Hannah Knowles – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Wed, 07 Jul 2021 02:03:04 +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 Hannah Knowles – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Knowles: One last pitch https://stanforddaily.com/2019/06/16/knowles-one-last-pitch/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/06/16/knowles-one-last-pitch/#respond Sun, 16 Jun 2019 07:02:59 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1155814 Five out of my seven Facebook cover photos over the last four years have been Stanford Daily recruitment pitches. They feature the usual cut-and-paste blurbs of hype, dangling the prospect of “interviewing prominent campus visitors,” getting “front-row press passes to sporting events,” and, of course, eating free Treehouse pizza every night at production.

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Five out of my seven Facebook cover photos over the last four years have been Stanford Daily recruitment pitches. They feature the usual cut-and-paste blurbs of hype, dangling the prospect of “interviewing prominent campus visitors,” getting “front-row press passes to sporting events” and, of course, eating free Treehouse pizza every night at production.

To be honest, none of these selling points has much to do with my Daily experience. To my parents’ dismay, my position has not once translated into an interview with the Ruth Bader Ginsburgs and Oprah Winfreys who sometimes give The Daily Q&As. I’ve attended about half of a Cardinal sports game. By my second year at The Daily, few foods were less appealing to me than Treehouse pizza (RIP the weekly thin-crust Patxi’s order).

For my goodbye column, I want to sort through what I’ve really gotten out of my time here — and for any students reading, why I hope you find a place here too.

As an aspiring journalist, I could talk about the many ways The Daily has helped prepare me to go out in the world as a reporter. This student-run paper has given me wonderful opportunities and hands-on training, allowing me to test new skills, make professional connections, get feedback, rewrite, get angry emails, get better. But only a fraction of The Daily’s staff want to become full-time journalists. This makes sense. As excited as I am about journalism, I’m also daunted by the glimpses I’ve gotten of the news industry — here, I think of the outstanding reporters I’ve worked with who got laid off, the local paper I interned at with a whole room known as “the graveyard” because it’s full of vacant office chairs.

Instead, I’ll talk about all the things you will take away from being a student journalist no matter your post-grad plans.

You might not interview RBG, but you’ll talk to some pretty interesting people on and off campus. You’ll venture beyond your normal path from dorm to lecture to dinner: to the Palo Alto courthouse, to the offices of professors far outside your department, to a dingy basement section of the Med School where you feel like you need some sort of special badge. You’ll hear concerns you weren’t aware of. You’ll care more about what happens outside your bubble within the Bubble. You’ll start to comprehend just how complicated Stanford is and how many stories are lurking if you ask.

You’ll talk to some people you disagree with, with the goal of understanding their view. You’ll dig into nuance, finding all sorts of beliefs challenged in the face of another person’s concrete experience.

You’ll encounter pushy people and figure out, over time, how to hold your ground. When something wild happens, you’ll drop your homework to go do something much more stimulating. You’ll sweat the details, because they matter and because if you don’t, you will definitely hear about it.

You’ll become a more curious person, empowered when you have questions to go talk to people who can help you find the answers. You’ll learn to be persistent: to make that extra phone call, send the follow-up email or show up unannounced — because why not?

You’ll feel moved by the things people are willing to share.

You’ll miss some classes and skip some reading, and maybe feel your heartbeat accelerate as you turn in assignments five seconds before they’re due. But you’ll get by. If your dorm room is too far from the Main Quad, you might crash for naps every Thursday on The Daily’s couch, waking up to the murmur of people discussing the news or their group project.

You might feel at times like you’re going crazy. Your roommate might ask you why you’re shredding documents with scissors on a Saturday morning. A professor might call you at 4 a.m. You might stay awake agonizing over whether the article you sent off to the copy editors was fair – and feel dismayed the next day when you realize something fell short. You’ll hear from people upset by coverage and see the many ways The Daily must improve.

You’ll develop a better sense of skepticism, learning to ask more follow-up questions.

You’ll do work you’re proud of — work that in a world of academic papers and theory feels refreshingly immediate in impact and broad in audience. You’ll watch others at The Daily do exciting work and feel equally proud of their successes, whether it’s a scoop or a podcast or a magazine or a beautiful, fast new website that a year ago seemed far out of reach. You’ll take ownership of projects, finding freedom to shape what you do here.

You’ll make some great friends. You’ll be part of a team and make Google Docs with lots of editors. You’ll be reminded often that everyone you work with has something to teach you.

You’ll feel a bit weird when, getting ready to graduate, you realize how much the group of current Daily staffers you know has already shrunk. But you’ll understand that this is natural. You’ll meet up for coffee with a recent Daily alum and feel happy to have shared an experience so important to both of you.

You’ll end up with a big list of all the things you wanted to do or write but never made time for. You’ll almost wish you could go back and do your four years of student journalism over again, with the messy process of learning so much of the basics behind you. You’ll think you could have put it all to better use.

You might even graduate with a story still in draft phase, calls unmade and emails unsent.

Contact Hannah Knowles at hannahknowles14 ‘at’ gmail.com.

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Warnings of Chinese government ‘influence’ on campuses divide Stanford community https://stanforddaily.com/2019/05/30/warnings-of-chinese-government-influence-on-campuses-divide-stanford-community/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/05/30/warnings-of-chinese-government-influence-on-campuses-divide-stanford-community/#respond Thu, 30 May 2019 07:19:45 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1155657 “There’s a real sense that there’s a growing fear and suspicion of Chinese Americans generally in the United States, and that the Hoover report is encouraging this type of scrutiny and suspicion,” Chang said. “And many of us feel this is a form of racial profiling.”

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This article is the last in a three-part series examining how rising U.S.-China tensions are affecting the Stanford community. Read the first installment here and the second here.

Chaofen Sun doesn’t like being dragged into politics.

“I’m a linguist,” the East Asian Languages and Cultures professor said. He researches variations in modern Chinese and speaks reverently of Tang and Song Dynasty poetry — it’s “like Shakespeare in English literature,” he said.

But political controversy has followed the Chinese government-funded language and culture institute that Sun helped bring to Stanford, one of many centers called Confucius Institutes around the U.S. A Senate committee report released this February following an investigation warns that Confucius Institutes, whose purview would seem to lie far from matters of national security, are part of a “soft power” campaign to make China seem less threatening to the U.S.

Much of the government’s efforts to limit the Chinese state’s access to U.S. academia focus on American universities’ prowess in science and technology. Officials do not want a powerful adversary taking advantage of research funded in large part by the U.S.

However, some policymakers and scholars have also highlighted a less-familiar risk from what a recent report out of Stanford’s Hoover Institution calls the Chinese government’s quest for “cultural and informational influence” in the U.S. The Hoover report places this quest for influence in everything from media to think tanks to universities like Stanford.

“Some of these efforts fall into the category of normal public diplomacy as pursued by many other countries,” the report states. “But others involve the use of coercive or corrupting methods to pressure individuals and groups and thereby interfere in the functioning of American civil and political life.”

The Hoover report has encouraged scrutiny of Chinese government activities at U.S. schools, but has also stoked a backlash from critics who believe it helps cast a wide swathe of the academic community under unfair suspicion. One of those critics is history professor Gordon Chang, who was recently appointed senior vice provost for undergraduate education.

“There’s a real sense that there’s a growing fear and suspicion of Chinese Americans generally in the United States, and that the Hoover report is encouraging this type of scrutiny and suspicion,” Chang said. “And many of us feel this is a form of racial profiling.”

Under the Chinese government’s watch

At a talk this March, Hoover Institution fellows spoke of a “new Cold War” with China and called the authoritarian country today’s biggest threat to global democracy. A Hoover report released last November titled “China’s Influence and American Interests: Promoting Constructive Vigilance” devotes a whole section to ways a group of China scholars sees Beijing wielding power on U.S. campuses.

Besides scrutinizing Confucius Institutes, the report — echoing news articles over the years — says that some Chinese student associations report back to the government about peers and faculty; that Chinese diplomats pressure universities to avoid events on touchy subjects; and that China restricts foreign researchers’ ability to study the country inside its borders.

Hoover senior fellow Larry Diamond, who co-chaired the working group behind the report, drew a line between open and transparent communication to promote pro-Chinese government perspectives and the more coercive strategies outlined above.

He cited national cases where students “say things favorable to the Dalai Lama or criticize the posture of the People’s Republic of China on something or condemn authoritarianism in China” and are told that their family could get in trouble. That’s inappropriate coercion, he said, distinct from efforts like cultural tours or open political conversations.

Students from China, most of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly with The Daily, said they have not encountered the sort of “peer monitoring” mentioned in the Hoover report as a way for the Chinese government to keep tabs on students. But they self-censor all the same. Whether peer monitoring actually exists at Stanford is moot, one Chinese student said; it’s the possibility that keeps people cautious about what they say.

“If it exists I’m not going to be surprised,” he said.

He talks with other Chinese peers about what internships may be too sensitive to pursue, remembering the story he’s heard about a Chinese student in years past whose parents were contacted by the government after the student got an internship at a prominent U.S. newspaper. Students wonder: Is a Stanford in Government position in Taiwan okay?

A second student recalled choosing her words with nervousness at some University events. Usually a confident speaker, she felt her voice shake a bit as she asked a question at a Hoover Institution talk on China, apprehensive to touch on a politically sensitive subject in case people connected with the Chinese government were there.

And yet, political organizing is far more likely to draw attention than casual speech, the first student said. He’s typically not too worried about voicing controversial opinions, reasoning that repercussions are rare and that the Chinese government has too many people to watch to track them all.

While some Chinese student associations around the country have been vocal proponents of the Chinese government’s views, objecting to campus talks by politically sensitive speakers and consulting with government officials, members of the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Stanford (ACSSS) said the group does not have a strong connection to the Chinese consulate. Other Chinese students said this is their perception as well after learning more about the group and attending its events.

Consulate staff give talks to members a couple times a year, said Ph.D. student Yiqing Ding, who co-leads ACSSS. But he said the appearances typically cover practical issues like safety, urging new students to beware of risky outdoor activities and car accidents.

Another Chinese student pushed back against common perceptions of government restrictions on freedom of speech, arguing that the issue is more nuanced than often presented.

“I think a general misconception is that China is like North Korea, like there’s no freedom whatsoever,” she said. “Honestly, most people who are saying sensitive things are pretty fine. According to my observation, as long as you don’t organize something [and] if you keep your view private to yourself … no one really cares and the government really wouldn’t care.”

She also added that sometimes the government actually encourages particular policy criticism so that it can generate policy more in line with people’s opinions.

When it comes to highly sensitive topics like Tibet or the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, however, she agreed that students have to choose words cautiously. The Chinese government has an expansive apparatus for keeping track of citizen data, she said, making students wary in the off-chance that what they say is recorded.

“Those words you may say carelessly might carry with you for a long way,” she said, pointing to China’s new social credit system, which seeks to standardize evaluations of citizens’ and business’ economic and social reputations in one unified system. The system, which allows China to deny certain privileges to those with low scores, has exacerbated fears about China using big data and advanced technology to construct a sophisticated surveillance state.

The student who heard the story about the newspaper intern said that, for all the genuine concern about Chinese censorship, the scrutiny of the U.S. government and concerns of xenophobia can loom larger in practical terms for students than the attention of the Chinese government. Visa issues and racial profiling, he said, are often a more immediate worry than suspicions of state monitoring.

If U.S.-China hostilities continue to rise, he may move to Europe or Japan after graduation.

“The world is so big,” the student said. “I don’t have to get stuck in the United States.”

Spotlight on Confucius Institutes

East Asian Languages and Cultures professor Sun seemed amused when asked about allegations that the Chinese government wields improper sway over Confucius Institutes, which are funded evenly between host universities and a Chinese government office called Hanban.

He said that Stanford’s institute, supported by a $4 million gift from Hanban in 2009, is governed by a contract like any other research agreement — one that protects academic freedom. The money supports a single faculty position, two graduate fellowships and Chinese studies curriculum.

“[None of that] is true about our Confucius Institute,” Sun said of the concerns raised about the Institutes broadly. “That’s all I can tell you.”

The government, meanwhile, has described Confucius Institutes as part of a Chinese influence campaign at odds with American interests. Two reports released in February — one by the Senate, another by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) — detail investigations into the institutes and their relationship with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Hanban has given almost $160 million to U.S. schools’ 110 institutes since 2006, according to the Senate inquiry.  

In particular, Confucius Institute critics have called out some Institutes’ exclusive use of pro-CCP material and the censorship of discussions on controversial topics such as Tibet, Tiananmen, repression of minorities in Xinjiang, and human rights in American classrooms.

A report from the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations also objected to the Chinese government’s oversight of many Confucius Institutes, from budget review and veto power over events to contracts stipulating that Hanban-appointed Chinese staff must “conscientiously safeguard national interests” and follow Chinese law.

The National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law last August, now prohibits the Defense Department from funding Chinese language programs at universities with Confucius Institutes, though institutions can seek an exemption. At least one school has decided to close its Confucius Institute to avoid losing Defense Department funding for a language program. According to the Hoover Institution’s China report, several universities that once contemplated opening CIs — including Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania — have decided against doing so.

Even staunch China critics, however, have cautioned against monolithic assessments of the 100-plus Confucius Institutes currently operating on American campuses. The GAO report, which involved a review of 90 institutes’ contracts, stressed that most CI agreements reveal the institutes are not simply pawns of the Chinese government and include language not in template agreements on Hanban’s English website. According to the GAO, 10 agreements explicitly state that Confucius Institutes are subject to school policies.

Others believe the fixation on Confucius Institutes distracts from real issues in U.S.-China relations. Stanford alum John Pomfret ’81 M.A. ’84 wrote last summer that he sees little harm from these humanities-oriented centers to American interests. For Pomfret, the larger threat lies with the Chinese government’s efforts to access American technology through academia.

Early on, Chinese officials did try to influence Stanford’s Institute. Representatives at Peking University (PKU), Stanford’s partner organization for the new center, pushed for Stanford to fill its endowed chair with someone working in modern social studies.

More ominously, Hanban’s first funding offer of $4 million came with one crucial caveat: Don’t talk about Tibet.

Yet when Stanford turned down Hanban’s initial restriction on Tibet, the Chinese government dropped the suggestion and provided the money anyway, Stanford administrators have said. Similarly, Stanford’s Confucius Institute successfully pushed back against PKU’s desire for the institute to take on a social science bent, appointing an expert in classical Chinese poetry for the endowed chair position.

East Asian Languages and Cultures Professor Ban Wang told the Office of International Affairs in 2013 that Stanford negotiates directly with Hanban representatives in moments of disagreement. “Each time, we remind [Hanban] that Stanford University has the control on how to manage the Institute,” Wang said.

Thus, Stanford says it has no good reason to shut down its institute, though at least 10 schools as of this January have closed or are planning to close their Confucius Institutes amid the political scrutiny.

University spokesperson E.J. Miranda told The Daily that the Chinese government has not influenced or restricted the Stanford institute’s hiring or programming. Details of the University’s contract with the Hanban are confidential, Miranda said, because it involves a gift.

Broad suspicion of Confucius Institutes hit Stanford directly back in 2014, when a Forbes opinion piece accused Stanford of enabling Chinese propaganda and spying through its Confucius Institute. An indignant Richard Saller, the director of Stanford’s Institute, called these accusations “sensational to the point of being ridiculous.”

“If we negotiated an agreement that protects our academic freedom at Stanford, why should we renege on that?” Saller said.

‘They look twice, if you’re Chinese’

As U.S.-China tensions rise, history professor Chang has heard troubling stories from Chinese academics — stories about situations in which they have felt singled out for their race.

The impacts confided in him, Chang said, are subtle: a funny feeling a Stanford colleague got at an off-campus policy meeting, a sense of being scrutinized.

“We walk into a room of people, policy people — they look twice, if you’re Chinese,” Chang said. “Are you really American? Are you going to have America’s interest at heart?”

In an afterword to the Hoover report on Chinese influence in the U.S., Diamond and his report co-chair, the Center on U.S.-China Relations’ Orville Schell, emphasized that they do not wish for their research to provoke “a McCarthy era-like reaction against Chinese in America.”

For critics of the report like Chang, that intent does not change the outcome he sees lately: a heightened suspicion toward all Chinese. Chang said that since the Hoover report came out in November, he’s heard concern from some 50 people around the country — from relatives to colleagues — that it encourages unfounded fear.

Chang has no qualms with the University as a whole, which he believes has been supportive of  Chinese community members. He worries instead about a societal trend.

As a historian, Chang traces Western misgivings about the Chinese 150 years back, to worries about “yellow peril” in the 19th century and ideas of Chinese immigrants as so “bound by racial loyalty to each other that they become a threat to American life.” But he believes the Trump administration’s rhetoric — statements like “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” which the President made during his 2016 presidential campaign — has notched up fear over the last few years.

Chang is part of the Committee of 100, a group of influential Chinese Americans that aims to promote “constructive” U.S.-Chinese relations as well as Chinese American integration into U.S society. The Hoover reports calls some Committee of 100 members sympathetic to the Chinese government’s objectives and states that members report “significant pressure from the Chinese consulate” to “toe the Party line.”

Chang was skeptical at the implication of successful, well-known American citizens acting on Beijing’s behalf.

“We have our own point of view, and we are entitled to our point of view, and some of the Hoover people don’t like it,” Chang said. “But they cannot — they should not — insinuate that we are somehow the instrument of a foreign power.”

Defending the report at a February panel, Diamond said that he seeks a balance between healthy scrutiny of an authoritarian country’s influence and embrace of what Chinese and Chinese-American scholars contribute to the U.S. He also said he welcomed feedback.

“All of this is very valuable and thought-provoking and we’re taking careful notes,” he said of the discussion.

University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Persis Drell publicly addressed concerns about efforts to protect national security and intellectual property, in a March 7 blog post that did not name China but spoke on Stanford’s relationship with the international community.

“We must … ensure that attentiveness to national security concerns does not bleed into something more insidious: a questioning of people within our community based on their country of origin or their heritage,” Tessier-Lavigne and Drell wrote.

Other universities have given similar statements of caution. On Feb. 21, UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Research, Randy Katz, wrote a letter to campus titled “Reaffirming our support for Berkeley’s international community.” The letter acknowledged recent reports to the school’s administration of “negative comments” made toward scholars who are Chinese-American or working with Chinese entities. The comments, Katz said, alleged without evidence that these community members “could be acting as spies or otherwise working at odds with the interests of the United States.”

At Stanford, faculty have also met with University leaders to discuss the concerns addressed in these public posts. Earlier this year, a group of Chinese and Chinese-American faculty talked with the Provost about how government actions and the political climate were affecting Chinese community members.

Victoria Yang ’21, an undergraduate from China, finds a silver lining in the fraught relationship between the U.S. and China: She thinks the tensions have made Stanford students more interested in U.S.-Chinese relations. Membership in the Forum for American-Chinese Exchange at Stanford, where she is vice president of communications, has tripled from about 10 last school year to 30 this year. The group draws a medley of Chinese students, Chinese-language speakers and international relations enthusiasts.

“I think before, a lot of people don’t care as much about China as they do right now,” she said. “There’s this huge emergence of a big power that challenges something people feel is America’s right place in the world.”

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu and Berber Jin at fjin16 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Chinese access to University research prompts debate over inclusion, national security https://stanforddaily.com/2019/05/29/chinese-access-to-university-research-prompts-debate-over-inclusion-national-security/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/05/29/chinese-access-to-university-research-prompts-debate-over-inclusion-national-security/#respond Wed, 29 May 2019 07:35:50 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1155586 This article is the second in a series examining how rising U.S.-China tensions are affecting the Stanford community.

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This article is the second in a three-part series examining how rising U.S.-China tensions are affecting the Stanford community. Read the first installment here and the third here.

When the Bits and Watts initiative launched in October of 2016 to design better, greener electric grids, it was a collaboration between Stanford and SLAC National Linear Accelerator, a Department of Energy (DOE) laboratory operated by Stanford.

Today, it’s just a Stanford project. SLAC pulled out because of an industry partner that had been with Bits and Watts from the start: China’s state-owned electric utility. The DOE raised concerns partway into the initiative, recalled Bits and Watts co-director Arun Majumdar, and “we decided it was best … to put at least a little bit of separation between SLAC and Stanford.”

Bits and Watts continues to work closely with China’s State Grid, as the federal government had nothing “official” against the company, Majumdar said. But he doesn’t question the DOE’s decision. He served in the agency for several years under the Obama administration.

“They have information that I don’t have right now,” he said. “I’m not going to second guess them. They’re doing … what they think is best for the DOE and the United States.”

The DOE’s second thoughts on the Bits and Watts initiative illustrate a growing caution toward China from the federal government, which has stepped up restrictions on the scientific research it funds and on scholars who can enter the U.S. Some, like Majumdar, trust that government agencies have good reasons for their shifting attitudes, as the U.S. looks to guard its massive investments in academia from foreign adversaries. Stanford’s moratorium on new funding from Chinese telecoms company Huawei, imposed six months ago, is just one way the University is adapting its policies amid the heightened scrutiny.

Others worry that new government restrictions will erode research institutions’ support for international collaboration and for academics of all backgrounds, undermining a great source of U.S. universities’ strength.

Protecting U.S. investments

Stanford has banned classified research since 1969, when the Faculty Senate responded to protest over the University’s role in secret military research during the Vietnam War. Research that’s not marked “classified” can be shared freely.

As Dean and Vice Provost of Research Kathryn Moler puts it, academic openness — the idea that results are published for all to see — is “built into the research ecosystem at Stanford.”

But U.S. officials are increasingly looking to curb some groups’ access to this research, worried about foreign governments taking advantage of federally funded work at schools like Stanford.

“Our federal agency sponsors, members of Congress and members of the public are concerned about protecting billions of dollars in public investments that support American economic competitiveness and national security,” Moler wrote in an email to The Daily. “They wish to put safeguards in place to defend this investment.”

The University has a responsibility to address those national security concerns, she said, while balancing them with key values of openness, academic freedom and non-discrimination.

Particularly over the last year, federal officials have raised alarm about academics breaking rules by sharing confidential grant application information obtained through the peer-review process, or by failing to disclose all their other funding sources — including foreign backing — as required when applying for U.S. money. An October 2018 letter from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) cautioned thousands of research institutions against inappropriate “foreign influence” in biomedical research; earlier this year, the NIH followed up with letters to smaller group of schools asking for information about particular NIH-funded faculty members thought to have undisclosed ties to foreign governments.

Last year, Congress also considered blocking Department of Defense funding for any researcher who had participated in Chinese, Russian, North Korean or Iranian “talent recruitment programs,” which aim to bring top academics to the countries and create connections at institutions abroad.

