started killing.”

Shan’s family was killed in the ensuing bloodbath, and he only survived because of the unexpected kindness of one of the killers. That killer led Shan through the fields to Ludhiana, where he stayed at a Sikh family’s house secretly until an uncle in the Pakistani army found him and took him to Pakistan.

“He left me at that house in the village outside Ludhiana, and I never saw him again,” Shan said.

Fortuitous kindness from strangers was a common theme in survivors’ stories. Baljit Dhillon Vikram Singh, another survivor, recounted how her family left suddenly in the middle of the night, and were very nearly killed by the Pakistani military.

“White-uniformed military men came and raised their guns, asking us to stop,” she recounted. “My mother went and fell at the feet of the captain [and] said ‘I have small children in the van. Please let us go, we have done nothing.’ I had no idea what came into his heart, but he talked to her for a little while and let us go.”

“Later, she told me what he had told her – he told her to not stay in the next village and keep going to Amritsar, because they were going to burn it down that night,” she added.

The emotion coursing through the atmosphere was palpable as the three of them reflected on what they felt now, almost seventy years after those horrifying events.

“Can you imagine now, when I look back in my 70s and say… ‘Can I take my four daughters in the middle of the night, pack their clothes and leave the house as it is and go never to return again?’ The impact even today leaves a very hard mark on my mind,” said Singh, echoing what her mother had to do on that fateful night when they left.

“I was blessed, and I am blessed now … My goal now is to do anything to help people who are refugees and in need and resettlement.”

But of all the emotions, most palpable were those of relief, gratitude and moving on.

“My life has been full of tragedy and adventure,” said Shan.“I hike, I go to the gym, I do yoga, and I have survived three more near-death experiences and cancer since … My motto now is love everyone and hate no one. I have made peace with those who killed my family and childhood – and I forgive them.”

 

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm@ stanford.edu.

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Stanford students awarded inaugural Schwarzman Scholarship https://stanforddaily.com/2016/01/13/stanford-students-awarded-inaugural-schwarzman-scholarship/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/01/13/stanford-students-awarded-inaugural-schwarzman-scholarship/#respond Wed, 13 Jan 2016 08:29:18 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1109269 Two Stanford students were among the 111 recipients of the inaugural Schwarzman Scholarship, a fully-funded one year master’s degree program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

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Two Stanford students were among the 111 recipients of the inaugural Schwarzman Scholarship, a fully-funded one-year master’s degree program at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Alina Luk ’16 and Jordan Shapiro ’15 M.S. ’15 were selected from a pool of over 3,000 applicants from 135 countries to study in the newly-built Schwarzman College in Tsinghua, after going through a rigorous application process designed to evaluate intellectual talent, leadership potential and a desire to understand other cultures, according to the Schwarzman website.

Founded by Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chairman, CEO and co-founder of the global investment firm Blackstone, the scholarship aims to prepare the next generation of global leaders to respond to the changing geopolitical landscape of the 21st century. It will enable students to pursue a master’s degree in global affairs with a concentration in either public policy, economics and business or international studies. The $450 million endowment will support 200 students annually from around the world and has been modeled on the Rhodes Scholarship of the University of Oxford.

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(Courtesy of Alina Luk)

Luk, a senior from Hong Kong majoring in science, technology and society, has worked on three startups so far and is currently working on a wearable device for the elderly. She also co-founded the nonprofit organization QRist, which was awarded funding from the Thai Ministry of Public Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to digitize biometric health records for indigenous people in Thailand.

“Identifying as a bicultural American Chinese citizen, with Mandarin as my mother tongue and native English fluency, I’ve been brought up to identify with Chinese traditions and culture, fitted alongside a west-coast Stanford education,” Luk wrote in a message to The Stanford Daily.

Luk is excited by the doors that the scholarship will open.  

“Outside of the program, I want to spend this year exploring the entrepreneurship scene in Beijing, particularly in Dongguancun (often referred to as China’s Silicon Valley), located by Tsinghua,” Luk wrote. “I’m currently working on building a couple of ideas for different technologies for older adults, and I’d love to prototype them during my time in Beijing.”