The Department of Energy has responded most strongly to concerns about foreign governments accessing U.S. research, moving ahead with restrictions like the one the Department of Defense dropped. A memo released by the DOE in December 2018 restricted DOE-funded researchers working in unspecified “emerging research areas and technologies” from collaborating with colleagues in 30 “sensitive” countries including China, Russia and Saudi Arabia. A second memo in January said the DOE would ban its employees and grant recipients from participating in certain foreign talent recruitment programs.

SLAC leaders referred questions about DOE’s policy changes and their effects to the DOE. The DOE would not say how many people or projects could be affected at SLAC and declined to comment beyond saying they are not yet “at an implementation stage” for the new rules.

Federal concerns over foreign governments’ access to federally-funded research are not new. In 2016, for example, the Obama administration decided to restrict international students’ ability to participate in research on technologies related to national security.

Back then, however, Stanford joined 61 other research institutions in signing a letter to the State Department opposing the decision, warning of the “disastrous consequences” of the new restrictions.

Recent restrictions on foreign researchers have met less resistance from schools and higher education groups, in the wake of a growing bipartisan consensus in Washington about the risks of engaging with China. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in December 2018, California senator and Stanford alum Dianne Feinstein ’55 called the “transfer and theft of American intellectual property by the Chinese government” the United States’ most urgent national security issue. She highlighted examples of the issue in academia, from members of the Chinese military working in American labs to efforts to recruit top researchers back to China.

Meanwhile, many former supporters of engagement with China have become disillusioned with the country’s increasing authoritarianism. That group includes members of the working group behind a controversial November 2018 report from Stanford’s own Hoover Institution calling for “constructive vigilance” against China’s efforts to “take advantage of the openness of American society.”

As caution toward China rises, Stanford has revisited its own policies concerning international collaboration on sensitive projects.

The University recently updated its approach to evaluating federal export control regulations, which mandate that universities working on matters close to national security obtain a special license from the government to employ foreign researchers. Scrutiny of certain research projects that pose risks to information security or carry greater potential to violate these export controls — restrictions on what can be shared with citizens of another country, meant to protect U.S. interests — have been a focus of Stanford’s policy changes in recent years, Moler said.

“It’s now explicit that we will evaluate whether to accept and manage the risks of engagement and financial support,” she said.

Though University spokesperson EJ Miranda acknowledged Stanford’s first responsibility is to follow federal guidance, he said the University hopes to play a role in shaping this guidance, with the aim of preserving openness and international cooperation.

Moler said faculty and University leaders are “actively discussing” concerns around these sorts of research risks and described a balancing act for Stanford. She emphasized her belief that Stanford must welcome international community members, calling them “essential to our community” and saying their research benefits people around the world.

“I think it’s important that efforts to protect legitimate national security interests be carefully tailored so as not to stifle discovery, innovation, collaboration and the greater prosperity they lead to,” she wrote to The Daily.

Controversial ties

Around five years ago, KL, who was granted anonymity to speak about politically sensitive issues, was close to finishing his engineering Ph.D. at Stanford. A Chinese student already armed with a prestigious undergraduate degree from back home, KL was the type of star student who supporters of openness to China laud as key contributors to research.

KL’s academic record also caught the attention of multiple Chinese universities, each of which offered KL a tenure-track professorship upon his graduation. These universities encouraged KL to apply for the Chinese government-sponsored Thousand Talents Plan (TTP), which supplements existing faculty offers with generous benefits, including a one million-yuan ($151,000) starting bonus, housing subsidies and compensation for relocation. It is also the most conspicuous of the foreign “talent recruitment programs” whose members for whom the DOE has moved to restrict funding.

KL calls the Thousand Talents Plan one of China’s highest academic honors, and recipients are often celebrated across the press and social media. But with U.S. officials scrutinizing such recruitment initiatives as potential vehicles for espionage and tech transfer, Chinese authorities have recently sought to lower the program’s profile.

Late last year, China’s Ministry of Education issued a notice on WeChat requesting that all colleges and universities delete information relating to the TTP on their web pages. An Oct. 4, 2018 screenshot of a note signed by the “Thousand Talents Plan Youth Review Team” stressed that TTP recruiters should protect the security of overseas prospects. Recruiters were told to use telephone or fax in lieu of email when notifying candidates about upcoming interviews. They were also instructed not to use the term “Thousand Talents Plan.”

While the DOE stands out for its crackdown on foreign talent program participants, other agencies are watching the TTP closely. In April, the renowned MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston fired three Chinese scientists — all with Thousand Talents affiliations — after the NIH determined they had violated agency rules involving confidentiality of peer review and the disclosure of foreign ties. One researcher shared confidential information from an NIH grant application containing “proprietary/privileged information,” while others failed to disclose their close ties to research programs in China, according to NIH letters sent to MD Anderson.

For KL, who said he never spoke with any government officials while part of the TTP, concerns about the program’s threat to the U.S. seem overblown. He maintains that the Chinese government “does not care what you are doing” when a part of the TTP, and that the forms of technology transfer that do occur are not coordinated efforts.

U.S. officials believe otherwise. They consider the TTP part of a concerted strategy to challenge American tech dominance. In its January memo announcing the planned ban on grant recipients’ participation in select foreign talent programs, the DOE said the programs “threaten the United States’ economic base” by helping foreign governments gain both legal and illegal access to U.S. technology and scientific research.

The November 2018 Hoover report isolated TTP participants working in government labs and private companies as primary causes for concern. The report alleges that these participants often do not tell their employers that they get support from TTP; such failure to disclose is illegal for federal employees and for others can break hiring contracts by presenting conflicts of interest. Official Chinese TTP websites list more than 300 U.S. government researchers and more than 600 employees at U.S. businesses who have accepted TTP money.

Additionally, some Thousand Talents participants receive unconventional offers, according to University of South Carolina Aiken professor Xie Tian.

“The Thousand Talents Plan isn’t a normal way of recruiting talents … the program’s requirements are very strange, hoping that the people work a few months in China every year while still retaining their jobs in other countries,” he told the Epoch Times. TTP categories range from “Young Talents” like KL, which targets scientists under 40 with Ph.D. degrees and requires them to return to China full-time, to “Innovative Talents,” which allows scientists under 55 to be in China for as few as two months each year, for at least three consecutive years.

In 2008, late Stanford physics professor Shoucheng Zhang — whose death last December prompted speculation about his connections to the Chinese government — was recruited into the Thousand Talents Plan, conducting research at Tsinghua University. Unlike KL, who is now a full-time professor at a Chinese university, Zhang did not assume a full-time role at Tsinghua through the TTP.

Stanford professors are required to disclose outside professional affiliations and the sources of their research funding to the University. They are also forbidden from taking on significant managerial responsibilities with non-Stanford entities.

Physics professor Steven Kivelson, who was also a close friend of Zhang’s, is confident that Zhang adhered to these disclosure requirements.

“I have no doubt that all Shoucheng’s dealings were in the open and were consistent with Stanford’s policies and obligations,” Kivelson said. “We file conflict of interest reports with Stanford regularly, and I am sure Shoucheng did as well.”

Beyond the TTP, academics with connections to the Chinese military have drawn particular scrutiny.

Chaofan Zhang, who conducted physics research at Stanford for three years beginning in 2014, was an undergraduate at the People’s Liberation Army’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Changsha, China. After completing his post-doctoral research, Zhang returned to NUDT, working at its Center for Interdisciplinary Quantum Information Science and telling Chinese-language media that he wanted to “devote all his energy to the military.”

“The issue I’m thinking about right now is how to apply basic research results in the military arena,” he said. The Daily was unable to get in touch with Zhang.

Zhang was cited in Congressional testimony in July 2018 as an example of PLA efforts to send doctoral students overseas to acquire important scientific information for military research. Some of these PLA affiliates have been found to hide their military connections while traveling outside China, but Zhang did not conceal his NUDT affiliation while participating in university research.

“We understand that Dr. Zhang conducted basic research on the physics of thin films that was unrelated to any military applications — and under the University’s openness in research policies, his work here would be and has been published,” University spokesperson EJ Miranda wrote in an email to The Daily.

Striking a balance

Political science professor Larry Diamond, co-chair of the Hoover Institution report on Chinese government influence in American society, believes U.S. institutions need to be wary of programs like the TTP. But he also cautioned against painting Chinese students, as well as those in the Thousand Talents Program, with a broad brush.

Diamond said he doesn’t want to suggest “that participation in the Thousand Talents program is some intrinsic validation [of] collaboration with the Chinese party state.” He insisted that most forms of knowledge transfer — including those facilitated by the TTP — are a benefit for both the scientific community and society.

“I think [TTP participation] should be a matter of public record,” he said. “Beyond that, [professors] might do a lot of good things for China in bringing back medical and scientific knowledge, improving human welfare and raising standards of living.”

But he thinks professors should explicitly disclose affiliations like the TTP to universities. The Hoover report suggests TTP participants should be required to register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The responsibility for evaluating scientists and the likelihood of them passing on technology to a group the U.S. deems its adversary, Diamond says, should ultimately be the job of the federal government, not that of university officials or professors.

Others agree that such transparency is crucial step toward protecting academic research from foreign misappropriation. Speaking at a February panel about the Hoover report, physics professor Steven Chu — who served as U.S. Secretary of Energy in the Obama administration — said he thinks it is “sensible and rational” to require academics to declare financial ties to Chinese organizations.

Researchers report their sources of financial support not only to the University but also in publications and to federal funders, Dean of Research Moler said.

Most policymakers and scholars concerned about the Chinese government acknowledge that the vast majority of Chinese students and academics come to the U.S. simply to learn, collaborate and conduct research. For these people, the Thousand Talents Plan provides valuable funding for careers in academics and business.

But others have begun to discuss the program without nuance, treating any participant as a security risk. In April 2018, commissioner of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission Michael Wessel advised Congress to cut federal loans and grants to all participants of the program.  

That’s worrying to people like KL, who has heard from other Thousand Talents participants that the program has caused problems in obtaining U.S. visas and getting through customs. He said that though most of his classmates stayed in the U.S. after graduating, this trend is changing — in large part, he thinks, due to increased U.S. government hostility toward the Chinese.

Lost talent?

Many at Stanford echoed KL’s concerns about a shifting government attitude, arguing that attempts to safeguard U.S. universities’ innovation from the Chinese government will only undermine it by turning away talented people. Former Secretary of Energy Chu noted the heavy “opportunity cost” of curbing Chinese students and postdocs at February’s panel discussion.

“There’s a large fraction of people from Taiwan, China [and] now India who are part of the technology base of the United States who have actually developed all those secrets we’re trying to keep from China,” Chu said.

Visa restrictions on Chinese students have tightened. In June 2018, citing national security concerns, the State Department started issuing one-year visas only to Chinese graduate students in sensitive, high-tech fields like aviation and robotics — a big shift from the five-year visas given out before. That November, Reuters also reported the Trump administration was considering more stringent backgrounding for Chinese students.

China, meanwhile, is working to lure its students back home after stints at U.S. colleges. For would-be entrepreneurs, for example, cities offer everything from free apartments to health benefits to low business taxes in an effort to net Chinese-born, U.S.-educated talent.

“There’s even sort of this regional competition within China,” said a Chinese student and startup founder at Stanford, who was granted anonymity due to his concern for his visa prospects. “Shanghai, they put up a really good package,” he said, explaining that the city offers particularly attractive perks for students like him who settle there.

In 2000, just one in 10 Chinese students who studied abroad returned to China. By 2017, almost half of them did, according to China’s Ministry of Education.

Among Stanford’s international students, almost 10 percent of undergraduates and more than 30 percent of graduate students are from China, according the latest available statistics from fall of 2017. Chinese students make up nearly a third of all international students in the U.S., numbering about 340,000 as of 2018.

The White House has mulled a more drastic crackdown on Chinese students that the U.S. ambassador to China helped talk down. Last year, Trump advisor Stephen Miller raised the idea of a full halt on Chinese student visas.

Already, though, the uncertainty of one-year visas is making it harder for faculty to take on certain Chinese Ph.D students and postdocs, given the need to work on long-term projects.

“I would never hire a postdoc for one year,” Chu said. Other faculty echoed this sentiment in interviews.

Chu guessed that there are probably a few agents of the People’s Liberation Army among the 300,000 Chinese students who study each year in the U.S.— “one or two or three, or maybe 10 or 15.” But Chu urges the U.S. to approach Chinese students as an asset rather than a liability, and try to keep them in America past graduation, something Diamond agreed with.

“The upper quartile or upper half of Ph.D.s and postdocs [should] have a green card stapled to their diploma,” Chu said.

An uncertain future

As the government sharpens its scrutiny, students and faculty are caught in the middle and wary of what the future holds.

A recent Stanford graduate and startup founder from China, who was granted anonymity due to her concern her statements could affect her company, told The Daily that new difficulties with visas have complicated peers’ post-grad plans. The alum stayed in the U.S. post-graduation on Optional Practical Training (OPT), which allows those on student visas to work in the U.S. for up to one year to gain experience related to their studies.

“In Obama’s era, I know for a fact [that] a lot of students graduating … can get their OPT visa in three days, three work days, and sometimes [the] longest is two weeks,” the alum said. “But in our generation, especially in our class, we got our OPT [after] three months, or even longer.”

Other students were hesitant to connect anecdotal increases in visa delays with the Trump administration’s more aggressive stance toward China, saying they’ve heard of such issues long before 2017.

A physics professor — who requested anonymity to avoid excess media inquiry — told The Daily that he’s noticed Chinese physicists have found it harder to get visas for academic visits to the U.S. over the last few years. Of the Chinese invitees who needed visas to go to a conference the professor organized this year, only half were approved. The rest were rejected outright or waited for months and missed the conference.

The professor isn’t sure why, exactly, visa hang-ups have increased.

“But for sure this has a very strong effect in making international collaboration more difficult,” he said.

Kivelson said that, before the new rules on foreign talent programs, DOE employees at SLAC were also strongly discouraged from attending last fall’s 12th International M^2-S 2018 conference on superconductors and superconductivity, held in Beijing. Certain invited speakers from SLAC were also restricted from attending, Kivelson said. A DOE spokesperson said that as usual attendance was “determined based on the program priorities and resource availability.”

These changes are concerning for scientists who believe the vast majority of international academic exchange is good for science and society. Physics professor and senior associate dean for the natural sciences Peter Michelson said that while his research has not been affected by rising U.S.-China tensions, he does worry about how the political climate could hurt collaborative work. Michelson heads an international effort that built a telescope to study gamma rays, a high-energy type of light that has helped scientists answers questions on everything from black holes to the evolution of galaxies.

Scientists around the world, including in China, have used the telescope’s data. A recent joint analysis with a group of Chinese researchers led to an important discovery: a millisecond pulsar, a rare, quick-spinning and high-density kind of star.

Likewise, foreign students, including Chinese students, have made great contributions to physics,  Michelson emphasized.

“The benefits should not be underestimated,” he said.

For students, long waits for visas have left them feeling helpless. An aeronautics and astronautics student told The Daily he spent all of winter quarter stuck at home in China, watching online lectures for his Ph.D. program and coding from afar after an unexplained delay in his visa renewal. When he got his visa at the end of March, he’d been waiting three months. The student was granted anonymity due to his concern his statements could affect future visa evaluations.

Previous visas, he said, arrived in just three weeks. Before, though, as a master’s student, he wasn’t doing research. This time around, he had to submit a research plan as well as information on his advisor, who works with NASA and the Air Force.

The Ph.D. sees little direct link between his research area and national security. But judging by peers’ experiences, he said, any STEM student’s visa could get held up in what’s called  “administrative processing.”

“As long as [the visa interviewer] sees … certain terms in the application, he will think that it will be a sensitive field,” the student said.

Yiqing Ding, a Ph.D. student in the same department, believes he is the only Chinese student in his area with a five-year visa.

The anonymous Ph.D student took his long-awaited flight back to Stanford in early April. The visa came with little time to spare: If the delay continued into May, he would have lost his registration in the federal database that tracks international students. If that happened, the student would have to get new immigration documents, reapply and potentially face another months-long limbo.

“That was really scary,” he said. “I’m glad it didn’t happen.”

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu and Berber Jin at fjin16 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Faculty question moratorium on Huawei research funding as U.S.-China tensions intensify https://stanforddaily.com/2019/05/28/faculty-question-moratorium-on-huawei-research-funding-as-u-s-china-tensions-intensify/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/05/28/faculty-question-moratorium-on-huawei-research-funding-as-u-s-china-tensions-intensify/#respond Tue, 28 May 2019 07:06:23 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1155521 Stanford placed a moratorium on new research support from Huawei in December 2018 amid rising U.S. pressure on the telecoms company because of its potential threat to national security. The Faculty Senate was not asked to discuss or vote on the moratorium before the policy was quietly implemented.

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This article is the first in a three-part series examining how rising U.S.-China tensions are affecting the Stanford community. Read the second installment here and the third here.

In 2007, Stanford considered whether it should ban research funding from tobacco companies. Proponents of the ban argued the tobacco industry manipulated the research they sponsored to push a habit that killed millions.

Debate over the proposed ban consumed the Faculty Senate, with each speaker allowed just one minute to sum up an opinion in the lead up to the vote. Passionate arguments on both sides highlighted an intense conflict over how moral judgments should influence academic research. In the end, the Faculty Senate voted 21 to 10 against a ban.

“There are a few things we protect above all else at this University and those include academic freedom and freedom of expression,” then-Stanford president John Hennessy said afterward. “The minute you infringe upon those, you can run into trouble.”

In December 2018, Stanford placed a moratorium on new research support from the Chinese telecoms company Huawei, amid rising U.S. pressure on a firm the government sees as part of a broader national security threat from China. This time, however, no discussion or vote in the Faculty Senate preceded Stanford’s decision. The policy was implemented so quietly that some faculty only learned about it after asking why their funds were frozen.

A formal announcement to all affected faculty did not come until Feb. 1.

“We made the decision out of an abundance of caution,” Dean of Research Kathryn Moler wrote in the email to those with funding at stake. “We are aware of nothing inappropriate arising from past support that Huawei has provided to Stanford.”

Administrators’ communication has left faculty confused about the University’s decision-making and questioning the policy’s wisdom, even as peer schools from the University of California, Berkeley to Princeton enact similar restrictions — and as the Trump administration urges organizations in the U.S. and allies abroad to cut ties. At the time of the ban, Huawei supported millions of dollars worth of research at Stanford and was poised to support millions more. Much of the current funding goes to graduate students through various industrial affiliates programs that will have to kick Huawei out if the moratorium continues.

In January the U.S. government indicted Huawei — the world’s top manufacturer of telecommunications equipment and second-biggest producer of smartphones — with bank fraud, theft of trade secrets and violation of U.S. sanctions against Iran. The concern with the company, however, is much more expansive: federal officials consider Huawei a potential conduit to the Chinese state, because the company produces equipment that could dominate in the race for next-generation wireless technology and also facilitate spying by Beijing.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration forbade Huawei from using American technology without the government’s consent, a serious blow for a company whose products rely on partners like Google and Qualcomm. The administration also barred domestic telecommunications firms from installing foreign-made equipment “posing an unacceptable risk.”

Publicly, there’s been little sign at Stanford of backlash against the moratorium. But behind the scenes, faculty have been organizing objections. They have even created a “moratorium” mailing list to keep people up to date.

Professors pushing back on the new policy argue that worries around issues like intellectual property theft are moot, as gifts affected by the policy support broadly published, non-classified research. Regardless of the threat the government sees, these faculty also view the moratorium as a test case for Stanford’s commitment to academic freedom.

“It is true that there is one odd policy about one company at this moment, but in this context, it’s hard to read it that way,” said psychology professor Brian Wandell, who lost funding due to the moratorium and also sat on the Faculty Senate’s research committee during the debate over tobacco money. “It’s much easier to see it as, we’re part of a thing that’s going on that could be transformational.”

Administrators, meanwhile, remain tight-lipped about the reasoning behind instituting the moratorium, saying only that the decision was based on public information. They emphasize the University’s desire to balance bipartisan concerns about “undue foreign interference” with support for international collaboration.

“No one has pressured the university,” Dean of Research Kathryn Moler wrote in an email to The Daily. “We are committed to the advancement of knowledge and the international exchange of people and ideas, and we also are attentive to concerns about potential risks associated with particular engagements.”

Like most U.S. universities, Stanford gets the majority of its research funding from the federal government — far more than what Huawei or any other Chinese entity offers.  Jeopardizing Stanford’s relationship with an administration increasingly worried about technology transfer to China could thus have far-reaching implications, revealing the tenuous balance the University must strike between upholding international engagement and remaining sensitive to national security concerns.

‘An abundance of caution’

Just before Stanford put the moratorium in place, Huawei was considering quadrupling its gift to a University research group called the Platform Lab, upping it to $2 million a year.

The lab, whose website lists nearly a dozen faculty and more than 40 Ph.D. students, is developing three platforms to enable what the lab calls “Big Control.” The lab imagines a world where Big Control allows us to oversee the morning commute of a million self driving cars or coordinate 10,000 drones delivering packages.

The project’s ominous-sounding name evokes many China critics’ worst fears about academia aiding an authoritarian government, especially given China’s reputation for repressing its citizens through omnipresent technology. A November update to the U.S. Trade Representative’s 301 report, prepared annually to identify trade barriers to U.S. companies, accused the Chinese government of investing in high-technology U.S. startups through state-backed venture capital (VC) firms, with the goal of acquiring emerging technologies in robotics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and other fields.

But computer science professor John Ousterhout, who directs the Platform Lab, believes that Huawei’s contributions to his research do not pose a national security threat, and that it’s the government’s job — not Stanford’s — to prosecute companies that break the law.

“So what if they have been conspiring with the Chinese government?” he said of Huawei. “What does that have to do with our research program?”

Huawei’s January indictment claims the company has showed blatant disregard for intellectual property protections, giving bonuses to employees who steal competitors’ secrets and even taking part of a T-Mobile robot to learn how it worked.

Huawei has denied wrongdoing. Shortly after the U.S. placed sweeping new penalties on the company, a Huawei spokesperson told The Daily that “it has been a very challenging week” but did not give further comment.

Spying concerns stem from the lack of true separation between the public and private sectors in China. Chinese laws state that Chinese individuals and organizations must cooperate with government intelligence operations upon request, though Beijing maintains that Huawei is not obliged to aid intelligence gathering in its business overseas.

“You just don’t know how modern China works if you think that any private company in China can resist the demands of the Communist Party state for whatever — to share data, to share their technology [or] to share their knowledge of how the U.S. system works,” said Larry Diamond, a political science professor at Stanford who has called for vigilance against the Chinese government’s attempts to influence U.S. institutions, including universities.

Though Huawei officials have stepped up efforts in recent months to prove their autonomy from the Chinese Communist Party, critics are unconvinced. Given that Huawei is not a publicly listed company, it is not subject to the scrutiny that would allow outsiders to evaluate company claims that, for example, it is owned entirely by its employees.

The U.S. is especially fearful of the Chinese government having access to the “5G” networking infrastructure that Huawei is building around the world. Huawei has pulled ahead of other companies in the race for technology that promises to not just boost data speeds but allow all sorts of devices to talk to each other in new ways.

“5G will be, simply put, the central nervous system of the 21st-century economy,” an April article in Foreign Policy asserts. “And if Huawei continues its rise, then Beijing, not Washington, could be best placed to dominate it.”

Moler’s Feb. 1 email to professors affected by the moratorium gave no reasons for the new rules beyond an “abundance of caution,” a phrase that other universities have used to explain new restrictions on Huawei funding. But several professors said that, privately, Moler has explained the decision in more detail. Rationales they said she cited include Huawei’s indictments, national security concerns, the fact that other schools have enacted similar restrictions and Stanford’s network security, among other considerations.

Affected faculty say they have trouble seeing why such concerns would apply to Huawei’s funding at Stanford.

Huawei’s supports the Platform Lab and other researchers at Stanford through gifts, which means the company cannot control how their money is used. The results of Ousterhout and his colleagues’ work are published for anyone to see, regardless of whether they’ve given funding. That’s standard at Stanford, which has long prized academic openness and banned classified research during the 1960s at the height of anti-war activism.

Research programs like Ousterhout’s do offer perks to their industry sponsors. They are opportunities for companies to support work that interests them while building connections with other experts and potential hires. Platform Lab “premium” sponsors receive updates on projects, chat informally with faculty and students, and can send their own researchers to Stanford as visiting scholars.

But faculty contend that concerns about companies’ access via these research arrangements can be addressed. Earlier last year, for example, the University balked at the idea of Huawei’s visiting scholar to the Platform Lab getting access to Stanford’s networks. Stanford eventually let the Huawei researcher come but had them access the network as a guest, without a SUNet ID.  

Electrical engineering professor Andrea Goldsmith, whose research group focuses on 5G, also said that Huawei employees would not gain unique information from their collaboration.

“Certainly if they’re giving me a gift and want to have a discussion about the research that’s being funded by that gift I’ll have that conversation with them,” she said, ‘but I would have the exact same conversation with anybody else that wanted to talk to me about my research, or I’d have that same conversation at a conference when I was presenting that research.”

Many of those conferences count Huawei among their funders. Goldsmith emphasized the benefits of collaboration not just for the telecoms company but for U.S. universities that draw on its expertise.

“Exchanging ideas with them in 5G, which they’re really a technical leader in many ways, is valuable to me as a researcher,” she added.

Randy Katz, vice chancellor for research at UC Berkeley — which enacted a moratorium like Stanford’s on Jan. 30 — has also called such restrictions a “disservice” to U.S. companies and researchers who can learn from Huawei. He told The Daily he held out at first against a funding ban, even as other universities cut ties.

“As a public university, I felt we needed a principle upon which to limit engagement with any source of funding, and suspicions of public officials was not a sufficient reason,” he wrote in an email.

Huawei’s Jan. 28 indictments changed his mind, Katz said.

“These suggested seriously improper business practices on the part of [Huawei], and we hold our corporate sponsors to high standards,” he wrote, though he said UC Berkeley has not placed a moratorium on other companies due to indictments.

Many of the Stanford professors affected by the moratorium remain unconvinced by such logic. How can the University justify cutting ties with just Huawei, they say, when other companies Stanford partners with have acted immorally or illegally?

“Should we take research funding from a company that has paid teenagers to allow the company to spy on their online habits so the company could create software more addictive to children?” Ousterhout said. “That would be Facebook. Should we accept money from a company that has been fined billions of dollars from the European Union for what they consider legal violations? That would be Google, possibly Apple. So the question is, where do you draw the line?”

The University’s traditional solution to this problem is to examine research and funding proposals case-by-case for violations of University policy or export control and information security risks. Administrators cited that approach earlier this year when The Daily asked whether it had reevaluated its relationships with Saudi Arabian government, another major research funder that’s drawn scrutiny at some peer schools for its repressive actions and apparent killing of a U.S. journalist.

Computer science professor Philip Levis believes each professor should decide for themselves how to weigh concerns that fall outside Stanford’s educational mission.  

“I don’t think it’s fair for the University, or any university, to,  when they hire a faculty member, say, one of your jobs is to promote the national security of the United States,” he said of the moratorium. “I’m sure there are many faculty from other countries who did not sign up for that.”

Levis thinks the Huawei issue should have gone to the Faculty Senate, as the debate over tobacco industry funding did back in 2007. His conversations with Moler have “definitely given me some good things to think about,” he said, but he still has questions.

“I don’t know all the facts, right,” Levis said. “It could very well be that this is the right decision. To me the troubling thing is that I don’t really know.”

Rising government pressure?

Some at Stanford wonder if government pressure is behind the moratorium.

Wandell and Ousterhout, who met with administrators in January about the policy, both recalled Provost Persis Drell discussing conversations with members of the government that implied federal agencies might cut research funding for Stanford if it did not pull away from Huawei. The meeting also included Moler and Director of Export Compliance Steve Eisner, among others.

Wandell in particular remembers Drell saying that someone at the Department of Energy (DOE) told her the agency would look negatively on universities that took funding from Huawei and was concerned researchers applying for DOE funding might fail to disclose their ties to the company. Given the DOE’s clout as a funding agency — it bankrolls most of SLAC National Linear Accelerator Laboratory and gave Stanford an additional $26 million in 2017 — Wandell guesses the thought of the agency’s disapproval could be persuasive.

During the same meeting, Eisner said it’s important for Stanford to be “a good partner” to the government, according to Ousterhout, who kept notes of the conversation. Eisner, though, said that the quote “does not sound like” him.

“What I tried to convey in the meeting was neither about pressure from the government nor partnering with the government, but rather that when there are concerns about potential risks in the research enterprise, we need to consider those issues seriously,” Eisner wrote in an email to The Daily.

The DOE did not respond to a request for comment. Beyond Moler’s statement that no one has pressured Stanford, Moler and Drell did not address Wandell and Ousterhout’s recollections.

Though administrators deny government pressure, U.S. officials have stepped up their efforts to communicate the threats they see in Huawei to schools.

In July 2018, the F.B.I. and other intelligence agencies briefed Department of Education employees on Huawei. Two months later, the FBI held a “major summit” with university presidents in Washington that covered the issue, according to Tobin Smith, the Vice President of the Association of American Universities, which represents 62 research institutions including Stanford.

“They’re very careful not to say you should or shouldn’t deal with this company,” Smith told Bloomberg News. “But they help you assess the risk.”

But the government has also leveraged federal research funding to push universities away from Huawei. Many schools ditched IT equipment from Huawei following government concerns over Chinese spying — and a ban on federal funding for universities that use technology from a host of Chinese companies, part of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The NDAA also calls for universities to work more closely with Department of Defense officials to create new regulations protecting academics from foreign exploitation, potentially limiting universities’ research partnerships and other agreements with Chinese groups.

In fact, a Department of Defense (DoD) official visited Stanford in March for a discussion focused on the government’s concerns about foreign influence in research. The meeting, which Moler said she organized after the official told her it would be helpful to chat with a few faculty, stated in its invitation that “the academic-government relationship is critical to ensuring that the United States remains a Great Power.”

After the meeting, at attendee Goldsmith’s request, the DoD passed on declassified government white papers explaining China’s threat to the domestic and world economy. The papers outline everything from hacking-aided theft of trade secrets to “predatory” lending to developing countries. One of the documents, which focuses on university science and technology, states that academics become unintended enablers of a regime that uses tech and data — sometimes with U.S. origins — to track and persecute its critics.

The DoD official’s talk did not focus on Huawei and “wasn’t super enlightening” about the reasons the government would see the company’s gift funding as a threat, Goldsmith said. But she said appreciated the chance to convey concerns about openness in research.

Ousterhout, who said none of the faculty who have been most vocal about the University’s Huawei policy were invited, pointed to the meeting as an example of how moratorium critics have been shut out of University discussions. Moler pushed back on that idea.

“There wasn’t any selection process and there wasn’t any intent to exclude anyone,” she said.

Meanwhile, federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health have increasingly expressed concerns that scientists may not be disclosing all their foreign ties when applying for research grants. These agencies are wary of funding research for scholars who they believe may share work with foreign groups and governments.

Levis said Moler told him in a meeting that worries about the University’s ability to track gifts fed into the moratorium decision. Gifts are monitored less carefully than sponsored research agreements, as they do not involve a contract, Levis said. He said he’s received emails to the computer science faculty list noting that a gift check has arrived and haphazardly asking for someone to claim it. Moler, however, told The Daily that the University tracks all gifts.

Levis understands why the University would be anxious to keep tabs on money from groups flagged by the government, like Huawei.

“The concern is that faculty — we’re tired, we’re overextended, we make mistakes, nobody’s perfect,” Levis said, adding that researchers may not be aware of all the groups that back programs they belong to at Stanford. “[Say] Huawei gave some money to [an institute], somebody didn’t realize, they don’t put it on the form, and the government gets really upset.”

While many faculty suspect Stanford’s moratorium is rooted in government concerns, they remain frustrated with the administration’s lack of transparency.

“To understand the decision, understand the reason it was made…that’s something that many universities are grappling with right now,” said Joyce Farrell, who leads the Stanford Center for Image System Engineering (SCIEN). “Is this coming from pressure from the Trump administration? The Defense Department? Is this a trade policy issue? When it’s basically based on what seems to be the press or rumors, it’s very difficult not to be cynical and suspicious.”

“The idea that, out of an abundance of caution, we shouldn’t engage with the people who are the best in the world — because of reasons I don’t know, because they’re being kept secret — is just weird from my point of view and a slippery slope,” Wandell said.

Faculty await committee input

On Feb. 10, Moler and other top administrators received a letter signed by about 20 affected professors. The letter urged Stanford to evaluate funding on a case-by-case basis and have a committee with a range of expertises develop general policies that can be applied to cases like Huawei. Wandell and Ousterhout also presented concerns at a March meeting of the Faculty Senate’s committee on research.

Provost Drell announced at the Faculty Senate’s May 9 meeting that two new committees will review the University’s policies around federal concerns of foreign influence on research universities. One committee will report to the Dean of Research about a broad review of Stanford’s policies on issues like researcher disclosures and international funding and visitors. Meanwhile, a subcommittee of the Faculty Senate will consider “how to balance Stanford’s values and non-discrimination in research agreements with concerns about foreign influence,” as Drell put it.

Both groups’ discussions will cover countries like China and Saudi Arabia, Moler wrote to The Daily. But their work will be “broader in nature, addressing our policies related to all foreign research engagements,” she said.

Professors upset by the moratorium see the committees as a step forward and have urged administrators to fast-track a final decision. But they’re still troubled that University leaders would take such an unusual policy step without first opening the issue to faculty discussion.

Moler only told the Faculty Senate’s committee on research about the decision after it had been made, with approval from the President and Provost. According to Moler, there was a “brief discussion” of Huawei at the committee’s Jan. 24 meeting as Stanford considered whether to continue the funding pause. Administrators also met and communicated with a number of faculty shortly after.

Moler told The Daily that the University consulted with the School of Engineering and notified “lead faculty” for gifts put on hold in December, when the moratorium was put in place. But emails reviewed by The Daily show that some leaders of affected affiliate programs and faculty whose funds were frozen were just learning about the policy in late January.

Moler also said that she asked the School of Engineering to reach out to each affected faculty member and summarize issues the moratorium created for them. But multiple professors told The Daily they have not been contacted.

While faculty wait for the new committees to weigh in, the moratorium has blocked significant funding meant to support graduate students and postdocs. Professors The Daily talked to said they will continue supporting their current students, but many are still figuring out how they will make up the difference. They estimated the cost of supporting a graduate student at $75,000 to $100,000 a year.

“Faculty often move their group members from one source of funding to another in response to changing levels of external support,” Moler wrote to The Daily. “Although the loss of funding is a disappointment, I’m not aware of any students who do not have funding as a result of the Huawei decision.”

For some students, the loss of funding meant scrambling to find summer internships in lieu of research projects. Others will take on additional teaching duties. Professors said they may dip into unrestricted research money they’ve saved up.

Administrators have told faculty that, if needed, they can approach their departments or deans for money to close gaps. But professors are skeptical this will work, especially as a poor endowment payout squeezes budgets.

“With this low payout and all the budgets being busted and stuff, basically I’m on my own here,” Wandell said.

Wandell chose not to take on several graduate students as a result of the moratorium. Other faculty who relied on Huawei money are also holding back on new hires.

About half of Goldsmith’s research group was funded by Huawei when the moratorium went into effect. She’s not sure where replacement money will come from: The main funders Goldsmith has encountered for her 5G research are Huawei and the federal government, and she hasn’t seen the latter offering more funding to compensate for universities’ breaks with Huawei.

Gift money like Huawei’s is precious, she said, because it’s unrestricted — in contrast to government grants, it doesn’t come with conditions on its use. It’s also subject to lower “overhead” fees from the University than federal grants, meaning more money goes to the researcher.

Beyond funding difficulties, some professors worry that the moratorium has exacerbated feelings among Chinese students that the University is not combating increasing government hostility toward China and the Chinese community —  despite Stanford leaders’ statements that national security concerns must not feed discrimination by heritage or country of origin.

“I think it’s very difficult to explain this [decision] to Chinese students in a way that doesn’t make it seem as if they’re being discriminated because they’re Chinese,” said Farrell. “It’s really extrapolated from much farther beyond just Huawei.”

Farrell recounted an incident in which one student did not want to contact Huawei engineers inquiring about an open-source software he was developing. His work was not supported by the company. The student did not even want to respond to a request from a Huawei employee due to fear that his email messages were being monitored and could affect his visa status.

“I don’t think he was wrong to be worried,” Farrell said.

“They’re worried about what projects they work on,” she said. “They’re worried about their visa applications… We don’t have an explanation to the graduate students to say, this is why Stanford made this decision.”

Contact Berber Jin at fjin16 ‘at’ stanford.edu and Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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You can never level the playing field https://stanforddaily.com/2019/05/17/you-can-never-level-the-playing-field/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/05/17/you-can-never-level-the-playing-field/#respond Sat, 18 May 2019 02:00:01 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1155097 The student identified as “Sarah” has been given a first-name pseudonym. For more context on this decision, see the editor’s note at the end of this article. “No laptops.” For most students, it’s an easy ask — a common refrain among professors sick of pupils checking Facebook during discussion. For Bryce Tuttle ’20, it’s a […]

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The student identified as “Sarah” has been given a first-name pseudonym. For more context on this decision, see the editor’s note at the end of this article.

“No laptops.”

For most students, it’s an easy ask — a common refrain among professors sick of pupils checking Facebook during discussion.

For Bryce Tuttle ’20, it’s a problem.

Tuttle’s dyslexia means he writes slowly and nearly illegibly. Typing helps him keep up. Last winter, as usual, he emailed an instructor his letter from Stanford’s Office of Accessible Education (OAE) outlining the disability accommodations the office had recommended for him, which included laptop use in class.

A few days later, Tuttle said, he received a phone call from his OAE advisor, who told him the instructor had a strict no-laptop policy and did not want to honor Tuttle’s accommodations.

“I could have made this a crusade or I could have just dealt with it and not used my accommodation, and I chose to do the latter,” Tuttle told The Daily. “I think lots and lots of students with disabilities choose to just do the latter when confronted with this kind of thing … I can either take this burden upon myself, or I can just ditch it.”

Stories like Tuttle’s have gotten more public attention since December, when another student, Sarah, opened up on her blog about her frustrations with Stanford’s disability accommodations. Her blog post — half narrative, half how-to guide for other students with disabilities — circulated on social media, among administrators and, in February, the entire student body, thanks to an email blast from student government leaders. Her highly personal post detailed, in part, the challenges she said she’s come up against at Stanford as a cancer survivor seeking academic aids like excused absences and extensions.

“I want all students to know that your professors do not know what they are talking about!” she wrote. “They do not know your rights. They will often tell you that an accommodation is not possible or reasonable when you have an absolute right to it.”

You can never level the playing field

As student leaders make disability advocacy a top priority and push for a disability community center, some with disabilities say they struggle to get all their needs met in the classroom — and worry that others less willing to advocate for themselves lack aid to which they’re entitled. Stanford’s OAE may provide guidance, but in the end, it is the faculty’s responsibility to weigh accommodations requests with course requirements and decide what’s reasonable. Navigating this gray area of “reasonability” in accommodations decisions can be challenging for students and faculty alike.

Tuttle described a difficult power dynamic when students request their prescribed OAE accommodations from unwilling professors. He compared it to a concept from political science, the “second face of power.”

It’s “a power dynamic that’s enforced to a degree where you don’t see any visible conflict,” he explained, “because it’s so clear who’s going to win that no one ever fights against it.”

“I think that’s a lot of the accommodations process,” he added. “Students with disabilities see these kinds of policies they see these professors who seem immovable. So they just don’t even try.”

Recommendations, not requirements

Tuttle came to Stanford in part because of the strength that he saw in the OAE accommodations process. He needed to know he was going to a college that would be accessible to him.

“I toured other colleges, and when I said, ‘I have learning disability, how are you going to help me with that?’ the admissions officers were like, ‘Oh, you know, I’m sure we [can] figure that out somehow,’” Tuttle recounted. “Stanford had a very clear answer. I met with people from the OAE, and I knew that there was a robust infrastructure. I knew I’d be able to get my readings done.”

Seventeen percent of the student body was registered with OAE for academic or housing accommodations at the end of the 2017-18 school year, though not everyone chooses to use their accommodations. That’s more than double the percentage of students registered in 2009-10.

Tuttle said OAE has been quite helpful, especially in setting him up with technology to turn long PDF documents into speech. But he’s found that the office cannot override professors who balk at accommodations they find disruptive.

All OAE letters reviewed by The Daily contained the sentence, “Based upon review of [the student’s] functional limitations, I am recommending the following academic accommodations.” The letters’ language of requests, rather than directives, underscores OAE’s role as a mediator between students and professors rather than an advocate for students alone.

Letters emphasize that “academic modifications should in no way compromise the essential elements” of a professor’s course. This is in line with the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a landmark civil rights law that says schools must provide accommodations for students with disabilities, unless the accommodations would cause an “undue burden” or change the fundamental nature of a program.

Though faculty at Stanford are “strongly encouraged” to reconsider attendance rules for students who may have to miss class due to disability, OAE affirms that professors “are under no obligation” to revise their attendance policies for these students.

Even the grievance process intended to resolve disputes over a student’s accommodations does not give faculty mandates. Instead, the process involves conversations with faculty to find a solution, explained Rosa Gonzalez, who oversees the grievance system in Stanford’s Diversity and Access office.

When a student’s dispute proceeds to a formal grievance process — which Gonzalez estimated happens in only five or so cases each year — Gonzalez gathers facts about the situation and writes a report. Disability law is vague about what constitutes a reasonable accommodation, she said, but she can draw on 30 years of case law for precedents.

In ambiguous situations where, say, a student wants to make up a problem set, Gonzalez typically talks with the professor about their options; she said she’s never encountered a situation where stronger intervention seemed necessary. Could the professor use another faculty member’s p-set? Could they have the student attest under Stanford’s Honor Code that they have not used others’ answers?

“I could see their being uncomfortable with doing that for more than one time,” she said. “But I would hope that that faculty member might sort of want to think out of the box to think, ‘How else can I assess what I’m trying to teach here.’”

Not worth it

OAE says it hears often from faculty who feel that a student’s OAE requests infringe too much on their class — faculty like Tuttle’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) instructor, who didn’t want to make an exception to his no-laptop policy.

Tuttle said that after multiple conversations with his OAE advisor, who acted as an intermediary between Tuttle and the teacher, he decided to drop the issue. The advisor offered to tell the instructor that Tuttle needed the accommodations. But Tuttle, who had already been trying to convey how important the laptop was, realized he didn’t want to force the instructor’s hand.

“It’s a small seminar course where he would be grading everything I was doing personally, and I didn’t want to deal with that dynamic for the rest of the quarter,” Tuttle said.

Feeling uncomfortable with the situation, Tuttle asked OAE if it could help him switch PWR classes. According to Tuttle, OAE said he should take up his request directly with the PWR department. The first week of the quarter was over, and Tuttle was concerned that by the time he switched classes he would be too far behind in his new class to catch up. He decided that fighting for his accommodation just wasn’t worth it.

“I have the liberty [and the] the luck to be like, ‘Okay well I can not take my accommodation and I’ll still probably pass,’” Tuttle said. “Other people don’t have that option.”

OAE said it is unable to speak to specific students’ situations. However, the office’s online guidance for faculty states that it’s “reasonable” to make an exception to laptop policies for a student with an accommodation.

OAE told The Daily it does not know how many students decide not to use their accommodations or set them aside after encountering resistance. Asked how frequently students drop requests due to worries about how an instructor will perceive them, OAE added in a statement that from its “experience with thousands of students, it is not an issue that students mention often.”

OAE said it typically refers students to academic advising or Undergraduate Advising and Research (UAR) when they need to switch class sections. It will communicate directly with a department when a need is “program or course-specific, and directly related to an access issue.”

“We make every effort to be responsive, act quickly, and resolve issues as they arise,” OAE wrote.

PWR Faculty Director Adam Banks, like OAE, said he could not comment on students’ situations for privacy reasons. But the program’s policy, he wrote in an email to The Daily, is that “accommodations recommended by the OAE should be provided when students share an accommodation letter with their instructor.” PWR encourages instructors to come to program leaders with questions on how to provide these aids, Banks added.

Tuttle recalled thinking that he, of all people, should be able to advocate for himself. He’s played a leading role in the push for a disability community center at Stanford. This school year, he’s serving in student government as director of disability advocacy.

Tuttle emailed his PWR instructor looking to talk his concerns over, and they turned to the issue one morning after a meeting to discuss Tuttle’s research topic. Tuttle recalled the instructor saying he could have used his laptop in class if he really wanted to, though the teacher preferred no computers. Tuttle, on the other hand, said it would be difficult to go against the teacher’s wishes given the inherent power imbalance in their relationship.

“When a professor asks the student not to use their accommodation, they’re not going to use it because they’re going to feel uncomfortable for the rest of the quarter,” Tuttle remembers saying.

“He just kind of refused to understand why what he did made me really uncomfortable,” he added.

Behind the blog post

Sarah, the student whose blog post sparked conversations around campus, echoed Tuttle’s worries that a professor’s resistance to an accommodation — even if they’re ultimately willing to budge — can effectively prevent a student from getting what they need. Sarah is the daughter of a college professor; she suspects she knows better than most how to navigate University processes and stick up for herself.

When decisions about disability accommodations are applied unevenly, she said, at the will of professors, that adds “additional layers of discrimination” — “some students come from backgrounds that have better prepared them to advocate for themselves.”