NEW.011315.chinascholarship
(Courtesy of Jordan Shapiro)

Shapiro graduated last June with a degree in bioengineering and earned a master’s in management science and engineering this December. Fluent in Mandarin, Spanish and Hebrew, he was president of the Class of 2015, Executive Chief of Staff for the ASSU and a 2014 Mayfield Fellow.

“The Schwarzman Scholars program provides me not only the opportunity to study, work and collaborate in China, but also the resources to develop a deep understanding of global affairs that will allow me to become a leader in global biotechnical business,” Shapiro wrote in an email to The Daily.

Shapiro sees the Schwarzman program as an extension of his personal goals.

“My interests vary across a broad spectrum and I have dedicated my undergraduate and master’s years to satiating my academic curiosity well beyond my core area of study, propelling me to continue learning inside and outside the classroom,” he said.

Both Luk and Shapiro plan to pursue concentrations in economics and business. As Schwarzman Scholars, they will have the opportunity to interact with Chinese and global leaders through a wide array of lectures, internships and seminars in and around the Tsinghua Campus.

 

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Award-winning economists among newly appointed faculty https://stanforddaily.com/2015/09/17/award-winning-economists-among-newly-appointed-faculty/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/09/17/award-winning-economists-among-newly-appointed-faculty/#respond Thu, 17 Sep 2015 19:32:12 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1103297 Over the summer, Stanford President John Hennessy approved 19 new professoriate appointments that were reviewed and submitted by the Advisory Board of Stanford’s Academic Council.

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Over the summer, Stanford President John Hennessy approved 19 new professoriate appointments that were reviewed and submitted by the Advisory Board of Stanford’s Academic Council.  

Professors of economics Raj Chetty, formerly of Harvard, and Matthew Gentzkow, formerly of the University of Chicago, are among those newly appointed.

Chetty and Gentzkow are both winners of the John Bates Clark Medal, an award presented to economists under the age of 40 who have made the most significant contributions to economic thought. Their arrival means Stanford is now home to four of the 11 economists who have won the medal since 2000.

The New York Times reported that these additions to Stanford’s Economics department are indicative of a larger shift in the center of economic thought towards Stanford and away from MIT and Harvard in Boston.

Hennessy, however, stated that although this was an excellent recruiting year, he has not noticed any significant trends in faculty appointments.

“Great professors always want to be with other great professors and work with the very best students,” Hennessy wrote in an email to The Daily.

According to Hennessy, the recent appointment of several distinguished faculty members, particularly in the Department of Economics, reaffirms that Stanford is not only a hub for technology but also is able to recruit professors who are the best in their field across a variety of departments.

“The quality of our faculty and our students has increased significantly over the past 15 years, and Stanford is widely seen as one of the top few places in almost all disciplines,” Hennessy said.

“And the weather doesn’t hurt either,” he added.

In addition to professoriate appointments, 17 faculty members were reappointed to their faculty positions, eight professors were awarded emeriti titles, and 19 professors emeriti have returned for the current term.

 

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Stanford’s Title IX coordinator to step down on Sept. 11 https://stanforddaily.com/2015/09/07/stanfords-title-ix-coordinator-to-step-down-on-sept-11/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/09/07/stanfords-title-ix-coordinator-to-step-down-on-sept-11/#comments Mon, 07 Sep 2015 23:00:03 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1103132 Catherine Criswell Spear, Stanford’s first Title IX coordinator, is stepping down from her post on Sept. 11. A former director of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in Cleveland, she will be moving to the University of Virginia (UVA) as the new assistant vice president for equal opportunity programs.

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Title IX coordinator Catherine Criswell Spear will be stepping down on Sept. 11. (Courtesy of Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service)
Title IX coordinator Catherine Criswell Spear will be stepping down on Sept. 11. (Courtesy of Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service)

Catherine Criswell Spear, Stanford’s first Title IX coordinator, will step down from her post on Sept. 11. A former director of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in Cleveland, she will be moving to the University of Virginia (UVA) as the new assistant vice president for equal opportunity programs.