“Even if you get the accommodations, the fact that you have to fight so so hard for them is humiliating and degrading even in itself,” Sarah emphasized.

When Sarah ended up in the hospital in May 2017, she missed one of her organic chemistry labs. She’d come back to Stanford that winter after spending a year and a half fighting off and recovering from leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. She landed in the emergency room for a few days about once a month. Because she was suppressing an immune system that had turned against her, even a fever could turn into a major threat, and she had to go in preemptively each time an illness flared.

Sarah, whose OAE letter recommends she get extensions and not be penalized for absences, sought to excuse the missed lab. But chemistry lecturer Megan Brennan declined, saying Sarah would have to take a zero since she hadn’t requested the accommodation in advance. The lecturer had already waived two of Sarah’s problem sets in lieu of giving her extensions — the chemistry department had and continues to have a policy of removing excused assignments from a student’s grade calculations, rather than taking late submissions.

“Since you have already been excused for missed work, even though for legitimate reasons, I am starting to become uncomfortable with being able to say that you actually completed enough of the course if there is much more absences etc.,” Brennan wrote in an email to Sarah, which Sarah shared with The Daily. “I strongly urge you to talk with your UAR advisor, since even if I excuse the work, I am not entirely sure I am doing you a favor in the long run.”

In some ways, Sarah’s experience in organic chemistry shows how OAE can be an effective mediator between students and faculty, stepping in when they disagree. Emails Sarah provided show that the lab was excused more quickly and with more help from OAE than her blog post conveys: Brennan agreed to waive the lab four days later, after an OAE advisor intervened on Sarah’s behalf.

“Based on [Sarah’s] disability, I support her being able to make up lab work as possible,” wrote Sarah’s OAE advisor, Carleigh Kude, in an email to Brennan. “I am wondering if we can discuss the policy against lab makeups and determine if making an exception in [Sarah’s] case qualifies as a reasonable accommodation.”

In a follow-up email to Sarah later that day, Kude relayed that Brennan would not, in fact, penalize Sarah for the missed lab, though resource constraints meant she would not be able to make it up.

However, the waived lab did not alleviate Sarah discomfort with having to argue for an accommodation, nor did it address the more systemic problems she saw with OAE and faculty attitudes toward disability.

She had further questions about how her grade had been calculated, and she felt that Brennan’s tone hardened after she got the OAE involved in the lab dispute.

I gave you 100% of the participation points (quizzes, labs, problem sets, etc) because of the advantage others had of being able to put iclicker [points] into their bucket of points,” Brennan wrote back when Sarah questioned aspects of her overall grade, which would be raised several months later. “If you’d like — I can go back and recalculate using a more accurate accounting of those points — but your grade won’t be higher than a B-.”

Brennan said Sarah’s grade was difficult to calculate due to the challenges of meshing winter and spring quarter grading schemes, as Sarah took the course over two quarters.

That fall, months after Sarah had completed the class and after meeting with Brennan to discuss her concerns about her grade, Brennan reweighed Sarah’s grade based on the winter quarter grading scale. In an email to Sarah, she said that Sarah’s grade placed her at the B/B- border, and Brennan ended up giving her a B in the class.

If OAE was more proactive about setting standards with departments and professors, Sarah said, the stressful situation could have been avoided. She emphasized these issues when asked why she left OAE’s intervention and Brennan’s reversal on the lab score out of her blog post.

“There’s a difference when you walk into a room and someone says, you know, I’m here to support you … and if you have an absence let’s work it out and come to office hours,” Sarah said. “We’re not asking for people to make leaps and bounds, we’re just asking them to follow the law.”

Other students’ responses to Sarah’s blog post have indicated to her that she is not alone in receiving pushback on accommodation requests, especially in the chemistry department.

“I don’t know if I’m going to continue premed, chem, or just work on other things in more supportive departments,” one student wrote to her last month (he did not respond to outreach from The Daily).

Typically it’s fine if a student misses a lab for illness, Brennan wrote in an email to The Daily, as the lab would simply be excused. Absences become harder to excuse as they accumulate, she added, because students need certain training in lab techniques to move on safely to other chemistry courses.

“These situations are usually handled on a case by case basis and we do our best to be accommodating to students given their circumstances all the while being fair to the other students in our class,” Brennan wrote.

OAE wrote in a statement that the office follows an “interactive process” when talking to faculty about whether an accommodation is reasonable. OAE staff do not disclose details of a student’s disability, but they do “identify the accommodation as appropriate for [it],” try to understand whether an accommodation will undermine the class at a fundamental level, and mull over alternative ways to accommodate a student, OAE said. Sometimes, staff will talk with other administrators and department chairs.

“Rarely do we discuss legal precedent, unless it is a very commonly upheld accommodation, because every student and every class context, is unique and must be examined on a case-by-case basis,” OAE wrote.

Sarah’s conversations with chemistry department didn’t end after her lab was excused. She also wanted to push for a broader change in how the department handled OAE needs, advocating for increased accommodations for makeup work so that medical emergencies like hers wouldn’t jeopardize a student’s ability to complete the class. She didn’t want to get in more disputes, and many students, she thought, would have taken a professor’s “no” to excusing an assignment or giving a makeup opportunity as the final word.

Her desire to resolve both her grading questions and her overarching issues with the department led her to speak in October 2017 with chemistry professor Dan Stack, who oversees lectures for chemistry “service courses,” the large introductory classes meant for students across majors.

According to Sarah, Stack emphasized the difficulty of providing certain academic accommodations, saying at one point that the chemistry department was already stretched thin accommodating student-athletes’ schedules. At the end, Sarah said, she asked Stack what he would have her do as a student taking chemistry, given her disability.

“I guess you have to take it elsewhere,” she says he told her.

“My jaw dropped,” Sarah recounts in her blog post. “Since that day, I have heard those words thousands of times in my mind.” She argues the chemistry department’s approach to accommodations violates the ADA.

Stack told The Daily he does not recall the details of the conversation from a year and half ago and, regardless, did not want to speak to particulars of Sarah’s case. But he reiterated his view that some accommodations are too challenging to provide.

“I think she was asking for something that we just couldn’t deliver,” he said.

Asked about Sarah’s takeaway from their talk — that students with certain needs should not take chemistry at Stanford — Stack said he does not think he would have said that. The department accommodates “to the best of our ability given the resources that we have,” he added. He said he may have been explaining his personal philosophy on balancing academics with other priorities, one he’s given many students through 25 years of advising, but that he says has no bearing on chemistry’s approach to OAE requests.

“Life events can really knock you off your game, and I think that trying to pursue chemistry, trying to pursue research, when you have a life event, is really difficult. Exceptionally difficult,” he said. “It takes a long time to get over such life events, and one does not necessarily drill down very deep, you know.”

For Sarah, whose disability isn’t going away soon, Stack’s view is deeply discouraging.

She maintains that more flexibility in the chemistry department’s blanket policy of waiving assignments rather than giving extensions would have helped her reassure her instructor that she was learning enough of the course. Maybe, she said, she could have finished the course the first time she took it, rather than taking an incomplete that she finished the next quarter. She understands the work involved in creating makeup assignments, but suggested she could have done old problem sets, bound by the Honor Code from looking at others’ answers.

Accommodations help “level the playing field,” she said.

“And you can never level the playing field,” she continued. “I went to school here for two years without any medical issues, and it was a million times easier.”

You can never level the playing field

Faculty perspectives

History professor James Campbell said he hasn’t run into difficulties accommodating students,  something he attributes in part to his teaching philosophy. He sees assignments mostly as chances for students to learn, rather than chances for them to be evaluated. So while he’s “not completely indifferent to concerns about fairness,” when a student asks for, say, an extension that he thinks will help them actually learn from the assignment, he’s likely to grant it — with or without an OAE letter.

He views the Americans with Disabilities Act as “one of the crowning achievements” of an important civil rights era.

“It is the law,” Campbell said. “And I revere it. And I am therefore committed to doing everything I possibly can to ensure that all the students who come through my classroom, however differently abled they might be, have an opportunity to learn, to succeed, to flourish.”

But Campbell understands why other professors would face more hurdles than he does in providing accommodations — professors of classes with hundreds of students where creating new batches of problems for makeup assessments is onerous. And departments that have grappled with more Honor Code violations might have extra reservations about, say, spreading out exam times, he added.

These were some of the issues chemistry faculty cited.

Makeup tests, labs and problem sets are “not possible given the current resources that have been allotted to these courses,” Stack said, and posting answers quickly so that students can check answers is “important in these large, fast paced courses.” While the department sometimes lets students take exams a day late, it does not give exams after answers are released, due to cheating concerns.

Spurred by conversations with students like Sarah, and with help from OAE, Stack said, the chemistry department has worked to standardize its approach to accommodations requests. With safety concerns in mind, the department has new policies on how many labs a student can miss (attend fewer than six labs in CHEM 33, and you can’t pass the course). And since last school year, all disability requests for special exam conditions like extended time or distraction-free environments go to a central coordinator, a graduate student paid by OAE who handles what Stack says is a growing number of requests each year.

A decade ago, he recalls, a large chemistry lecture of 300 people might have one or two students with OAE letters. Now, 15 is standard. Stack said the department has struggled to handle this jump and the corresponding work.

“I truly love teaching, you know, intro organic [chemistry] … I think it’s just a beautiful subject,” he said.

But, Stack continued, “If the courses become just an administrative nightmare, I don’t want to be there.”

You can never level the playing field

A good chunk of that administrative work now goes to sixth-year Ph.D. student Ariel Jacobs, the department’s OAE exam coordinator. Finding space for students who need private exam rooms is tough, he said, though he believes the department has developed a good system — pressed for rooms, he worked with OAE recently to host some tests outside chemistry’s home in the Sapp Center. Even trickier is timing for students who need double time on a final. Because students can’t take exams early, someone with a disability could end up working on their test until 1 a.m. — then head to another exam at 8 a.m.

These students aren’t happy, Jacobs said.

“It’s a jigsaw puzzle,” he added. “It’s crazy.”

Some students said they understand when teachers deem accommodations too burdensome to implement. An undergraduate whose OAE accommodations also account for class absences withdrew from a math course in fall 2018 after she missed a quiz — the weight of which would just be added to the weight of her final — and grew overwhelmed at the prospect of taking an exam without smaller learning milestones. The student asked her professor if she could take an incomplete; the professor said no.

But after dropping the course, the student — who said her teachers have been largely accommodating — was sympathetic to the professor’s policy against makeup tests.

“I do understand that the quarter system is really fast,” she said. “I imagine … the professor has to have a policy that they just won’t make up quizzes, because it just becomes too complicated. There’s a lot going on.”

Most professors The Daily spoke with, however, reported few problems providing disability accommodations. Some said they comply unequivocally with what the OAE recommends.

“From my standpoint the whole situation is very straightforward. If a student presents an OAE letter then I honor the accommodations provided in the letter,” wrote economics lecturer Scott McKeon in an email to The Daily. “Period.”

The economics classes he’s aware of do not explicitly take attendance, so students do not request excused absences. He has only received accommodations requests related to exam times and extensions. “And, the rules laid out within the OAE letters have always been clear-cut on those issues,” he said.

Fellow economics professor Chris Makler explained that official OAE decisions go through the the department’s registrar office, which he said has “really good processes” for dealing with requests smoothly.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, things go off without a hitch,” Makler said.

Makler has a son with type 1 diabetes. Given that personal connection to disability, he even encourages some students to ask for OAE accommodations. “Get the letter so that you have extra time if you need to take the time to bring your glucose back in range,” he recalled telling diabetic students in his classes.

Similarly, English department chair Blakey Vermeule said she could not think of “a single case” in which a student came to an English professor with an accommodation request that they could not grant.

“I would always err on the side of trying to help the student to the fullest extent of my capacities,” she said. “And I think all the faculty in the English department feel the same way.”

Invisible needs

Two students with visible physical disabilities said they’ve never had an issue getting the accommodations they seek from faculty.

“The things that I need are pretty straightforward,” said Tilly Griffiths ’22, a freshman who uses a wheelchair. “People can see why I need them.”

But others with so-called “invisible” disabilities said faculty might not notice when they’re struggling, or might question their use of accommodations. Tuttle spoke of unintended singling out of students whose disabilities may not be apparent — by professors who inadvertently make a student reveal their disability to peers, or who don’t realize that giving quizzes in the middle of a class poses challenges for a student with extra time accommodations.

An undergraduate who wished to remain anonymous to maintain privacy around her disability shared an email exchange with a faculty member from last spring in which she explained debilitating nerve pain from a knee surgery. The teacher agreed to set the student’s final presentation so that there would be room to reschedule if she was in too much pain.

When the student followed up to say she did “not feel prepared to present,” the instructor probed the student’s motives. The student was taken aback.

“If this were just a case in which you didn’t feel prepared, or in which you could have done the work to prepare but had freely chosen not to do it, you would still need to present tomorrow with everyone else,” the instructor wrote.

“I am very glad to support any accommodations that you need in order for this class to be accessible and inclusive for you,” she continued, “but not feeling prepared or choosing not to prepare are in a different category from OAE accommodations.”

The student’s knee pain came on top of another, more persistent autoimmune condition that she says sometimes makes her unable to focus and can leave her so tired she can barely lift a fork to eat. The symptoms are serious enough that she’s had to take a reduced course load for most of her time at Stanford. They make it difficult to predict how long she’ll need to complete an assignment; what’s typically a 20-minute task can easily balloon to two hours, she said. This can be even harder to explain to teachers.

“This fatigue thing – you can’t tell your teacher, I couldn’t do it because I was tired,” the student said. “That’s what they hear when you try to explain it.”

OAE letters don’t include the details of a student’s disability. Gonzalez from the Diversity and Access Office emphasized that students should not feel obligated to reveal this information to professors — in fact, she cautions students against doing so.

“People have their own biases or then their imagination goes sort of to the next degree,” she said. “Oh they’re not going to be able to do this, they’re not going to be able to do that. And then I see it sometimes pop up in letters, like letters of recommendation – in spite of Rosa’s blindness, she did really well in my class.”  

But multiple students told The Daily that the reason for an accommodation is likely to come up in conversations with faculty, especially when a student asks for extensions on assignments.

Julia — a senior who has been granted extensions and other OAE accommodations because of her struggles with sexual violence and post-traumatic stress disorder — recalled feeling uncomfortable approaching professors about her needs.

“It does, I think, take some grit and courage to send in your letter to your professor,” said Julia, whose last name The Daily has withheld due to the personal nature of her accommodations. “They are just meeting you. I feel like the immediate thought is, ‘Oh my God, what’s wrong?’”

She said she has started off quarters hoping to get through classes without needing her accommodations, only to initiate more difficult discussions later. Per OAE policies, professors must accommodate students who send in their letters late in the quarter, though those accommodations do not apply retroactively — a student cannot get an extension on a deadline they have already missed.

Julia said she’s become a better advocate for herself.

“When it’s really come down to an extension or accommodation, that will make a huge difference to me,” she said. “I think I’m good at expressing how much I need it.”

Seeking change

Faced with students’ concerns, administrators said they’re open to feedback.

Lauren Schoenthaler, Stanford’s Senior Associate Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Access, said the University’s training for new department chairs and deans this year spent more time discussing resources for faculty to help students with accommodations.

However, some students argued that this 15-minute segment is still short and said the University should provide better training for all faculty on academic accommodations.

Faculty know to include a standard “Student with Documented Disabilities” paragraph in their syllabi, outlining how students can request help through OAE. In Tuttle’s experience, though, professors’ knowledge doesn’t extend far beyond that.

“I think what really needs to be fixed is … on the University level,” he said.

Professors mentioned periodic email reminders from the University about OAE policies, and Schoenthaler said that this April’s two-hour sexual harassment training for all faculty and supervisors — held once every two years — would “briefly cover” accommodations, OAE and the Diversity and Access Office.

OAE is also working with other departments to “consider whether there are ways to harness resources and systems to support accommodations such as making up labs, and taking tests with extended time,” Schoenthaler wrote in an email. “If students have suggestions for streamlining accommodations, we would appreciate hearing them.”

And Gonzalez said she hopes more students will discover the Diversity and Access Office’s grievance process, which some students with disabilities told The Daily they were not aware of until recently. The grievance process is outlined on OAE’s website, and OAE said it refers students to the process when they are unhappy with accommodations or when they have experienced discrimination based on their disability. Before submitting a grievance, Schoenthaler added, students can talk confidentially with the University Ombuds, or non-confidentially with her about their options.

The grievance process asks that students submit complaints fewer than 10 days after the academic quarter in which their dispute arose. But Gonzalez says she welcomes discussions of all issues and has investigated incidents more than a year past.

“I would say to anybody, come and talk to me,” she said.

Meanwhile, the ASSU has taken its own steps to raise awareness of resources like the grievance process available to those with disabilities. In the same February email to students that broadcasted Sarah’s story, ASSU executives Shanta Katipamula ’19 and Graduate School of Education Ph.D. student Rosie Nelson outlined several University processes that help students resolve academic disputes.

Other students, like Tuttle, are hoping for change in the way both students and faculty think about accommodations.

“I had a time where I didn’t feel like I was entitled to them,” Tuttle said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, we’re giving you extra …’ A lot of people, because of the way that feels to them, just don’t go for it when they need it.”

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu and Courtney Douglas at ccdouglas ‘at’ stanford.edu.

Katie Keller and Elizabeth Lindqwister contributed to this report.

This article has been updated to clarify Sarah’s concerns with OAE and the chemistry department’s handling of accommodations.

July 2021: This article has been updated to remove the name and photo of the student whose blog post was circulated among the Stanford community. This change does not reflect a retraction of our reporting; rather, it was made due to a request for anonymity from the student profiled in the article, and a determination that the continued public interest of the article no longer depended on the student being named when weighed against the impact on the student.
 
The Daily seeks to be responsible and transparent in its post-publication changes. Post-publication changes always include an editor’s note, and previous versions of Daily articles are archived at 
archive.org.
— Erin Woo, Vol. 259 editor-in-chief
eic ‘at’ 
stanforddaily.com

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Despite political tensions, Stanford’s Saudi partnerships continue with little scrutiny https://stanforddaily.com/2019/04/25/despite-political-tensions-stanfords-saudi-partnerships-continue-with-little-scrutiny/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/04/25/despite-political-tensions-stanfords-saudi-partnerships-continue-with-little-scrutiny/#respond Thu, 25 Apr 2019 07:05:49 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1153528 Some at Stanford find these relationships uncontroversial or point to their scientific and cultural benefits. Others approach them with more wariness or believe the University should engage more thoughtfully with the country.

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When Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last spring, several dozen protesters — locals as well as MIT and Harvard students —  showed up bearing signs that called the Prince a war criminal for his country’s military intervention in Yemen. A Change.org petition with 6,000 signatures urged MIT to cancel the visit.

“I think it’s an embarrassment for MIT to be associated with him and to welcome him here this weekend,” a student told The Tech, MIT’s campus paper.

Later that fall, MIT’s president commissioned a review of the university’s Saudi connections. Although the resulting report recommended against severing any partnerships, it acknowledged that the apparent murder in October of Washington Post journalist and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi had “deflated” hopes of a more progressive future for Saudi Arabia, adding to an already troubling record on human rights.

MIT’s inspection of its Saudi ties came at a time of intense controversy for the Kingdom. Prince bin Salman, colloquially known as MbS, had launched an ambitious reform program known as Saudi Vision 2030 to transform the monarchy’s oil-dependent economy by attracting investment from around the globe. MbS initially sent a message of change by allowing women to drive and vowing to steer his country toward openness and “moderate Islam.” But his reign soon fell under scrutiny following the mass arrest of Saudi elites in the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, the detention of then-Prime Minister of Lebanon Saad Hariri and other incidents.

For years, Stanford scientists have collaborated with and received funding from the Saudi national laboratory, government-supported universities and the state-owned oil company Aramco. But despite having ties with Saudi Arabia much like MIT’s — including with several of the government institutions probed in the MIT report — Stanford has undertaken no broad review of its connections to Saudi Arabia. As a result, Stanford’s Saudi relationships have continued largely under the radar. Some at Stanford find these relationships uncontroversial or point to their scientific and cultural benefits. Others approach them with more wariness or believe the University should engage more thoughtfully with the country.

Oil industry roots

Stanford’s history with the Saudi Arabian government begins with a geology student from rural Oregon.

Max Steineke graduated from Stanford in 1923 and went on to discover Saudi Arabia’s first productive oil field — jumpstarting the industry that transformed the country into the world’s largest oil exporter. As chief geologist for what would become Aramco, Steineke pushed to drill the “Lucky Number Seven” well that, by 1938, was producing almost 4,000 barrels of oil per day. The increased capacity for oil production gave Saudi Arabia new prominence in the world.

Despite political tensions, Stanford’s Saudi partnerships continue with little scrutiny
An oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia / Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The CEO of Aramco highlighted Steineke’s success when he spoke at Stanford in 2012, telling an audience of some 300 people about the virtues of “digging a little deeper.” His visit to campus included a meeting with School of Earth Sciences faculty and a private dinner at the home of then-Provost John Etchemendy.

By then, Stanford’s Saudi connections went far beyond Steineke. In 2011, a dozen Aramco affiliates were studying at Stanford while another 40 were alumni, according to speech at the time from the head of Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM). Stanford, Aramco and KFUPM had recently launched a partnership to do research “closely aligned with the interests of Saudi Aramco and the Kingdom,” as the head of KFUPM put it.

“We already have a strong partnership with Saudi Aramco, so this broadened relationship allows Stanford to become even more actively involved in research and academic development in Saudi Arabia,” Etchemendy said as the collaboration kicked off.

At the same time, Aramco endowed a faculty position in Stanford’s Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences. Donald Lowe is now the Max Steineke Professor in Earth Sciences.

As with most endowed positions, Aramco has no input in Lowe’s research, Lowe said. In fact, he’s had little contact with them or others in Saudi Arabia for the last couple years, after his projects in the region wound down. He collaborated with the company and KFUPM scientists to study deep water sediments, a speciality of his with implications for oil extraction.

“[Aramco is] not in it for just philanthropy,” Lowe told The Daily. “They’re in it to get something that they can use, and we’re in it to get a good education and research projects and be able to give our students the experience of working in a foreign country, of seeing different rocks or solving different kinds of problems.”

From 2011 to 2017, an Associated Press analysis found, nine U.S. universities received more than $10 million from the Saudi government and groups it controls, with George Washington University leading at almost $74 million. Stanford is one of six schools for which Department of Education data does not contain any foreign donor identities, so it’s unclear where the school ranks. Stanford spokesperson E.J. Miranda declined to share the missing information, telling The Daily that the University considers gifts confidential.

However, Stanford is ninth among tracked colleges and universities in money from all Saudi people and entities, according to the Education Department’s latest data. That funding has dropped steadily in recent years. In 2012, Saudi Arabia accounted for more of Stanford’s foreign gifts than any other country, while the data so far for last year lists no Saudi money.