“UVA recruited me to fill a new Assistant Vice President of Equal Opportunity Programs position at their university,” Spear wrote in an email to The Daily. “I will not only have the opportunity to continue to do Title IX work, but also to be involved in overseeing other areas of civil rights and equal opportunity law compliance involving students, faculty and staff. In addition to being a wonderful professional opportunity, on a personal level, this opportunity also allows my husband and me to live closer to family in a more affordable location.”

Spear’s tenure at Stanford coincided with a period of increased interest in and criticism of the way universities around the country handle sexual assault cases.

Soon after her appointment in May 2014, Stanford saw the national debate take center stage at home when Leah Francis ’14 challenged the approach taken by the University in handling her case of an off-campus sexual assault, an investigation that occurred before Spear’s tenure. Hundreds of students rallied behind Francis in protest, with the hashtag #StandWithLeah going viral.

In response, the University convened the Provost’s Task Force on Sexual Assault last June, on which Spear served. The Task Force issued its recommendations this April, among which was the adoption of expulsion as the default sanction for sexual assault and the creation of a new investigation process to replace the Alternative Review Process (ARP). Currently, the ARP serves as the Office of Community Standards’ method for handling cases related to sexual assault, sexual harassment, dating violence and stalking.

“A clear Title IX investigation and resolution process that is clearly and consistently communicated is critical to building student and community trust in the process,” Spear said.

“The Provost’s Task Force on Sexual Assault and the committee’s recommendations embody this principle and, once implemented, will only serve to enhance this important aspect of the University’s Title IX efforts,” she added. “However, building trust in a new process will take time.”

Stanford remained in the spotlight for much of her tenure, as an investigation into sexual harassment at Sigma Alpha Epsilon, resulting in the loss of their house, was followed by the arrest of freshman swimmer Brock Turner for attempted rape and allegations that Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale ’04 sexually assaulted his former girlfriend, a former Stanford student.

As Stanford’s Title IX Coordinator, Spear was responsible for investigating many of the incidents and deciding appropriate sanctions. Her office came under criticism from members of the Stanford community for its handling of confidentiality issues, including for the travel ban placed on the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band after the University found it guilty of violating policies on alcohol, controlled substances, sexual harassment and hazing.

Spear noted that the Title IX office is placed in a unique, often divisive space when it comes to issues on campus and sometimes has to take a particular course of action due to federal law. One of the major challenges, she said, was to create clarity around the role of the Title IX office and the overlapping responsibilities it shares with other offices like the SARA Office, the Office of Community Standards and the Sexual Harassment Policy Office.

“Often what people disagree with is legally required by the Title IX federal law and OCR,” Spear said. “For example, universities are required to use the preponderance of the evidence (more likely than not) legal standard in deciding these matters, and they cannot simply refer a matter to law enforcement and do nothing.”

“Another challenge is that federal privacy law (e.g. FERPA) prohibits the University from correcting inaccurate or incomplete information in media reports,” she added.

However, Spear noted that as outreach and education continues about the role of Title IX, challenges related to understanding the function of the office and its jurisdiction will diminish over time.

“Stanford is grateful for the considerable contributions Catherine made to Stanford over the past year and a half, including expanding the Title IX office and her participation on the Provost’s Task Force on Sexual Assault  Policies and Practices.” said Lisa Lapin, University spokeswoman. “We wish her well as she returns to be closer to her family on the East coast.”

 

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Enjoy responsibly: Alcohol policies at American universities https://stanforddaily.com/2015/05/08/enjoy-responsibly-alcohol-policies-at-american-universities/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/05/08/enjoy-responsibly-alcohol-policies-at-american-universities/#comments Fri, 08 May 2015 07:36:52 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1100598 Stanford University is relatively tolerant towards alcohol compared with some of its peer institutions, as this piece explores.

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Hardly a day goes by without a new story in the media about rambunctious, rowdy, students at college, itching to explore the world of intoxicants thoroughly for the first time. Stanford is no different from other schools in this regard; indeed, Stanford students have a rich history of lobbying hard for the freedom to drink on campus. Recently, however, a number of high-profile incidents have increased scrutiny on Stanford, and colleges across America, on the harmful consequences of college drinking, including sexual assault, bodily injury, and vehicle-related accidents.

Despite the National Minimum Drinking Age Act ensuring that a significant number of college students are underage at some point during their time at universities, the overwhelming majority of college students drink alcohol. American colleges might therefore find it difficult to perpetuate old-world traditions that have been traditional havens of campus social life, like the famous university-sponsored college bars of Oxford and Cambridge. Instead, they must scratch their collective chins contemplating the question of college drinking. Specifically, colleges have had to grapple with the question of whether or not to police their students for engaging in underage drinking, and how to simultaneously ensure that they do so in a safe and responsible manner.

A history of alcohol policies in the U.S.

(VICTOR XU/The Stanford Daily)
(VICTOR XU/The Stanford Daily)

After prohibition was repealed in 1933, the 21st Amendment effectively gave states the right to set their own alcohol laws, with most states setting a minimum drinking age of 21. But pressure from student activists in the 1960s to reduce the minimum voting age to 18 saw various states subsequently reduce their drinking ages to 18, 19 and 20 years. After all, so the reasoning went, if citizens were considered old enough to be drafted and vote, they should be considered old enough to drink.

All that changed in 1984 with the passage of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which withheld 10 percent of federal highway construction funds from states that did not set a minimum drinking age of 21. Since then, all 50 states and the District of Columbia have enacted minimum drinking ages of 21.

Cultural attitudes and lifestyles have, of course, evolved since those turbulent years. In 2011, 21 million, or 42 percent, of 18-24 year-olds in America were enrolled in college, up from 10.6 million in 1984. With this increase in enrollment, colleges face greater non-academic challenges too. One of the most important is balancing students’ desire for experimentation and their transition to adulthood with their need to abide by laws and create safe communities.

Alcohol and drug use by underage students is therefore one of the biggest challenges colleges must face. How colleges approach this challenge varies widely from campus to campus and is subject to numerous local factors, such as laws regulating alcohol consumption on private property, the amount of public funding received and cultural attitudes embodied in the school’s philosophy.

Universities’ policies vary in success

Regardless of the philosophical and legal basis behind implementing a particular alcohol policy, policies across many otherwise distinct universities tend to share similar themes. They explicitly prohibit underage possession and consumption of alcohol and often have administrators and resident assistants police underage students.

Public universities like UC Berkeley and UW-Madison may be compelled to adhere more strictly to state laws than their private counterparts since they receive funding directly from states. Similarly restrictive policies at universities like Dartmouth College may have been enacted in response to a harmful, disruptive, even legendarily infamous drinking culture. Other universities, like Notre Dame, enact such policies perhaps due to codes of conduct being heavily reliant on their religious affiliation. The same approach of actively restraining alcohol use is therefore widely held in colleges across America.

The effectiveness of such a heavy-handed approach, however, is not without question. Harvard University’s College Alcohol Study has found that colleges that ban alcohol have 21 percent fewer students who are heavy drinkers than those that do not. But, data from the National Institute of Health shows that nationally, about 80 percent of college students drink alcohol and about half of those binge drink. Furthermore, the same Harvard study shows that students who do drink at colleges that ban alcohol experience the same rate of alcohol-related problems as their peers from other colleges.

If the aim of restrictive alcohol policies is to encourage abstinence among underage students while creating a safe campus community, then they do not seem to be fulfilling that aim.

Targeting safe drinking rather than abstention

Stanford has adopted an "open door" policy for student drinking. (RAHIM ULLAH/The Stanford Daily)
Stanford has adopted an “open door” policy for student drinking. (ARNAV MARIWALA/The Stanford Daily)

Perhaps colleges may not be able to prevent all, or even the majority of students from drinking. Other colleges have instead geared their policies toward mitigating the consequences of excessive drinking and encouraging responsible behaviour.

At Stanford, this perspective has been a part of the University’s alcohol policy for many years. Colloquially referred to as the “open-door policy,” its aim is to reinforce the expectation of students to make healthy, responsible choices.