The Stanford-KFUPM-Aramco partnership included two trips that brought U.S. and Saudi researchers together: one to Death Valley, and another to Aramco facilities and the Saudi desert. Lowe’s research was one of a host of associated projects related to oil recovery but dealing with fundamental science — basic questions about how, for example, materials interact. While that first “trilateral” collaboration has ended, Aramco and KFUPM continued to work with scientists at Stanford. The groups joined for another field trip last year.

Lowe recalled distinct cultural and political differences between the groups of scientists that came together for trips back in 2012 and 2013. KFUPM initially told Stanford they could only bring male students and faculty to Saudi Arabia. But when Stanford pushed back, KFUPM accommodated. Most of the students at the all-male school had never worked with women in the field before, and watching the delegations integrate, Lowe said, was “mind boggling.”

“The rocks were great,” he said, but so was the exchange of cultures and teaching methods.

“Both groups change a little bit,” he added.

Just as Stanford’s connections to Saudi Arabia are not unique among U.S. universities, foreign research partnerships are common, especially in engineering and the sciences, said Anthony Kovscek, a professor of petroleum engineering who participated in the research partnership. Kovscek has projects with the French oil company Total as well as with academics in Norway, France and Colombia.

“I think one of the things that’s kind of great about Stanford is there’s a lot of — the idea of [the] freedom of the investigator to develop the collaborations that they want is very strong,” he said.

Kovscek called Khashoggi’s killing troubling. But he said he believes in “keeping politics out of science.” He acknowledges social and political issues in Saudi Arabia and the broader region but doesn’t think they should dictate whom academics can work with.

“You could turn it around, right?” he said, going on to reference humanitarian issues at the U.S.’s border with Mexico. “What do people in Norway think about the current situation that we have on the southern border… People are dying, and it’s tragic.” He recalled conversations with foreigners who disapprove of the U.S.’s use of the death penalty: “I know that has troubled institutions in Europe about interacting with institutions in the U.S.”

Saudi politics aside, Kovscek also knows that some academics are skeptical of partnering with a big oil company. A specialist in the science behind petroleum extraction, Kovscek believes that countries need to draw on many types of energy, and that “stable [oil] supplies held by countries that are more or less stable is a good thing.” But he remembers how, back when he was a college student, a massive Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska led some of his classmates to declare that they’d never take research funding from the company.

“That’s the nice thing about our system,” Kovscek said. “You can decide for yourself where your boundaries are.”


Politics and science collide

The trilateral agreement with Aramco and KFUPM wasn’t Stanford’s only academic collaboration in Saudi Arabia. In 2008, Stanford announced it was one of a host of schools helping with a brand new, $10-billion-endowment Saudi research university, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

KAUST, a national project initially run by Aramco, was part of a modernization push by the relatively progressive King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz for whom the university is named. As a hub for foreign academics and as the first co-ed university in a country that still grants women far fewer rights than men, KAUST looked, to many, like a step toward the opening up of Saudi society. The campus was a westernized bubble in a deeply conservative Kingdom. It boasted amenities like a movie theater that were banned elsewhere, and female students could walk around with their heads uncovered.

While Kovscek emphasizes the need to separate science and politics, the Stanford professors behind the KAUST partnership saw highly political implications in an academic partnership, right from the start. In their eyes, science was an avenue for social reform.

“I think KAUST is a visionary project by moderate people in Saudi Arabia,” computer science professor Jean-Claude Latombe, one of the collaboration’s main organizers, told Stanford News in 2008. “By helping these people, we have a chance to make a big impact in this country, and, since Saudi Arabia has become the most important Arab country — a role that Egypt had had in the past — we can also have a major impact on the region.”

“This project is extremely challenging because there are very traditionalist people in Saudi Arabia who may oppose it,” Latombe added, contrasting Saudi Arabia’s king to its political “extremists.”

Despite political tensions, Stanford’s Saudi partnerships continue with little scrutiny
Students and locals protest the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia’s visit to MIT last March / Courtesy of Mahi Shafiullah/The Tech

Noting KAUST’s commitment to nondiscrimination in religion, race and gender, the Stanford News announcement of the new partnership highlighted not just KAUST and Stanford’s shared research interests but also the schools’ shared values.

“There was great care taken in the drafting of the agreement to make certain that Stanford’s principles were a central part of the agreement,” said Jim Plummer, then-dean of the School of Engineering.

The agreement was a lucrative one. Stanford would help KAUST pick 10 faculty and develop curriculums in applied math and computer science. It would also get $5 million from KAUST each year for five years: $3 million designated for collaborative projects with researchers at KAUST, and the rest to be used however Stanford’s computer science and Computational and Mathematical Engineering departments saw fit.

KAUST gave millions to Stanford energy researchers, too. Stanford professor Yi Cui, famous for his work on rechargeable batteries, was among 12 “global research partnership investigators” funded by KAUST in 2008. That same year, KAUST and Stanford announced a $25 million, five-year grant for a new Stanford research center aiming to make solar power cost-competitive with coal.

Six years later, Stanford debuted another Saudi collaboration, this time with the country’s national laboratory: the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST). KACST and Stanford would work together on a new Center of Excellence in Aeronautics and Astronautics, investigating everything from green propellants to better safety for small aircraft. With many different projects under its umbrella, the arrangement formalized Stanford researchers’ existing relationships with the Saudi laboratory.

As with the KAUST agreement, the KACST partnership was billed as part of a broader effort to modernize Saudi Arabia by supporting tech and science education.

“Our aim is to help transfer the country from an oil-dependent economy to a knowledge based economy,” said Prince Turki Saud Bin Mohammed Al Saud Ph.D. ’97, a Stanford alum, Saudi royal and vice president of research institutes at KACST, at the time.

Charbel Farhat, a professor in aeronautics and astronautics who leads the collaboration at Stanford, declined to speak with The Daily for this article, saying he did not want to get into politics. A spokesperson for the School of Engineering said KACST continues to fund research at Stanford.

Robert Byer, a professor in the applied physics department, praised the science the KACST partnership has produced. Byer worked with the Saudi laboratory and NASA to launch a satellite and advance the detection of gravitational waves — the space-time “ripples” that Albert Einstein predicted over a century ago as part of his groundbreaking general theory of relativity.

While Byer and his colleagues met their scientific goals, Byer said shifts in the Saudi political climate made it harder to conduct research. His last visit to the country was in 2015 — the same weekend Saudi Arabia invaded Yemen — and his stay in Riyadh brought new restrictions. Travel in and out of the country grew difficult. Even within the city, he could no longer move around freely.

It wasn’t a good place for scientists, Byer said. “The country had militarized.”

Under new scrutiny

Last June, Stanford signed a “memorandum of understanding” with a new Saudi Arabian university, the Prince Mohammed bin Salman College for Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technologies, or MbS Tech for short. Other U.S. groups like Carnegie Mellon University and Silicon Valley for-profit Draper University had already struck similar partnerships. Stanford — touted by MbS Tech officials as a world leader in science and engineering — would look into advising the Saudi university on its curriculum in areas like artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing.

Latombe, the professor behind the old KAUST partnership, declined to get involved. His decision came just a few weeks before the death of Jamal Khashoggi.

Latombe hadn’t had contact with KAUST or others in Saudi Arabia for years and, having retired in 2013, he wanted to pursue other interests. But that wasn’t his only concern. He also “did not trust Prince MbS’s intentions.”

“Unlike with KAUST, I did not believe that the project had anything to do with modernizing Saudi society and introducing an additional dose (even a very small one) of democracy in the kingdom,” Latombe told The Daily over email. He declined to elaborate.

Latombe’s wariness toward this new Saudi partnership reflects a growing sense among observers that the country wasn’t as committed to reform as hoped, even before the killing that rocked U.S.-Saudi relations.

In his 2030 plan to diversify the Kingdom’s economy, MbS presented Saudi Arabia as a country ready for modernization and liberalization. But reality seemed far less optimistic.

On November 7, 2017, when the Saudi-born Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri arrived in Riyadh’s airport, he was greeted not by diplomatic officials but by security forces that confiscated his phones and took him into custody. Eleven hours later, Hariri declared his intention to resign in a televised statement from the Saudi capital.

Hariri’s unexpected resignation followed just three days after the detention and extortion of hundreds of Saudi royals, billionaires and government officials in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh. Saudi authorities claimed that the detention was part of the Kingdom’s effort to crack down on corruption.

In response to the Khashoggi incident, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced in October 2018 that Germany would no longer export arms equipment to Saudi Arabia. Calls for severing ties with Saudi Arabia have also reverberated in the U.S., where the Senate voted to end American military assistance for the Saudi-led war in Yemen — a conflict the United Nations has called “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.” Just this month, President Trump vetoed a later incarnation of the bill. And while Trump has refrained from blaming MbS for Khashoggi’s killing, despite CIA evidence that he was involved, the incident continues to have repercussions for the U.S.-Saudi military and intelligence partnership.

Cutting ties with Saudi Arabia is complicated, though, by political realities — including the fact that U.S. rivals could gain a strategic advantage by filling the void. And those complications extend beyond government.

“While some Western investors have shown a reluctance to engage in the wake of the Khashoggi killing, many others continue to work closely with the Saudi government,” political science professor Lisa Blaydes wrote in an email to The Daily. “And if Western firms pass on those opportunities, Chinese investors are ready to step into their place.”

Despite political tensions, Stanford’s Saudi partnerships continue with little scrutiny
Students on Stanford’s 2013 exchange trip with KFUPM / Courtesy of Donald Lowe

However, the renewed political tensions illustrate how Saudi Arabia’s hope to adopt modern norms and institutions has clashed with its impulse for the regressive, authoritarian model that has sustained the Kingdom for decades.

Many have described MbS’s agenda as an effort to reform Saudi Arabia, said Hesham Sallam, associate director of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute.

“In reality, however, his project sought to modernize autocracy in Saudi Arabia and to concentrate political and economic power in the hands of a narrower circle of elites,” he said.

Some argue that by leveraging its enormous wealth, Saudi Arabia simultaneously legitimizes and rebrands itself by partnering with elite U.S. universities and investing in research and technology domestically and abroad.

Last year’s collaboration with MbS Tech faltered shortly after Khashoggi’s death on Oct. 2, 2018. According to Judith Romero, a spokesperson for Stanford’s Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning (VPTL), the exploratory partnership came to an end on Oct. 15 due to a “lack of alignment with faculty interests and availability.” When asked if the Khashoggi incident played a role in the decision, Romero said the absence of faculty interest had become clear before then.

Companies, nonprofits and government agencies often reach out to VPTL looking to use Stanford’s resources through the Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD), Romero said. SCPD connects these groups with the relevant Stanford faculty and departments to “explore whether or not collaboration makes sense.”

The memorandum of understanding with MbS College never moved beyond that early stage, she said.

Other partnerships with Saudi government groups have continued. In the summer of 2018, SCPD designed a program for 35 members of the Saudi Industrial Development Fund (SIDF), the state-owned investment agency. This program delivered “training in finance, leadership, strategic planning and innovation” for Industrial Fund managers, according to Romero.

SCPD plans to provide an additional program for newly hired analysts focusing on “credit, risk and financial modeling” in the summer of 2019. Romero said SCPD is not involved in Saudi Arabia’s 2030 Vision or its development plans for the region.

When asked whether Stanford has reviewed or reconsidered its collaborations with Saudi Arabia like MIT, University spokesperson Miranda said that Stanford examines research proposals and financial agreements that “may pose export control or information security risks” on a case-by-case basis.

“That is not limited to, nor specific to, any one country,” he wrote in an email.

A Stanford Review article from January criticizes Stanford’s partnerships with Saudi Arabia, arguing that the Kingdom’s values are inconsistent with the University’s and weighing in against relationships built solely around Stanford’s tech expertise.

“A purely technological contribution from Stanford would uphold the authority of the Saudi regime and might even contribute to illiberal ends,” the Review piece reads.

But opposition to work with Saudi state groups has been nowhere near as visible as in Cambridge, and other Stanford community members believe that universities’ engagement with the Kingdom can have a positive influence under the right circumstances. Lowe, the Earth sciences professor who led exchange trips with KFUPM, emphasized the value he sees in simply exposing people from the two countries to each other.

“I’m not sure it’s our job to create change, just our job to introduce [Saudi citizens] to our stuff and our people and our culture, just the way that they’re introducing us to their culture when we’re over there,” he said.

Alp Akis ’21, a member of American Middle Eastern Network for Dialogue at Stanford (AMENDS), thinks universities can play a more explicit role in pushing for liberalization. Cutting all ties with Saudi Arabia is unrealistic, he said, but U.S. institutions can use their involvement as leverage for encouraging progressive values in the Kingdom.

“Stanford could use its existing relationship with Saudi state agencies and companies to promote the values that Stanford stands for,” Akis said, suggesting that the school could make its offers to work with state agencies conditional on steps toward “democratization” ranging from strengthening LGBTQ+ rights to releasing political prisoners to protecting press freedom. For example, he said, Stanford could require that a Saudi university seeking curriculum advice commit to making a certain percentage of its instructors female.

“This model should not be used as justification of making profits by benefiting the Saudi regime, but should be carried out with sincere intentions of effecting change,” Akis said.

Contact Daniel Yang at danieljy ‘at’ stanford.edu and Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Admission Assistant Director arrested on attempted murder, domestic violence charges https://stanforddaily.com/2019/03/05/admission-assistant-director-arrested-on-attempted-murder-domestic-violence-charges/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/03/05/admission-assistant-director-arrested-on-attempted-murder-domestic-violence-charges/#respond Wed, 06 Mar 2019 07:23:10 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1150848 James Shirvell, an Assistant Director in Stanford’s Admission office, was arrested Sunday after allegedly stabbing a woman multiple times while under the influence of LSD, according to NBC Bay Area.

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James Shirvell, an Assistant Director in Stanford’s Admission office, was arrested Sunday after allegedly stabbing a woman multiple times while under the influence of LSD, according to NBC Bay Area. Shirvell faces charges of attempted murder, domestic violence, assault with a deadly weapon and “assault with force likely to commit great bodily injury.”

Shirvell, 26, was booked into San Francisco County jail at 12:15 a.m. on Mar. 3, according to the San Francisco sheriff’s department. His bail has been set at $1 million. 

If convicted of first-degree murder with premeditation, Shirvell could be sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, according to California state law. For second-degree attempted murder without premeditation, Shirvell could receive up to nine years in prison. Each of the felony assault and domestic violence charges carries up to four years in prison, as does the state assault with a deadly weapon charge.

According to NBC, which cited unnamed sources, the incident occurred this past weekend at a Potrero Hill house. The Daily has reached out to Shirvell for comment. 

The woman was also allegedly under the influence of the hallucinogenic drug, NBC stated.

Shirvell has worked for Stanford Admission since the fall of 2016 — first as an admission counselor and then as an assistant director — according to his LinkedIn profile. By Tuesday night, Shirvell’s name was not listed on the Stanford Admission webpage.

In an email to The Daily Wednesday morning, University spokesperson E.J. Miranda said Shirvell “has been placed on leave and will not be coming to campus or performing any admissions work.”

“We are continuing to gather information on this matter to inform next steps,” Miranda wrote. In an earlier email, he said Stanford did not learn of the arrest until Tuesday afternoon.

 

Contact Courtney Douglas at ccdouglas ‘at’ stanford.edu and Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

This article has been updated with new comment from University spokesperson E.J. Miranda. This article has also been updated with a fourth charge, time of booking, bail and possible prison sentences.

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Data breach allowed students to view other students’ admission files, sensitive personal data https://stanforddaily.com/2019/02/14/data-breach-allowed-students-to-view-other-students-admission-files-sensitive-personal-data/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/02/14/data-breach-allowed-students-to-view-other-students-admission-files-sensitive-personal-data/#respond Fri, 15 Feb 2019 01:02:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1149723 Before this week, Stanford students could view the Common Applications and high school transcripts of other students if they first requested to view their own admission documents under FERPA.

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Before this week, Stanford students could view the Common Applications and high school transcripts of other students if they first requested to view their own admission documents under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

Accessible documents contained sensitive personal information including, for some students, Social Security numbers. Other obtainable data included students’ ethnicity, legacy status, home address, citizenship status, criminal status, standardized test scores, personal essays and whether they applied for financial aid. Official standardized test score reports were also accessible.

Students’ documents were not searchable by name, but were instead made accessible by changing a numeric ID in a URL.

A Stanford student who recently submitted a FERPA request for their admissions documents discovered the vulnerability in a third-party content management system called NolijWeb that the University has used since 2009 to host scanned files. Since 2015, students who have submitted FERPA requests have been able to view files through NolijWeb.

Between Jan. 28 and 29, the student briefly accessed 81 students’ records while attempting to assess the scope of the vulnerability. Others informed of the issue accessed information contained in 12 students’ records during that time period while seeking to learn more about the kinds of files exposed. University spokesperson Brad Hayward said the University has not identified other “instances of unauthorized viewing” but is still reviewing the matter.

The Daily withheld reporting on the exposed data until the University could secure the breach so that students’ records could be protected. The student who disclosed the breach to The Daily was granted anonymity to protect them from potential legal repercussions for accessing private information while investigating the security flaw.

Stanford will notify the 93 students whose privacy was compromised because of this flaw.

“We regret this vulnerability in our system and apologize to those whose records were inappropriately viewed,” Hayward wrote in an email to The Daily. “We have worked to remedy the situation as quickly as possible and will continue working to better protect our systems and data.”

Stanford has also notified Nolij’s parent company Hyland Software of the vulnerability. Hyland acquired Nolij in 2017 and announced on Dec. 31, 2017 that it would be discontinuing the NolijWeb product. While Stanford University Information Technology (UIT) intends to finish implementing a new platform to replace the NolijWeb system by this summer, a number of schools still use NolijWeb to store admissions records. It is unclear how many schools using NolijWeb give students access to the online documents, or how many might be subject to the vulnerability.

The Daily reached out to eight different executives at Hyland Software for comment and expressed concern that other schools’ data may be similarly compromised by NolijWeb. Alexa Marinos, Hyland’s Senior Manager of Corporate Communications, confirmed receiving The Daily’s phone and email requests for comment, made over the course of a week. However, the company provided no statement on the matter.

 

Accessing admissions records

FERPA, a U.S. federal law, provides to parents specific protections related to their children’s education records, including academic transcripts and family contact information. Students who are at least 18 years old or enrolled in postsecondary education may request their own education records under the law.

FERPA gained recognition among Stanford students in January 2015 after the Fountain Hopper (FoHo), a widely-circulated campus email newsletter, reported that FERPA requests allow students to see their Stanford application materials, including the numerical scores assigned to them by admissions officers. Officers were found to rate applicants on a scale of one to five on various metrics including testing, personal qualities and interviews. Legacy status, ethnicity and 300-word summaries written by Stanford admissions counselors distilling their perception of the candidate were all available. Any student who requested their application materials would receive printed copies of their admissions documents, stored on NolijWeb.

Deluged with FERPA requests after the FoHo’s report, Stanford and other universities soon began erasing records of admissions officers’ ratings and comments on student applications once students arrive on campus. At this point, Stanford began to give students direct access to NolijWeb to expedite access to their own records. Occasionally, a delay involved in destroying the records still allows first-year students to view such comments on their admissions records, multiple current freshmen found.

 

The vulnerability, explained

Students whose FERPA requests are approved by the University are directed toward a link titled “Student Admission Documents” on Axess, Stanford’s information portal for students, faculty and staff. That link directs them to NolijWeb where — after entering their SUNet IDs into a search box — students can view their own scanned documents.

When a user views one of their files, the browser performs a network request. However, a student may use tools like Google Chrome’s “Inspect Element” — commonly used by programmers to debug websites — to view that network request’s URL and modify it to give them access to another student’s files.

While using file identifications in such a URL is not uncommon, sites typically add protections to prevent people from accessing files not intended for them.

Because URLs and files are linked through numeric IDs, the NolijWeb vulnerability did not allow students to retrieve documents by name nor by any other identifying information. Instead, incrementing file ID numbers in URLs allowed access to arbitrary students’ files. But a web scraper could theoretically help someone download all available documents, the student who discovered the vulnerability said.

The student was especially concerned that their Social Security number was visible on one of their documents.

“It wasn’t anything sophisticated,” the student said of their methods, adding that anyone with web development experience could have exploited the vulnerability with ease. “You change the ID slightly and it just gives you someone else’s records.”

 

Stanford’s response

Since learning of the vulnerability, UIT has disabled the component of NolijWeb that allowed students to access others’ records. In the meantime, the University has suspended online access to FERPA documents while it researches short-term alternatives.

UIT has also maintained logs of unauthorized access to students’ files since the issue was brought to their attention, and Hayward said “a thorough review is currently underway.”

Though Stanford has used NolijWeb for 10 years and students have had direct access since 2015, the University does not know how long the vulnerability has existed.

“Exploiting this vulnerability requires an authenticated student login and specific knowledge of the application’s underlying behavior,” Hayward wrote. “We believe this to be the first report of the issue.”

Because of the necessity of an authenticated student login, the vulnerability was not detected by UIT’s regular audits of its third-party software, Hayward said.

He noted that the vulnerability did not allow students to access other documents stored in NolijWeb besides the admissions files of undergraduates. But students who have graduated since 2015 may have had their files exposed, he added.

 

Cybersecurity issues at Stanford

“Stanford’s Information Security Office is continually looking for opportunities to bolster the overall security posture of our systems,” Hayward wrote.

One such effort was the recent launch of Stanford’s Bug Bounty Program, meant to encourage community members to notify the University of vulnerabilities in its web systems. However, the FERPA records exposure would not qualify for the program; the web domain affected is not among those listed as eligible for a bounty.

Data breach allowed students to view other students’ admission files, sensitive personal data

“As this is an experimental program, we wanted to begin with a very limited set of systems to gauge the response,” Hayward wrote. “If the program goes well, we intend to gradually expand the scope over time.”  

If within the initiative’s scope, a vulnerability that results in the “exposure of sensitive information” is eligible for a reward of $150 to $450. Since learning of the NolijWeb data breach, Stanford has amended the Bug Bounty Program to explicitly include safe harbor provisions for discovery of out-of-scope vulnerabilities that are “responsibly report[ed].”

The program’s terms specify that participants must not access confidential information beyond what is absolutely necessary to demonstrate the vulnerability.

As of Monday, UIT had received 43 submissions to the Bug Bounty program “of varying severity levels,” Hayward wrote. Stanford intends to publish “high-level information about the bugs, but not the details,” on the program’s website.

“Even after a fix is implemented, publicly disclosing a vulnerability still has security implications,” Hayward wrote.

Prior to the establishment of the Bug Bounty program, multiple other cybersecurity issues at Stanford resulted in leaks of Stanford affiliates’ data.

In late 2017, The Daily discovered permissions errors in a University-wide file-sharing system called the Andrew File System (AFS) that allowed any Stanford community members — as well as AFS users from other schools — to access information on sexual assault cases prepared from campus therapy sessions, emails about student conduct issues and other confidential information.

A month later, Stanford reported that the names, birthdays, salaries and social security numbers of 10,000 University staff members working in 2008 had been exposed on a shared Graduate School of Business (GSB) site between September 2016 and March 2017. The information was also accidentally made public due to permissions errors. Shortly after the leak’s reveal, GSB Associate Dean and Chief Digital Officer Ranga Jayaraman announced he would leave his job.

The student who found the FERPA vulnerability said the recent succession of data breaches at Stanford is concerning.

“I think it’s kind of ironic that Stanford is one of the best CS schools in the country, but it’s so negligent in terms of these kinds of important records,” they said.

 

Contact Julia Ingram at jmingram ‘at’ stanford.edu and Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Student government leaders from 76 colleges express opposition to DeVos’s Title IX changes https://stanforddaily.com/2019/01/31/student-government-leaders-from-76-colleges-express-opposition-to-devoss-title-ix-changes/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/01/31/student-government-leaders-from-76-colleges-express-opposition-to-devoss-title-ix-changes/#respond Thu, 31 Jan 2019 08:30:03 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1148986 Katipamula said she began thinking about assembling a joint comment back in November when the Department of Education released its intended revisions.

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In a collective effort co-led by Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) president Shanta Katipamula ’19, student government leaders at 76 colleges have signed a letter opposing U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ proposed overhaul of federal guidelines for campus sexual assault cases.

The letter, submitted Wednesday as the public comment period for DeVos’ proposals ends, highlights 10 “problematic” aspects of the Education Department’s planned changes to Title IX rules, from giving parties’ representatives the ability to cross-examine students live during hearings to a suggested narrowing of the kinds of incidents schools are responsible for investigating.

Student leaders are not the only ones to weigh in on the future of Title IX. In two months, the Department of Education has received a deluge of some 100,000 comments. Some laud DeVos’s changes as strengthening due process protections for the accused; others decry them as weakening schools’ ability to punish sexual assault and support victims.

Katipamula said she began thinking about assembling a joint comment back in November when the Department of Education released its intended revisions.

“From conversations with people, we all have the same concerns, and I thought it would be really powerful to have a unified student voice,” Katipamula told The Daily.

She began by reaching out to a few acquaintances and student body leaders at other schools. She quickly got interest from around 50 people. But the timing of the public comment period was less than ideal for students, Katipamula said: Thanksgiving, final exams and winter break all intervened, making it harder to organize.

“Once I got back from [winter] break, we were really kind of on this race against the clock,” she said.

Katipamula began drafting a letter with Simran Mishra, the student body president at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and another key organizer of the effort. Katipamula had already met Mishra, who worked at the company Katipamula will be interning at this summer.

They circulated the letter among those who had expressed interest earlier and in a daily newsletter for student government leaders. While Katipamula wishes she’d had more time to gather support from students at different schools, she was happy to see the initial list of 50 or so interested students grow to more than 70. Signatures continued coming in through the night before the Jan. 30 deadline.

Student representatives at Stanford have been vocal critics of the Education Department’s plan since it was announced. Earlier in January, both the Undergraduate Senate and the Graduate Student Council approved a bill to send DeVos feedback, arguing her changes would deter victims from reporting assaults to their schools.

The ASSU has also focused on helping other Stanford students submit their thoughts to DeVos, holding workshops on how to give public comment and circulating letters designed to let community members sign on and express opposition with minimal effort.

Many college administrators have also spoken against the changes DeVos seeks. While Stanford has not issued its own statement on the proposed policy changes, it provided joint comment as one of 60 members of the Association of American Universities (AAU). The AAU’s letter to DeVos cautions against a “one-size-fits-all” approach to campus policies and a shift toward “quasi-courts … inconsistent with [schools’] educational missions,” among many concerns.

The proposals would likely force Stanford to revise key parts of its Title IX practices, according to a big-picture University analysis requested by Katipamula and Ph.D. candidate Rosie Nelson, the ASSU vice president.

The analysis by Stanford’s Office of Institutional Equity and Access outlined potential changes in hearing procedures and interim measures for complainants as well as the scope of cases Stanford could adjudicate. However, it also described unknown impacts from certain shifts in federal rules.

“Amidst powerful movements such as #MeToo and #TimesUp, the proposed Title IX regulations will take our nation and our institutions a step back,” the statement from student leaders says.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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With StartX now financially ‘self-sustaining,’ University discontinues funding for its startups https://stanforddaily.com/2019/01/22/with-startx-now-financially-self-sustaining-university-discontinues-funding-for-its-startups/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/01/22/with-startx-now-financially-self-sustaining-university-discontinues-funding-for-its-startups/#respond Tue, 22 Jan 2019 09:45:50 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1148456 StartX provides mentorship and other resources to Stanford-affiliated startups. The Stanford-StartX Fund, created in 2013, uses University money to invest in StartX ventures alongside other groups.

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The Stanford-StartX Fund, which invests in Stanford-affiliated startups through the nonprofit StartX, will stop making new investments this June, StartX announced on Thursday.

The Stanford-StartX Fund has achieved its goal of helping StartX — legally a separate entity from the University — become financially self-sustainable, StartX wrote in an online post.

Founded in 2009 by Stanford students to help the school’s entrepreneurs found companies, network and fundraise, StartX has now guided 650 companies, 83 percent of which are growing or have been acquired, according to the recent post. In a testament to its growth, StartX says its companies now raise $9.3 million on average, many times the $1.1 million its companies raised on average half a decade ago.

StartX itself, however, does not invest in the companies it takes on and instead provides mentorship and other resources. The Stanford-StartX Fund, created in 2013, uses University money to invest in StartX ventures alongside other groups.

“We invested in StartX’s program development because we saw the potential for it to provide great value to Stanford entrepreneurs,” said Randy Livingston, Stanford’s Vice President for Business Affairs and Chief Financial Officer, in a statement posted by StartX. “We are pleased that this vision has been realized, with over 800 Stanford alumni, faculty and students having participated in StartX over the last 9 years. It is gratifying that StartX is now in a position to move forward as a financially self-sustaining organization.”

According to Livingston, Stanford decided about a year ago to end its funding for StartX when its agreement with the nonprofit expires on June 30 of this year. Livingston said the choice was motivated not only by StartX’s growth but also Stanford’s “desire to prioritize investment” in its Long-Range Planning effort, an initiative begun in 2017 by University leadership to gather input on and craft a vision for Stanford’s future.

While Stanford will no longer provide its companies with financial support, StartX will continue to work with the University. StartX’s Thursday announcement referenced “new collaborations with Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing” as well as programs under development that will encourage majors in the humanities and sciences to consider “entrepreneurship … as a viable path for all backgrounds.”

Although StartX began as a resource for new ventures from Stanford students, it emphasizes that its programs are now open to companies at any stage of development. Applicants to StartX can be new founders, “experienced entrepreneurs” or professors at Stanford; the program also takes some applicants without Stanford ties if they are recommended by current StartX members.

In June, StartX-funded medical artificial intelligence company MedWhat sued Stanford-StartX Fund and other investors for breach of contract, unfair business practices and other alleged offenses, two months after these investors filed their own lawsuit against MedWhat on charges including breach of contract, fraud and unfair competition. The ongoing legal dispute, however, “had absolutely no bearing” on the University’s decision to end investments, according to Livingston.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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TDX fraternity to lose housing https://stanforddaily.com/2019/01/20/tdx-fraternity-to-lose-housing-2/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/01/20/tdx-fraternity-to-lose-housing-2/#respond Mon, 21 Jan 2019 04:01:43 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1148436 The Theta Delta Chi (TDX) fraternity will lose its housing at the end of this school year, after the University found for the fourth year in a row that the group “needs improvements” to meet Stanford’s “Standards of Excellence” (SOE) governing reviews of Greek organizations. The fraternity plans to appeal the decision, and will receive a final outcome from Residential Education (ResEd) by Feb. 1.

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The Theta Delta Chi (TDX) fraternity will lose its housing at the end of this school year, after the University found for the fourth year in a row that the group “needs improvements” to meet Stanford’s “Standards of Excellence” (SOE) governing reviews of Greek organizations. The fraternity plans to appeal the decision, and will receive a final outcome from Residential Education (ResEd) by Feb. 1.

ResEd acknowledged TDX’s efforts to address critical feedback but said they ultimately fell short. Panelists on the SOE review board said that the “seriousness” and “urgency” of TDX’s attitude toward alcohol and safety concerns were “primarily spurred by sanctions.”

TDX’s SOE review emphasized the need for TDX to develop a new member education curriculum incorporating the “foundational values of the fraternity,” to establish a relationship with an alumni advisor and to fill the house with TDX members, not non-member “boarders.”

“Long-standing concerns” about alcohol consumption, including “several” investigations within the past year, were among the University’s main concerns about TDX, according to the chapter’s SOE review released this fall.

Members of TDX found the process of meeting the University’s requirements difficult and frustrating, according to the new TDX president Nico Garcia ’20, who assumed his position last week.

“It seems like it’s kind of this moving target of their expectations,” Garcia said. “We’ve done the things they’ve outlined, and then they list like two more that come out of nowhere.”

Newly elected vice-president Michael Quezada ’20 echoed Garcia’s sentiments.

“It seems like to me — from what I’m aware of — each year they came up with something different,” Quezada said.

The fraternity has circulated a University-wide petition to galvanize support in its quest to retain its housing.

TDX leadership told The Daily they were shocked to find out that they would lose their housing after what they deemed to be insufficient warning.

“It definitely felt out of the blue to us,” Quezada said.

Residential Education (ResEd) told TDX last March that it could lose its residence at 675 Lomita if it did not raise its scores under the SOE system, according to a March 25 letter from ResEd Assistant Dean Amanda Rodriguez to TDX leadership.

TDX received the lowest score, a “3” — indicating the “needs improvements” designation— following this year’s review, and was put on probation for winter 2019. Organizations must score a “2” in order to “meet expectations” and a “1” indicates that a group has exceeded the University’s standards. Chapters that do not meet or exceed expectations are placed on probation, and have one quarter to improve their status or face removal from the chapter facility.

According to the program description, SOE reviews are based upon the Greek organization’s promotion of shared values, development of group identity and mission and adherence to community norms, among other considerations.

TDX plans to appeal the decision directly to ResEd Dean Koren Bakkegard, Garcia and Quezada confirmed to The Daily. The group has until Jan. 28 to file the appeal.

In the fraternity’s petition to defend its access to housing, published on Jan. 20, TDX leadership asked for “testimonies of Stanford students, alumni, and other relevant voices” to include in their appeal, arguing that TDX was cited for “minor shortcomings” despite “recognized improvements … and no transgressions explicitly meriting removal.”

Appeals can cite bias or procedural errors in the evaluation process or offer new information worth the University’s consideration, Rodriguez’s letter states.

Bakkegard’s response to the appeal, to be issued by Feb. 1, will be final.

TDX’s petition is modeled after Outdoor House’s Nov. 2018 efforts to defend its housing.

In Nov. 2018, residents of Outdoor House pushed back with public testimonials and administrative outreach after ResEd announced, without explanation, that it would strip the residence of its theme. Within two days, administrators extended the House’s theme. House staff said the initial decision was “an administrative misstep that resulted from broken communication channels.”

TDX fraternity to lose housing

History of the TDX review

The SOE program was established in the 2014-15 school year, with the goal of assessing Greek organizations on campus and helping them to “enhance their positive impact” on the broader community. The program launched shortly after fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) lost its housing, amid heightened national scrutiny of Greek organizations’ conduct.

The University’s first-ever SOE review in 2015 gave TDX a low score, taking issue with the chapter’s communication with ResEd as well as chapter management and finances.

Stanford asked TDX not to host all-campus parties in fall quarter of 2017 after finding that the chapter fell short of expectations for a third time. In its fall 2017 feedback, ResEd praised TDX’s efforts on diversity and communication but told the chapter to “identify, cultivate, and articulate a sense of purpose in order to ensure sustainability on campus.”

The University reiterated that sentiment last spring, telling TDX to develop its “mission, vision and group identity” shortly after warning that the organization could lose its housing in the next SOE review if it did not raise its scores. Stanford also instructed TDX to “abide by the University policy and California law that prohibits smoking inside the facility at all times,” among other directions.

That same month, Stanford’s Organizational Conduct Board (OCB) opened an investigation into TDX regarding “alcohol-related incidents” at three recent TDX social events, according to the chapter’s November submission to the University for its latest SOE evaluation. Two months later, the investigation expanded to examine another event the chapter held in April.

TDX argued in its November report on SOE progress that the chapter has worked hard to address University concerns.

Responding to the charge that the group “develop a mission, vision and group identity,” TDX noted the chapter’s heterogeneity in terms of interests and identities, emphasizing that the group’s unity revolves instead around “friendship” as well as a mission to “foster a community in which members are expected to strive towards the intellectual, moral, and social improvement of themselves and their fellow members.”

“Our members share a reflective demeanor, seeking to better themselves humbly rather than by pushing past others,” the chapter added later, saying that “there’s something about our members’ respect for and appreciation of individual struggle that makes TDX unique.”

After receiving a report from the OCB investigation, TDX wrote, the chapter cancelled all social events “indefinitely as a demonstration of good faith towards the findings of the Report.”

“This process has been uncomfortable and frustrating for the members of our organization, and canceling our social events has certainly affected the morale of our community—but we felt (and still feel) that the latter action constituted a necessary step… to ensure that our organization is doing its best to keep our fellow students safe,” TDX members stated.

The group said that it had stopped serving hard liquor at events. In the future, TDX wrote, it would take further actions to improve party safety, including checking IDs and monitoring drinks “more stringently”; putting kitchen tables away during events to prevent people from dancing on top of them; bringing in Stanford Office of Alcohol Policy and Education staff for workshops; drafting a risk management plan; and requiring members to complete sober monitoring and party-planning training.

Feedback from the University last fall credited TDX for “minor” improvements, including “fresh clarity on the foundational values of the fraternity,” but still criticized the chapter for not doing enough to meet standards. For instance, the review stated that “[it’s] great that the chapter has eliminated serving hard alcohol at social events. [It’s] also concerning, however, because that’s a practice that should have been eliminated years ago.”

After the 2018 SOE review, TDX was placed on probation for winter of 2019 and asked to create an action plan. The chapter was told that if it could lose University recognition or housing privileges if it did not improve during the probationary period.

TDX fraternity to lose housing

Perceived discrepancies in University’s approach to Greek life

In addition to the shock of finding out that TDX has lost its housing, Garcia highlighted the discrepancies between the University’s claims of support toward Greek life and what he views as its unfair punishments for Greek organizations.

Discussing a recent meeting among university officials and representatives from all campus Greek organizations, Garcia said that the university encouraged fraternities to “be excellent” and “step up and be the role models” for the campus community.

However, one week after the meeting, TDX received news of the ResEd decision.

“I understand this is not the news you hoped for, however we are committed to supporting you as an unhoused organization moving forward,” Rodriquez wrote in the Jan. 18 letter informing TDX of its housing loss.

TDX members argued that the University wants Greek organizations to stand as “pillars” of communal excellence, yet also imposes harsh sanctions on them.

“If they want us to meet expectations and to continue to improve, I think it’s instrumental that we keep this house and keep this space for the community, so that this community has a place to center around and work on the things that [the University administration] wants us to,” Garcia said.

Other TDX residents reiterated Garcia’s sentiments, saying the chapter fosters a strong sense of belonging for its members.

TDX member Luke Soon-Shiong ’18 told The Daily last spring that he felt comfortable exploring gender in TDX as someone who identifies as genderqueer. He also noted a growing Native American community within the fraternity chapter that he believes has encouraged more Native students to rush the group.

ResEd commended TDX last fall for its “equity and inclusion”— a consistent strength in SOE review reports that TDX members have emphasized amid long-standing concerns about and efforts to increase diversity in Greek life broadly.

However, Garcia speculated that rather than work alongside Greek organizations to build upon these improvements, the University is actually attempting to “cut down” on Greek organizations as part of a broader initiative to limit students’ housing options. Other members of Greek life feel similarly, says a fall Op-Ed by Kappa Sigma senior and Daily columnist Harrison Hohman ’19.

“In bureaucratically taking us down, or in kind of setting different expectations … it seems like they’re executing, with purpose, this sort of take-down to root us out,” Garcia stated.

Multiple other fraternity presidents said the same in previous interviews with The Daily.

However, Student Affairs spokesperson Pat Harris categorically denied that the University’s ResX Task Force is trying to shut down Greek life on campus by stripping fraternities of their housing.

According to Harris, Stanford’s ResX Task Force has not reached any definite conclusions about how Greek life will factor into its proposed plans to establish residential “neighborhoods,” which are housing clusters similar to Harvard’s “houses” or Yale’s “residential colleges.” The Task Force convened last spring and is charged with developing recommendations for improving residential life under the University’s long-range planning process.

Recent fraternity housing controversies

During the last five years, both the Sigma Chi and Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternities have lost their Stanford housing. Most recently, Sigma Chi lost its campus residence in May 2018 after an investigation by Sigma Chi International during which the fraternity was barred from participating in spring recruitment, leaving them without a 2018 pledge class. The investigation followed an alleged January drugging by a non-Stanford affiliate at the Sigma Chi house.

A few days later, Stanford’s Sigma Chi fraternity lost its charter after Sigma Chi International voted to close its chapter at Stanford due to “risk management concerns” and “accountability issues” within the chapter. The International Fraternity’s Executive Committee said that there were “few members” who would be able to “carry the chapter forward in a positive manner.”

Three years earlier in May 2015, the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity also lost its housing following two Title IX investigations conducted by the University.

The initial Title IX investigation opened in July 2014 over concerns that SAE “caused, condoned and tolerated” a “sexually hostile environment” at its May 2014 Roman Bath party. The investigation results came out in December and led Stanford to place the fraternity on alcohol suspension, social probation and a two-year housing suspension beginning spring 2015.

The second investigation opened in March 2015 after concerns that SAE violated probation and participated in acts of retaliation or harassment that month. The investigation then expanded to look into alleged retaliatory behavior against a Title IX witness in Cabo San Lucas over 2015 spring break.

In May 2015, as a result of the investigation, the fraternity lost its housing indefinitely, and the University placed SAE on probationary status for three years.

Other currently housed fraternities include Phi Kappa Psi, Kappa Alpha, Kappa Sigma, Sigma Nu and Sigma Phi Epsilon.

 

Holden Foreman, Erin Woo and Claire Wang contributed to this report.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu, Ellie Bowen at  ebowen ‘at’ stanford.edu and Berber Jin at fjin16 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

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Proposed federal changes to Title IX guidance would demand revision of Stanford’s policies, report says https://stanforddaily.com/2019/01/14/proposed-federal-changes-to-title-ix-guidance-would-demand-revision-of-stanfords-policies-report-says/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/01/14/proposed-federal-changes-to-title-ix-guidance-would-demand-revision-of-stanfords-policies-report-says/#respond Mon, 14 Jan 2019 08:37:33 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1148165 If adopted, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ proposed changes to federal guidance on colleges’ sexual assault policies would likely require Stanford to revise several key aspects of its Title IX system, according to an analysis by the University’s Office of Institutional Equity and Access.

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If adopted, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ proposed changes to federal guidance on colleges’ sexual assault policies would likely require Stanford to revise several key aspects of its Title IX system, according to an analysis by the University’s Office of Institutional Equity and Access.

Potential changes include narrowing the scope of allegations Stanford can investigate under Title IX; modifying hearing procedures and adding hearings for claims against non-student community members; and making the University review its burden of proof as well as the interim measures it provides in sexual assault cases.

Many schools have grappled with uncertainty over the future of their Title IX programs since DeVos announced her intentions to overhaul federal policy. The Office of Institutional Equity and Access’ Jan. 8 analysis, created at the request of Associated Student of Stanford University (ASSU) Executives Shanta Katipamula ’19 and Ph.D. candidate Rosie Nelson, gives a “high-level overview” of changes Stanford might need to make if DeVos’s plans move forward. At the same time, it notes areas where the precise impact of DeVos’s agenda remains unclear.

In a “Notes from the Quad” blog post released shortly after DeVos unveiled her plans, Provost Persis Drell emphasized that “nothing changes today in our campus Title IX procedures as a result of this development.” University spokesperson E.J. Miranda told The Daily that Stanford is working to submit comment through the Association of American Universities, as Drell said it would in her blog post.

DeVos released her proposal for Title IX in November, and the Department of Education is accepting comment on the plans until Jan. 28. Last week, both the undergraduate and graduate bodies of student government approved a bill to submit comment on behalf of the ASSU. The ASSU’s input for DeVos is highly critical of changes that it says would deter sexual assault victims from reporting and undermine Stanford’s ability to keep its campus safe.

Longtime critics of Title IX, in contrast, see DeVos’ proposals as making colleges’ handling of sexual assault claims fairer to the accused.

Ph.D. candidate Emma Tsurkov, the ASSU Executive’s Co-Director of Sexual Violence Prevention, said the Office of Institutional Equity and Access’ analysis was “pretty much consistent with what we expected.” While she worries about the impact DeVos’ proposed changes could have at Stanford for victims of sexual assault, she was encouraged by students’ interest in providing Department of Education with their feedback.

“We did tabling at White Plaza for three days, we had a workshop, we sent the [ASSU] bill for people to give comments on … So I think overall the amount of students we’ve engaged with is probably in the hundreds,” Tsurkov said.

Potential changes

Almost all of the Department of Education’s proposed changes are opposed by the ASSU.

Stanford might have to revise its definitions of sexual harassment, the analysis states. For example, the new rules would prevent the school’s grievance processes from handling allegations of harassment that did not take place within a Stanford program or activity.

However, the analysis notes that Stanford could use other University policies — like the Fundamental Standard for students and the Code of Conduct for community members more broadly — to address behavior that would move outside Title IX’s jurisdiction under new rules.

Stanford may also have to provide hearings for Title IX complaints against any University community member — right now, it only provides them for claims against students — and add video technology to its hearings so that parties can see each other during the proceedings, rather than just listen in.

University processes would need to allow the complainant or accused’s support person to directly question the other party in the case, as well as their witnesses. Stanford’s existing student Title IX process allows each party to submit questions through a hearing panel.

For Tsurkov, the ability to more directly cross-examine is one of DeVos’ most concerning proposals.

“Having due process doesn’t mean retraumatizing victims,” she said, arguing that “there’s nothing that would hurt the discovery of the truth if it’s not done directly [but] through a panel.”