“We take an educational approach, wherein we educate students about accountability for bad choices, and expect them to make legal and healthy decisions.” said Ralph Castro, head of the Office of Alcohol Policy and Education (OAPE). “The open-door label is an unofficial term used by students; our intention is to build community in residences that encourage responsible behaviour among peers.”

Incoming freshmen are meant to complete the first stage of a comprehensive alcohol education program before their first Friday on campus, with the remaining two stages being completed on campus during freshman year. The program, Think About It, has a section known as “partying smart” that discusses alcohol consumption in depth.

“Alcohol education helped me develop reasons for choosing not to drink that went beyond it being illegal only.” said Andy Ylitalo ’17. “I don’t particularly enjoy the taste of alcohol, and I’ve never felt compelled to drink to enjoy myself or be part of a social event at Stanford. Giving people the freedom to drink if they choose to creates less pressure to take advantage of opportunities to drink than if it was prohibited — here, you can approach an RA if you have social problems related to drinking. There is less hype about drinking; if people want to, they can, but if they don’t, it doesn’t matter.”

Furthermore, unlike the aforementioned universities, most Stanford officials – barring the Department of Public Safety – are not expected to enforce the state drinking law, allowing students to possess and consume alcohol in residences. RAs and members of residential communities, however, are encouraged to step in to prevent risky behavior that may be associated with alcohol use.

“The open door policy is designed to create a safe space where a community can keep an eye on itself,” said Wesley Tiu ’16, an RA in an upperclass dorm. “Especially in some dorms where communities might not be as tight, making it easier for people to drink behind closed doors, having doors open keeps people accountable because everybody is ensuring that people stay safe.”

Additionally, OAPE runs the Cardinal Nights program, which sponsors alcohol-free events for students. Its mission is to challenge the notion that alcohol is necessary to have fun on a college campus; past events have included trips to a Giants game and performances by comedians like Chris Hardwick.

“Twenty-six percent of students who attend Cardinal Nights events report that they would have been drinking alcohol if they had not attended,” said Castro. “That greatly reduces risk for those students and others because they are engaging in a fun, healthy alternative instead of drinking alcohol that night.”

Other universities across the country have also started implementing similar policies. Tufts University has implemented what it calls a “good samaritan policy,” which absolves students seeking medical assistance for excessive alcohol use from disciplinary action.

Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) has implemented a policy like Stanford’s, which aims to encourage responsible drinking and discourage bingeing, according to Sankalp Kapur, a WUSTL freshman and member of the WUSTL Constitutional Council.

“The policy encourages freedom and trust between students and authorities,” Kapur said. “Students value it deeply.”

According to Castro, the number of students that engage in binge drinking at Stanford has remained stable over the past few years, with a decrease over the last year among undergraduates. Additionally, Castro said that only 40 percent of frosh think that alcohol is a significant part of college life at Stanford, indicating that educating students about the law, providing equally enjoyable social programming and encouraging responsible behaviour could be a better alternative to heavy-handed, prohibitive policies.

Ultimately, says Tiu, alcohol ought not to be a wall preventing members of a community from engaging with each other. Emphasizing students’ freedom to choose whether or not to drink may therefore be a deciding factor in creating an enjoyable and safe campus community.


Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu

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Stanford students arraigned for bridge protest https://stanforddaily.com/2015/02/23/stanford-students-arraigned-for-bridge-protest/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/02/23/stanford-students-arraigned-for-bridge-protest/#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2015 06:45:17 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1096387 Six Stanford students were arraigned in San Mateo County Superior Court on Monday, Feb. 23, on a single misdemeanor charge each. More students will be arraigned on Tuesday.

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Six Stanford students were arraigned in San Mateo County Superior Court on Monday, Feb. 23, on a single misdemeanor charge of violating Section 647c of the California Penal Code, which prohibits the willful obstruction of any person’s free movement in a public place. The charges stemmed from the San Mateo Bridge protest led by the group Silicon Shutdown on Jan. 19.

The students all pleaded not guilty. A pre-trial hearing date was set for April 21, to be followed by a jury trial on May 26. If found guilty, they may be sentenced to up to one year in county jail or a maximum fine of $1,000, or both.

Four more Stanford students are expected to be arraigned on the same charges on Tuesday.

Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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