Bob Ottilie ’77, a defense lawyer who has represented Stanford students and has been critical of the University’s Title IX processes, also noted the significance of the cross examination proposal, calling it “huge.” Unlike Tsurkov, though, he approves.

“Sometimes I’ll go 40 minutes into some area that I start with cross-examination,” he said. “It’s the ability to pursue [people] with a series of questions … If it’s implemented it will make a huge difference in the outcome of these cases.”

The analysis also states that Stanford may need to “review” its evidentiary practices in Title IX cases, but does not elaborate.

Stanford uses a third-party “evidentiary specialist” to look over what Title IX investigators have gathered in a case and decide what can go before panel members. Parties can argue to the specialist for the inclusion or exclusion of certain information, but for the purposes of the hearing they must stick to evidence the specialist admitted.  

DeVos’s rules would instruct schools to provide all the evidence they have gathered to the parties in a case. While Stanford has stated publicly that it shows parties all evidence collected and redacts only minimal personal information like names or Social Security numbers, Ottilie has shown The Daily correspondence with Title IX staff indicating more extensive redactions. Ottilie said his clients couldn’t argue for the information’s inclusion because they did not know its substance.

The Department of Education’s proposal further states that all the evidence schools collect must be available to parties as a hearing proceeds “to give each party equal opportunity to refer to such evidence during the hearing.”  

Victims’ advocates have expressed concerns about the implications for students’ privacy and victims’ willingness to go through Title IX proceedings as a result.

Tsurkov highlighted use of evidence as another part of DeVos’ plans that particularly troubles her. Title IX investigations by nature involve sensitive personal material, she said, and information gathered that’s irrelevant to the charge at hand should not be fair game for parties to use.

“The chilling effect of not reporting because the cost might be that your entire private life becomes available to the person who assaulted you is horrifying,” Tsurkov said.

Unknown impacts

The potential effects of DeVos’s rules are murky when it comes to Stanford’s standard of proof necessary to find guilt in sexual assault cases. The proposed federal regulations would allow schools to use either the higher “clear and convincing evidence” standard or the lower “preponderance of evidence” standard used in civil courts, which the Obama-era Department of Education told all colleges to adopt. But colleges would only be allowed to use “preponderance of evidence” for Title IX matters if they do the same for “conduct code violations that do not involve sexual harassment but carry the same maximum disciplinary sanction.”

At Stanford, other student conduct violations like cheating can lead to suspension or expulsion — the default sanction for sexual assault, although Stanford data shows that no Title IX cases over the last two academic years have led to expulsion. But student conduct violations outside the scope of Title IX are adjudicated under the highest standard of proof, the “beyond a reasonable doubt” bar used in criminal court.

Meanwhile, California law clashes with DeVos’s proposal by requiring universities to use preponderance of evidence for Title IX cases.

For all these reasons, “it is not yet clear” how DeVos’s regulations could play out at Stanford, the Office of Institutional Equity and Access’ analysis says.

However, the analysis also notes that Stanford might have to revise its policies to state “presumption of innocence” for the accused. The Judicial Charter — which governs student conduct investigations outside of Title IX — presumes innocence, the analysis states, but Title IX policy avoids this language, providing instead for neutral panelists “who will not prejudge the outcome of a case because there has been a charge.”

The analysis also describes “unknown” effects for new federal guidance on “support measures” such as no-contact orders meant to help victims of sexual assault feel safe on campus. The proposed new federal regulations would allow schools to give support measures without a formal process like a hearing, but these measures could not be “punitive or disciplinary.” No-contact orders would have to be mutual.

The analysis says that Stanford might need to change its policies on “interim measures” provided to complainants while a Title IX investigation pends, but does not give details. Interim measures can range from no-contacts to moving accused students to different housing or requiring them to attend classes with a security guard.

The ASSU’s feedback to DeVos, however, projects more specific consequences of the proposed policy change.

“Survivors awaiting the resolution of their complaint who wish to not be in contact with their assailant will have to change their own academic and extracurricular schedule, housing and dining,” reads the ASSU statement, which was drafted by Katipamula and Tsurkov. “Forcing the victims of assault to be the ones who have to move will create a significant barrier to reporting.”

Advocates for the accused, meanwhile, have taken issue with measures they say infringe too much on someone who has not been found guilty.

“That’s a great big scarlet letter that says you are an accused rapist,” defense lawyer Ottilie said previously of security guards as an interim measure.

Katipamula told The Daily she plans to publicize the Office of Institutional Equity and Access’ analysis soon in an email to campus community members.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Class action lawsuit disputes Stanford’s background check practices https://stanforddaily.com/2019/01/11/class-action-lawsuit-disputes-stanfords-background-check-practices/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/01/11/class-action-lawsuit-disputes-stanfords-background-check-practices/#respond Fri, 11 Jan 2019 08:05:50 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1148139 A class action lawsuit alleges that Stanford violated federal law by failing to get proper consent from prospective employees before performing background checks.

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A class action lawsuit alleges that Stanford violated federal law by failing to get proper consent from prospective employees before performing background checks.

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), employers conducting background checks must notify potential hires of checks in advance and obtain signed authorization forms. The FCRA requires that employers disclose their intent to use background checks in a “document that consists solely of the disclosure.” The lawsuit claims that Stanford failed to meet this stand-alone document requirement by combining its background disclosure with additional language that states that “all persons or entities requesting or supplying” relevant background information are released from liability. Such extra information could distract from the background check disclosure, the suit argues.

The University could be ordered to pay up to $1,000 per person for whom it performed a background check that was not properly authorized, as well as other damages and attorney’s fees, the lawsuit states.

An initial case management conference for the lawsuit, which was filed in October, is scheduled for Jan. 30 at a District Court in San Jose. The lawsuit proposes a class action on behalf of anyone who did not properly consent to background check between Aug. 16, 2015 and a date that will be determined by the court. The named plaintiff in the case is Theresa Richard, who according to the suit was hired in 2017 as a dining worker at Stanford’s Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE).

Stanford spokesperson EJ Miranda said the University will seek to dismiss the claim.

“This lawsuit is baseless,” he wrote in an email to The Daily. “The plaintiff received and signed a FCRA disclosure form which was fully compliant with the law.”

Stanford’s Human Resources website includes an employment application with a background check consent section at the end, as well as a separate background check form intended “for use when there is no SU Employment Application.” Both forms contain language mostly identical to what the lawsuit takes issue with.

“I agree to cooperate in the Background Investigation … and to release from all liability and responsibility all persons or entities requesting or supplying such information in connection with the Background Investigation,” Stanford’s forms state.

While the lawsuit focuses on the note about liability, the Federal Trade Commission also states on its website that the FCRA-mandated background check notice “cannot be in an employment application.”  

Asked if the background check section included in the “Employment Application” document on Stanford’s Human Resources website violates the FTC’s guidance, Miranda stated that “the disclosure and consent form is a standalone document and is not contained in the employment application.”

Other recent class action lawsuits have successfully sought compensation from employers — including Stanford — for failing to clearly disclose and gain consent for background checks as set out in the FCRA.

A district court ruled in 2015 that Stanford violated the FCRA’s stand-alone stipulation by noting seven state laws and adding a disclaimer that “nothing herein shall be construed as an offer of employment or contract for services,” alongside the school’s disclosure to applicants about background checks.

A 2018 district court verdict reinforced that ruling by holding that extra language about state law and other documents, as well as a link to a privacy policy, prevented an employer’s materials from meeting the stand-alone notice bar.

However, the Central District of California ruled this year in an employer’s favor in another suit about FCRA technicalities, finding that Hansen & Adkins Auto Transport did not break the law by including its background checks notice at the back of an application packet and within a package of several documents. The Court found that the relevant disclosure need not be provided “separate in time from any other documents” and that the disclosure form itself met standards.

Lawyers representing the complainant did not respond to a request for comment.

 

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Residential Education grants one-year extension to Outdoor House’s theme following pushback https://stanforddaily.com/2018/11/30/residential-education-grants-one-year-extension-to-outdoor-houses-theme-following-pushback/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/11/30/residential-education-grants-one-year-extension-to-outdoor-houses-theme-following-pushback/#respond Sat, 01 Dec 2018 01:29:38 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1147518 Residential Education (ResEd) will allow Outdoor House to retain its theme for another year, in a reversal of its controversial and unexplained decision  — announced earlier this week — to put the residence’s “Outdoor Education” theme on a one-year hiatus.

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Residential Education (ResEd) will allow Outdoor House to retain its theme for another year, in a reversal of its controversial decision  — announced on Nov. 27 — to put the residence’s “Outdoor Education” theme on a one-year hiatus.

In an email to residents announcing the decision’s reversal, House staff called the initial decision “an administrative misstep that resulted from broken communication channels.”

Stripping Outdoor House of its theme would have discontinued the residence’s partnership with Stanford’s Outdoor Center, which contributes $10,000 per year to Outdoor House programming.

As a result, students would no longer be able to pre-assign into the house, instead drawing in as they would any other house in Suites.

The staff’s email to residents was sent by Daniel Henry ’20, one of Outdoor House’s Academic Theme Associates. Henry wrote that ResEd and the Outdoor House were “apparently on two different pages” about the house’s status as a pilot program this year.

According to Henry, ResEd moved to put the house’s theme on a one-year hiatus because it viewed Outdoor House as a three-year pilot program coming to a close rather than a “permanent addition” to campus, whereas the staff saw the continuance of the theme for a fourth year as a sign of the pilot’s success.

In a Nov. 30 email to Outdoor House staff members, ResEd Interim Associate Vice Provost Koren Bakkegard said she had “reflected on this issue over the last few days” before extending Outdoor House’s theme.

Bakkegard’s announcement followed an email from residence staff to Vice Provost for Student Affairs Susie Brubaker-Cole expressing their disagreement, and came shortly before a meeting that afternoon which the staff were scheduled to attend with Bakkegard and Brubaker-Cole. Outdoor Staff requested that the meeting occur despite Bakkegard’s email, and used their time to deliver 43 pages of testimonials representing over 100 perspectives from residents emphasizing the significance of the community to them.

[Outdoor House] Staff made consistent reports on our progress over the past several years,” Henry wrote. “Now in our fourth year, we have seen the growth of our community into one of most tightly-knit, inclusive and passionate communities on campus.”

Henry said the miscommunication also stemmed from confusion surrounding ongoing efforts by the recently convened Committee on Residential Life (CoRL), which aims to create a process for developing “purposeful communities” on campus, including evaluating, approving and supporting themed houses on campus. The new process for decision-making around themed houses is still in development, Henry wrote.

“The intention was for the pilot program [Outdoor House] to be put on hiatus and wait a year until this process was ready to be rolled out and we could formally go through it,” he added.

Bakkegaard stated in her email that Outdoor House will be able to join in the new process “to discuss existing programs and consider proposals for new programs.”

CoRL is separate from the ResX Task Force, convened by Provost Persis Drell in April as part of Stanford’s long-range planning process to develop a series of recommendations for redesigning undergraduate residential life. Yesterday, Brubaker-Cole sent a University-wide email update on the status of the ResX Task Force, stating that the group is moving from the information-gathering phase of its process to developing recommendations for Drell.

Student Affairs spokesperson Pat Harris confirmed that miscommunication about the pilot program was what led to the earlier decision to suspend the theme.

Despite commenting on miscommunication, Henry said that ResEd was “transparent and helpful” during its Friday meeting with Outdoor House staff and that Bakkegaard and Brubaker-Cole were “wonderfully active listeners as we portrayed the magic of our community.”

Bakkegard wrote in her email to house staff that ResEd will set up another meeting with them and Stanford Outdoor Education to discuss staff selection and pre-assignment for the 2019-2020 academic year.

Henry emphasized that staff is “grateful that ResEd rectified the decision” and expressed appreciation for all those who advocated for Outdoor House.

“We deeply appreciate the outpouring of support from students, alumni and faculty,” he closed his email. “The amount of love and support created by this community has never been so tangibly apparent.”

 

Contact Julia Ingram at jmingram ‘at’ stanford.edu and Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Documents addressing Title IX evidence, procedures point to discrepancies between statements and practices https://stanforddaily.com/2018/11/29/documents-addressing-title-ix-evidence-procedures-point-to-discrepancies-between-statement-and-practices/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/11/29/documents-addressing-title-ix-evidence-procedures-point-to-discrepancies-between-statement-and-practices/#respond Thu, 29 Nov 2018 08:19:46 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1147377 As college sexual assault policies draw increased scrutiny amid ongoing federal changes, documents reviewed by The Daily suggest that Stanford has publicly misrepresented aspects of its own Title IX practices.

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As college sexual assault policies draw increased scrutiny amid ongoing federal changes, documents reviewed by The Daily suggest that Stanford has publicly misrepresented aspects of its own Title IX practices.

Bob Ottilie ’77, a lawyer who has advised students in Title IX cases at Stanford and at other schools, showed The Daily correspondence with Title IX staff indicating that the University prohibited parties in at least two sexual misconduct cases from gathering their own witness statements and in at least one case did not allow parties to review substantial information that had been redacted from evidence prepared for a hearing.

Both of these practices run contrary to Stanford’s public statements regarding the rights of students involved in Title IX cases.

For Ottilie, the discrepancy between Stanford’s statements and practices is just one aspect of broader concerns about the rights of students accused in Stanford’s Title IX proceedings. Ottilie has criticized Stanford’s expectation that accused students initially respond to complaints without full details about the allegations against them, as well as the University’s practices around evidence admission.

He has also argued that the Title IX Office’s decisions in his clients’ cases show bias against male students.

Others defend Stanford’s system, saying it has received undue criticism or contending that Title IX is instead unfair to complainants.

As Education Secretary Betsy DeVos seeks to revise federal guidance on how colleges handle sexual assault cases, her proposed policy changes have garnered approval from individuals who — like Ottilie — have raised concerns about the rights of the accused under existing federal policy as well as at Stanford specifically.

“Understanding that the University is legitimately scrutinized by both parties — one who wants an education free from an assailant on campus, the other who does not want to suffer an unjustified finding of responsibility — the University’s process favors neither the complainant nor the accused,” wrote Stanford spokesperson E.J. Miranda in an email to The Daily.

Statements on evidentiary policies undermined

Ottilie said Stanford has publicly misrepresented an aspect of Stanford’s new Title IX process, launched in 2016, that makes it harder for parties in sexual assault cases to combat evidentiary decisions that they find unfair.

Miranda told The Daily via email that students can collect and submit their own witness statements if they want, but that the University prefers “a neutral investigator to ask questions and summarize responses rather than risking a one-sided or incomplete witness statement.”

“Moreover, the University has received complaints from witnesses that third-party investigators, usually [private investigators], can come across as intimidating to student witnesses, and we remind parties that they are responsible for the conduct of the individuals that they are employing to assist them in investigations,” Miranda wrote.

Policy has not changed under the new Title IX system, he added. Former University spokesperson Lisa Lapin made a similar statement to The Daily last year.

But emails from a Title IX investigator regarding clients of Ottilie’s — reviewed by The Daily and first covered last year along with some of Ottilie’s criticisms of Title IX — show that the Title IX Office not only discourages but also has, at least in some cases, prohibited students from gathering their own statements. Such statements cannot be submitted under the new Title IX process, an investigator wrote.

“[Stanford is] lying because they are ashamed of what they do,” Ottilie said.

Another email reviewed by The Daily showed that Title IX staff declined to interview the psychologist of a male client of Ottilie’s, who had filed a competing claim of sexual assault against a female accuser. Ottilie said the psychologist would have supported the male student’s claims and bolstered his defense.

Explaining its decision in the email to Ottilie, the Title IX Office wrote that the conversation was not relevant because the student’s discussions with the psychologist were not contemporaneous to the alleged incident.

“It was absolutely contemporaneous,” Ottilie disagreed, “because the young man was referred by the University for psychological assistance as a result of his emotional state [after breaking up with his accuser]. That all occurred literally within days of when the relationship ended.”

Ottilie believes the Office’s decision to discount the source indicated gender bias, citing other cases at Stanford and beyond where conversations from long after an incident occurred were still deemed relevant to an investigation of a woman’s allegations. His client was unable to counter the decision: “The rules precluded my client from doing those interviews on his own,” Ottilie said.

Miranda said the University could not comment on the specifics of the case but stated that the matter was “reviewed under an earlier process” and that Stanford now has a third-party “evidentiary specialist” who decides whether a witness has relevant information.

Title IX decided not to charge either party in the case, Ottilie said, meaning the cases were dropped before going to a hearing.

John Clune, a lawyer who has worked on many high-profile criminal cases and advised students filing sexual assault complaints around the country, said he understands the University’s desire to regulate the quality of the investigation by keeping students from speaking with potential witnesses. Having the option to incorporate the extra evidence into proceedings can’t hurt, though, he added.

“If you really want to get the best information out, and there’s a thing the school doesn’t want to investigate, and the student involved wants to provide that information, [the school] should receive it and decide what to do with it,” he said.

Ottilie also disputed University statements about how the Title IX Office redacts evidence. Documentation supported his account.

According to Stanford’s Title IX process guidelines, once the Office has gathered all of its evidence, it removes or redacts information deemed irrelevant or repetitious from the file of materials prepared for a hearing panel. Parties receive a log of the rationale behind the redactions and can make arguments for the exclusion or inclusion of information to the evidentiary specialist, who makes the final decision about what gets forwarded to panel members.

Miranda said the third-party specialist has access to the information redacted by Title IX staff and serves as a check on their judgement. Parties in a case won’t get to see redacted personal details like phone numbers or social security numbers, he added, but other information that the Title IX Office plans to black out will be highlighted for parties to review.

Ottilie, however, said he’s encountered extensive redactions while working on Title IX cases, as well as brief redaction rationales that often only noted that information was deemed irrelevant. He showed The Daily correspondence in which he asked to see any withheld documents and clean copies of statements, writing that he could not challenge the Title IX Office’s exclusions without knowing their substance.

Most attorneys who spoke with The Daily said they had no complaints about redaction practices, though. Clune said he has only seen snippets of identifying information like names or phone numbers redacted. Michael Armstrong ’70, a recently retired defense lawyer, told The Daily that he did not recall any such concerns in Stanford cases he has worked on.

Armstrong, who is best known for representing former Stanford student Brock Turner in his 2016 sexual assault trial, did not respond to further requests for comment.

Previous concerns

Concerns about Stanford’s procedures around Title IX evidence admission aren’t new, and they come from all sides.

Earlier this year, when the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) released findings from its three-year investigation into Stanford’s Title IX practices, it detailed three cases brought forth by students alleging mishandling of their sexual assault reports. One of the three involved seeming inconsistencies that a complainant dubbed “Student C” encountered with regards to evidence and redaction procedures under the University’s old Title IX system.

Stanford may have created an “inequitable process” for her, the federal report concluded.

Student C, who filed a Title IX complaint against a dorm Resident Assistant, requested anonymity in this article because her identity is not publicly connected to the OCR case.

Like Ottilie, Student C is skeptical of Title IX administrators’ ability to remain neutral, but she believes that the bias swings the other way: against complainants. She told The Daily that she has felt “numb” to DeVos’ federal changes to Title IX guidance because Stanford’s process let her down even under Obama-era practices.

The OCR’s findings summary stated that, in Student C’s case, Stanford allowed the accused student to submit “positive character evidence” as a rebuttal made, in part, to a statement from Student C that was not allowed to go before the hearing panel. Additionally, OCR wrote, the Title IX Office did not redact information about Student C’s sexual history from the accused’s statements — again, on the grounds that it was an acceptable rebuttal — even though it was removed from other witness statements as “prejudicial.”

Information from Student C that “may have clarified” the matter was not given to the panel, the OCR found.

Stanford’s policies generally prohibit use of sexual history and character evidence in cases, except under special circumstances. Responding to the OCR report earlier this year, Provost Persis Drell said that the University would work to make sure these policies are followed.

“It was [the University’s] position — and it continues to be our position — that there were legitimate reasons for the panel to consider evidence in the Student C matter other than for the purpose of providing positive character evidence,” Miranda wrote.

Student C told The Daily she believes Title IX’s handling of evidence favors the accused. She said she was uncomfortable when, over her objections, the Title IX investigator in her case showed the hearing panel evidence that Student C wanted to exclude — arguing to the panel that it should be included because it spoke to Student C’s credibility. Student C was also not allowed to be present while the Title IX investigator spoke with panel members, although she was told her arguments would be relayed.

This account is corroborated by emails between Student C and an administrator.

According to Student C, the evidence in question included a claim that she had a history of accusing Resident Assistants of sexual assault — something she disputes, saying this was her only Title IX case — and a statement by the accused student that he had never masturbated due to his family background.

“[Title IX] allowed the reviewers that would be deciding my case to see everything before asking them to [potentially] decide to unsee something and not consider it,” Student C said. “That’s not how people work.”

Presented with the responding student’s unredacted statement, the panel opted to keep everything.

“Because [the investigator] was the only person there to present these disputes, she was allowed to characterize the dispute however she wanted,” Student C said.

The OCR’s report on Student C’s case notes that the University also declined to include one of her witness interviews after deeming it irrelevant.

Miranda emphasized that Student C’s case took place under a prior Title IX system. He said Stanford’s new Title IX process, by adding the third-party evidentiary specialist, has addressed Student C’s concerns about panelists being unable to “unsee” information.

Ability to respond

Ottilie said the accused clients he mentioned were either not charged or not found responsible by the University. However, he argued that Stanford’s procedures made it difficult for his clients to respond to a complaint effectively.

Former University spokesperson Lisa Lapin told The Daily last year that students receive a “notice of concern” officially informing them of what they are being investigated for, along with the name of the complainant, “approximate dates” of the alleged offense and potential policies they may have violated.

The Title IX Office collects evidence and, following the end of its investigation, decides whether to charge the accused. If it does charge them, it provides an evidentiary “hearing file” to both parties in the case. After that point, new information is only admitted if it qualifies as something unavailable earlier or as “rebuttal” evidence — something that a party couldn’t have anticipated as relevant.

Each party is also allowed to submit a 1,500-word final letter responding to the hearing file. This letter cannot introduce new evidence: Interviews with Title IX investigators are parties’ “opportunity to provide facts about the allegation(s) under consideration,” Miranda wrote.

Ottilie criticized the responding student’s inability to know every claim made about them from the start.  

“The point is, you should get everything before you have to give your everything response,” Ottilie said.

He said the notice of concern is not much to go on compared to the full complainant statement his clients used to receive before Stanford implemented its new Title IX process. Recalling the case in which a male and female student who had dated both filed claims against each other, Ottilie said the Title IX Office would not narrow down the date of the female student’s allegations to a particular year.

“Under the [old process], responding students were given ‘concerns,’ which came in different forms,” Lapin said. “Sometimes it was a statement from the complainant, sometimes it was an email from a reporting party, and sometimes it was a summary from the Office of Community Standards of an oral report. The current process creates an even, consistent playing field for all parties.”

Student C told The Daily that she sees the new, less detailed notice to responding students as an improvement over the complainant statement Ottilie mentioned.

She thinks limiting an accused individual’s information prior to their interview with Title IX forces them to “give their version of events, uninfluenced” while also limiting their ability to “spin a cover story.”

“If a respondent is telling the truth, they would not hesitate to give their version of events as it happened on a particular date — and that does not require knowing what the complainant has said thus far,” she said.

Ottilie, on the other hand, said his clients have opted not to be interviewed by Title IX because they are uncomfortable with the Title IX Office’s policy of not recording interviews and relying only on notes — a policy that Stanford defends as less “intrusive and intimidating” to students.

Ottilie added that he’s been frustrated in the past when additional evidence his clients tried to provide was rejected because it related to something that had been disclosed earlier in the case. Details might not come to light until the hearing file, he said, at which point investigators might surmise that the accused already had the chance to address the issue broadly.

He said that one of his clients became aware — upon reading his hearing file — that the Title IX Office was looking into allegations it hadn’t listed in the original notice of concern.

“The student said, ‘Now that I know what you were concocting with those weird questions I want to give you all this stuff,’ and [the Title IX Office] said, ‘No … just wait and do it with the 1,500-word letter,’” Ottilie said. “In real court, we might come up with 10 witnesses of our own.”

Although privacy rules prevent the University from discussing specific cases, Stanford maintained that the Title IX Office notifies parties of additional allegations if the scope of an investigation grows.

According to Miranda, Stanford’s new Title IX process was meant to close a “loophole” in the old system that allowed parties to provide new information after seeing all of the evidence gathered about their case by an investigation. As a result of that loophole, he added, some respondents waited to give information until later and did not participate in the investigation at its outset.

The new rules preclude “the possibility of gamesmanship,” Miranda wrote.

Stanford’s process gathers information in a trauma-informed manner, as required under what California law calls “victim-centered” processes, he added, saying that all students in Title IX cases have “equal opportunity to share information and appeal outcomes.”

Naomi Rustomjee, an attorney who has advised respondents under Stanford’s current Title IX process, defended Stanford’s system.

“Although, as a defense attorney, I would always want more rather than less due process for the accused… I find Stanford’s pilot program affords significantly more due process for responding students than is the case at other schools,” Rustomjee wrote to The Daily in an email, citing features such as Stanford’s requirement that hearing panels must agree unanimously in order to find a student guilty.

Rustomjee is among a group of attorneys that Stanford now makes available to both parties in a Title IX case for up to nine hours of free consultation. The University-sponsored attorneys became the center of controversy in early 2017 after Stanford dropped a lawyer, Crystal Riggins, from the panel, citing “disappointing” critical comments about the Title IX process she’d made to The New York Times. Riggins, who specializes in representing complainants and declined to comment for this piece, told The Times, “It is very difficult to get a 3-0 decision from a panel, and these young women are terrified and traumatized and just want it to be done.”

Rustomjee noted that she does not necessarily agree with the outcomes of every case but believes that the Title IX administrators at Stanford work to “get it right.”

“That alone is a whole lot more than one can say about other schools’ Title IX administrations,” she wrote.

Title IX versus the criminal system

At the center of national controversy over Title IX policy is the question of how much campus mechanisms for dealing with sexual assault should resemble those used in the criminal justice system.

Debate on the matter heated up in 2011 under the administration of President Barack Obama when his Department of Education issued a “Dear Colleague” letter instructing schools to adopt, among other changes, a “preponderance of evidence” — or “more likely than not” — standard for Title IX cases. Employed in civil court cases, this bar is lower than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard needed to find a criminal defendant guilty. The 2011 letter, issued without the public comment period that would have given it the force of law, contained only guidelines — but administrators across American universities have said that the Office of Civil Rights frequently used the document when investigating institutions for potential Title IX violations.

DeVos rescinded the Dear Colleague letter last fall, stating Title IX had overreached under Obama. DeVos then issued interim guidelines allowing schools to use a higher “clear and convincing” standard of proof if they wished.

Stanford Law professor Michael McConnell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, welcomed the announcement.

The Dear Colleague letter “wreaked havoc and injustice all over the country, and it’s time to have some balance,” he told The Daily.

Critics have argued that college Title IX processes exist without procedural elements — such as testimony under oath or the oversight of a trained judge — that offset the lower burden of proof employed in civil cases. Such critics also question the ability of universities to carry out investigations of serious offenses.

Students who filed campus sexual assault complaints have sued schools across the country, including Stanford, for mishandling their cases. In its investigation, OCR identified concerns with how the University handled cases of complainants that filed with the federal office in 2015 and 2016. Stanford pledged to address the concerns in a resolution reached with OCR.

Similarly, accused students have successfully sued their universities or had their sanctions reversed over due process claims. In October, a district court of appeals overturned a University of California Santa Barbara student’s two-year suspension and reprimanded the school for denying him a fair hearing.

In 2016, a male student found responsible for sexual assault by Stanford sued the University for “discriminatory zeal to prosecute sexual assault claims.” Neither the student’s lawyer nor Stanford responded to a request for comment on the case’s current status.

Stanford Law professor Michele Dauber, an activist and prominent advocate for sexual assault victims, argued that those who say their “due process” has been denied in Title IX proceedings are often projecting criminal trial rights onto much less stringent proceedings more comparable to those used for eviction from public housing or the termination of welfare benefits.

“The first word of due process is due, and it means literally, ‘What process is due given the context that we are in?’” Dauber said. “Basically, the courts have said that students are entitled to almost no due process.”

“It sounds more weighty to say, ‘We’ve been denied due process’ than it does to say, ‘We don’t like the way these hearings are run,’” she added.

Clune believes that most colleges have done a good job of ensuring due process for both sides and that the Department of Education’s current push for change is fueled by anecdotal evidence.

McConnell agreed with Dauber that, particularly as a private university, Stanford’s legal obligations to students accused in Title IX cases are minimal. But he said Stanford should go beyond what’s strictly required of them and provide some of the rights the accused would have in court ruling, such as powers of cross-examination. McConnell said he understands the rationale for keeping an accused student from cross-examining their alleged victim — a practice frequently denounced as retraumatizing — but believes that, at the very least, investigators in Title IX cases should be themselves better scrutinized.

“A police officer is always put on the stand in a criminal case,” McConnell said. “Did you investigate this, did you investigate that? … Was there any exculpatory evidence?”

Title IX case outcomes

For advocates of the accused, the seriousness of sexual assault allegations and their consequences mean that University processes merit more rigorous protections than those currently provided for accused students.

John Villasenor M.S. ’86 Ph.D. ’89, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, was recently invited by the Stanford Political Union to discuss his research on Title IX standards of evidence at a campus debate. The research — published in the peer-reviewed journal Law, Probability and Risk — examined the likelihood that an innocent person would be found guilty under either the “beyond a reasonable doubt” or the “preponderance of evidence” standards.

Villasenor concluded that, when shifting to “preponderance of evidence,” the likelihood increased fivefold under the most mathematically conservative model and up to as much as 19-fold depending on what estimate was used for wrongful convictions in court.

Title IX cases may not be criminal, Villasenor said, but they can still hold high stakes for the accused. He cited a New York Times article from earlier this year about a male Michigan State student found responsible for sexual assault in a Title IX process that the Times writer suggested was unfair. After his expulsion was publicized, the student filed a lawsuit claiming the school wrecked his athletic career.

“If an innocent person is subjected to eviction from a degree program, to the loss of an ability to earn a livelihood and to the stigma and resulting lost opportunities that will follow him around for decades — that is an enormously heavy punishment to bear, and a terrible injustice,” Villasenor wrote in an email to The Daily.

Advocates for complainants, on the other hand, believe that schools’ ability to protect their students from sexual predators still falls short and counter that a lower standard of proof is appropriate given that schools are not sending people to jail but rather trying to make their campuses safe for students. Clune, for example, was largely complimentary of Stanford’s policies, although he takes issue with the requirement that a panel vote unanimously to find a student responsible (something victims rights proponents have criticized as unusual among peer institutions).  

“It’s gonna be something that bites Stanford in the long run when they have a student who’s found responsible by two of three panel members and that student goes on to hurt somebody else,” Clune said.

Dauber argued that Stanford and other schools have long delivered overly lenient sanctions for serious offenses. Several years ago, Stanford student Leah Francis ’14 ignited campus protests after likening Stanford’s suspension of the student who it found guilty of assaulting her to a “gap year.” Both parties in Francis’ case went on to file complaints with OCR. The accused is the same student who sued the University in 2016.

Stanford has since made expulsion its default sanction for sexual assault. However, a report released this year by Provost Persis Drell indicated that, in the 2016-2017 academic year, none of the punishments given to students found responsible for assault rose to that level.

According to the same report, there were nearly 200 reports of sexual assault, harassment or relationship violence at Stanford in 2016-2017 across all demographic groups. Of the 58 formal investigations within these categories conducted by the University, 32 resulted in findings of policy violations.

Title IX cases offer more than just sanctions for perpetrators. Agreements between parties in a case can stipulate, for example, that a victim has priority in class enrollment and housing placement, that the accused can’t contact their accuser or that there are certain places on campus the accused can’t go.

Schools may also offer these accommodations as interim measures while a Title IX case is pending.

These interim measures have drawn criticism from defendants’ rights advocates who contend that they undermine access to education for someone who has not been found guilty.

Ottilie said one of his recent Stanford clients was moved out of campus housing for several months as an interim measure and only allowed to visit campus and attend class in the presence of a security guard. The student also had to notify Title IX of all non-class visits, he said, and rarely came to Stanford’s campus as a result of the constraints.

“That’s a great big scarlet letter that says you are an accused rapist,” Ottilie said of the security guard. While the Title IX Office ultimately did not pursue a case against the client, he said, “To this day Stanford [has] never done one thing for him to say they’re sorry.”

Writing to The Daily, Miranda responded that Stanford takes “steps necessary to protect the safety of the campus community when it is placed on notice of significant concerns.” Security guards balance that concern with ongoing access to education, he added.

Clune and other advocates for complainants believe interim measures are necessary to prevent a hostile educational environment for accusers. Prior to the “Dear Colleague” letter, Clune said, many students would simply leave school out of discomfort — sometimes permanently — before their case was resolved.

“Your process becomes completely moot and ineffective if you’re not putting in an interim measure that allows the complaining student to continue to attend,” he said.

Students have joined the debate over Title IX policy as well.

Shortly after DeVos was appointed as Education Secretary, The Stanford Review’s Editorial Board urged her to raise the standard of proof required in campus sexual assault cases, arguing that it undermined accused students’ rights.

Meanwhile, leaders of the Stanford Association of Students for Sexual Assault Prevention (ASAP) have said that Stanford’s policies don’t do enough to hold perpetrators accountable.

Past and current ASSU executive teams have made Title IX policy a key issue in their platforms. Current student body president Shanta Katipamula ’19 and vice president Ph.D. candidate Rosie Nelson pledged in their campaign to push for a wider definition of sexual assault and the elimination of Stanford’s unanimous panel requirement, among other reforms.

“Almost all universities, unlike Stanford, require a majority vote of a panel for both a finding of responsibility and for a sanction,” Katipamula and Nelson wrote.

Looking ahead

On Nov. 16, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos released her proposed changes to the federal policy that guides how colleges handle sexual assault cases. The proposal, if enacted, would narrow the definition of sexual assault, reduce schools’ liability for assaults and let parties’ advisors cross-examine the other party.

Stanford administrators have told the community, however, that little is changing.

“Nothing changes today in our campus Title IX procedures as a result of this development,” Provost Drell wrote in a November blog post after DeVos released the proposal. “We fully intend to continue our efforts to reject sexual violence in our community, to support survivors, to hold perpetrators accountable and to have fair adjudication processes.”

Revisions to Stanford’s student Title IX process are ongoing, Miranda wrote, as any updates will need to be approved by the Office of Civil Rights. He confirmed that an advisory committee has given feedback on the process to Drell, but did not provide specifics. According to Miranda, OCR is currently reviewing changes to Stanford’s sexual harassment and assault policies that were made following the federal office’s investigation.

In addition to flagging concerns with specific cases, OCR’s investigation found areas where the school was not in compliance with federal policy. The Office pointed to issues like insufficient documentation of complaints and a lack of clarity around discipline policies for staff found responsible in a Title IX case. Stanford agreed to address the concerns in its resolution with OCR.

Equal Rights Advocates, a civil rights organization whose clients filed with OCR against Stanford, lauded the federal investigation’s results.

“No student should be denied access to education because of sexual harassment or violence,” said Jennifer Reisch, legal director for ERA, in a press release. “This is an opportunity for Stanford to turn over a new leaf and create a campus environment that is safe and equitable for all.”

As numerous and often-clashing criticisms of the Title IX process demonstrate, exactly how Stanford should create this “safe and equitable” environment remains contentious.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Unchaining the Stanford Prison Experiment: Philip Zimbardo’s famous study falls under scrutiny https://stanforddaily.com/2018/11/13/unchaining-the-stanford-prison-experiment-philip-zimbardos-famous-study-falls-under-scrutiny/ Wed, 14 Nov 2018 07:57:24 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?post_type=tsd_magazine_post&p=1146210 On March 7, 2007, Philip Zimbardo used his last lecture at Stanford to declare that he’d left his most famous experiment behind. Capping off a discussion of the 1971 findings that made him a public figure, movie character and textbook staple, the renowned psychology professor told the audience he was ready to start probing acts […]

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On March 7, 2007, Philip Zimbardo used his last lecture at Stanford to declare that he’d left his most famous experiment behind.

Capping off a discussion of the 1971 findings that made him a public figure, movie character and textbook staple, the renowned psychology professor told the audience he was ready to start probing acts of heroism, rather than acts of abuse.

“I’m never going to study evil again,” he said.

The room was packed – not unusual for a course featuring Zimbardo, whose six-day Stanford Prison Experiment drew great attention as a dramatic demonstration of the power of roles and the way ordinary people can turn cruel under the wrong circumstances. Students who frequented the psychology department in Jordan Hall might have noticed a plaque marking the site of the study: Nearly 40 years prior, the building’s basement hosted a mock jail of college students in which – as Zimbardo tells it – student guards went so rogue with power and prisoners became so depressed that the professor had to call off his experiment. A colleague gushed later that week to Stanford News that Zimbardo’s research and teaching contributions were “probably unmatched by anyone – not only at Stanford, but throughout the world.”

Despite that switch to heroism he announced in his farewell lecture, Zimbardo remains inextricably linked to his most controversial work, conducted when he was in his 30s and newly tenured at Stanford. Now, though, Zimbardo battles accusations of questionable methodology and scientific fraud.

A journalist’s revisiting of the prison experiment has cast new doubt on its value: In an article quickly picked up around web, Ben Blum highlights participants’ claims that they were just acting and archival footage that he presents as evidence Zimbardo and his collaborators worked to elicit particular behavior. A French book by author Thibault Le Texier, published two months before Blum’s article, catalogues even more criticisms. While the summer’s discussion of the Stanford Prison Experiment focused on Blum’s arguments, an English-language summary of Le Texier’s findings – slated to publish in American Psychologist this month – could set off even greater scrutiny of the study as it reaches a U.S. audience.

The ensuing debate is rocking 85-year-old Zimbardo’s legacy in a way that decades of long-simmering but quiet critiques of the study didn’t, reshaping the experiment’s public image amid growing skepticism of influential psychology studies. Those who questioned the experiment for years are wondering why the reckoning took so long.

Others find value in the study despite its criticisms – and wonder if some of the blaring headlines sparked by Blum’s article, which asserts that “The most famous psychology study of all time was a sham” suffer from the same lack of nuance that characterized earlier coverage of the prison experiment.

Caught in the center, even Zimbardo seems torn between describing the experiment as an elaborate show and touting its scientific value. This comes across when he responds to the account of James Peterson M.S. ’91 Ph.D. ’74, a prisoner in the study who says he was let go early for no apparent reason.

Peterson, then a Ph.D. in engineering, recalls doing “a really lousy job as a guard” – nerdy and socially awkward, he drew weird looks during a count-off of the prisoners’ numbers by whimsically ordering the other students to yell out their ID numbers in “nines complement,” a computer science term.

Peterson has a hunch that his silly performance got him kicked out of the experiment. After his shift finished, he claims that someone on the research team – he doesn’t remember who – called him over to say he didn’t have to return. It turned out he wasn’t needed anymore, Peterson said.

Faced with this story, Zimbardo said he doesn’t remember Peterson but didn’t attempt to contradict Peterson’s account. Instead, he explained that “it might have been that Peterson just didn’t want to get into the role. That is, you know, just didn’t want to force the prisoners to do push-ups and jumping jacks and all the other things.”

“The only reason we would let a guard go,” he said, “is if he was not playing his role.” Zimbardo doesn’t seem to see an issue with removing someone from the experiment for failing to display the role-conforming behavior the researchers were observing for.

“The point is, it’s a drama,” he says. “You have to play the role in order for the whole thing to work.”

Unchaining the Stanford Prison Experiment: Philip Zimbardo’s famous study falls under scrutiny
In 1971, Jordan Hall hosted a mock jail of college students in which — as Zimbardo tells it — student guards went rogue with power and prisoners became depressed (Courtesy of Stanford Libraries).

‘Nobody read it’

Siamak Movahedi, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston who specializes in social psychology, was one of the Stanford Prison Experiment’s earliest doubters. In 1975, just a few years after the study made headlines, Movahedi and his colleague Ali Banuazizi published the first major methodological critique of the experiment in American Psychologist.

The two scholars argued that the Stanford Prison Experiment did not show students genuinely consumed by their roles as prisoner and guard. Rather, they said, it showed participants engaging in a sort of theater – acting out stereotypical guard and prisoner behavior in response to what psychologists call “demand characteristics,” or cues on the goals of an experiment that participants pick up on. Movahedi and Banuazizi are skeptical of the idea that a bunch of white college students roleplaying for a week could reproduce the psychological workings of a real prison.

Their paper went largely unnoticed until just recently, when Movahedi started to notice surprising readership statistics from sites like academia.com – where, in August, the paper was downloaded at least 400 times.

“For 40 years, nobody read it,” Movahedi said.

The sudden interest raises a question for many of Zimbardo’s critics in the psychology community: What took so long? You don’t have to read Ben Blum’s article, they say, to realize that Zimbardo’s project was flawed in an experimental sense.

And yet, Movahedi’s issue is with Zimbardo’s approach, not his message about the power of the situation. Several decades ago, a San Francisco attorney called Movahedi looking for criticism of the prison experiment’s findings; Zimbardo was set to testify in a case about prison abuse, and the lawyer wanted Movahedi to speak against him. Movahedi promptly called Zimbardo and offered to write him a note of qualified support.

“I sent him a letter saying we simply have some disagreements with you on methodological issues; however, we completely share your conclusion and hypotheses that it’s the structure which leads to some of this oppressive behavior,” Movahedi recalled.

Movahedi understands why the prison study has stuck around. For one thing, it’s a hit with students. It’s a good teaching tool that gets their attention and pushes them to consider roles and social structure. Movahedi presents it in his classes every October, albeit with a discussion of its shortcomings.

He calls the prison study an “evocative object,” something useful for thinking but not for real data on a research question.

“It’s kind of a little play-acting that makes a point,” he said.

Although Zimbardo calls his study a “drama,” he views it as more than mere theater. He presents it as research from one of the top psychology departments in the country, as evidence for legal cases and debates over U.S. policy. He’s spoken before Congress. He’s called for prison reform. He testified for the defense in the Abu Ghraib guard trials, saying that situational forces just like those in the Stanford Prison Experiment led a good guy to abuse detainees.

Movahedi’s coauthor Banuazizi said he’s disappointed that Zimbardo chose to ignore the criticisms and continue pushing a “glorified” narrative of the experiment.

“In doing so, I believe, he did a disservice to his own reputation and, more importantly, to the field of social psychology,” Banuazizi said.

Unchaining the Stanford Prison Experiment: Philip Zimbardo’s famous study falls under scrutiny
Philip Zimbardo played the role of both head researcher and prison warden in his infamous Stanford Prison Experiment (Courtesy of Stanford Libraries).

Zimbardo responds

Zimbardo has long acknowledged problems with his study, although he continues to defend vociferously against many of the issues raised by people like Banuazizi, Movahedi, Le Texier and Blum. “It wasn’t a formal experiment,” he told Stanford Magazine in 2011. “My colleagues probably never thought much of it.” He says he should never have played the prison warden in his own experiment and wrote early on about the way that he became overly invested in the drama as it unfolded. But he hasn’t budged on the experiment’s core validity.

The conclusions he describes from his experiment today are more qualified than what he expressed in earlier interviews. Faced with accusations of overhype, Zimbardo focuses in on the participants who took their parts to extremes: He points to late-night video that captures guards going far beyond tough talk, directing prisoners to pretend to be camels and simulate sex. He emphasizes now that students varied in their behavior and that the prison experiment showed what could happen to someone under extreme circumstances, rather than what will happen to anyone.

Back in 1971, Zimbardo told The New York Times a more sweeping story.

“It is clear that almost anyone put in a certain kind of situation can be made to behave toward other human beings in a demeaning and brutal fashion,” he said.

“In the beginning it was overstated, and probably even from me,” he said when asked about the surety of that quote. “I was too close to it.”

Critics say that Zimbardo is still in denial about the nature of his experiment, and Blum’s piece published on Medium this June presents a host of issues to answer for. One prisoner says that his much-publicized mental breakdown was actually a ploy to leave the experiment early and prepare for the GRE (he joined the study thinking he’d be able to spend the day reading). Others recall trying to quit the experiment, only to hear from Zimbardo that they couldn’t leave – a story supported by a recording, despite Zimbardo’s denials. As for Zimbardo and his fellow researchers’ claims that guards slipped organically into their roles, Blum points to audio of a researcher instructing a guard to treat prisoners more sternly. “I was given the responsibility of trying to elicit ‘tough guard’ behavior,” the researcher writes in his notes.

Zimbardo’s nearly 7,000-word response to his critics, posted on his website devoted to the Stanford Prison Experiment, dismisses the various charges against his study. He points out that he’s the one who put all his experimental materials in public archives — providing his critics with their ammunition.

“The key is, as I say in my response, nothing is hidden,” he said.

Researchers who guided guards were just trying to make sure reluctant students participated in basic tasks, Zimbardo says. A study by two British researchers – often cited as a failed attempt to replicate the Stanford Prison Experiment – differed from the prison study in key ways. Participants were filmed for broadcast on a BBC TV show, something Zimbardo argues would surely warp results. And the prisoner who now claims he faked his breakdown? His account can’t trusted, Zimbardo says, given that he told a story of a genuine mental crisis when interviewed for a documentary back in the 1990s: “The Stanford Prison Experiment was a very benign situation, but it still caused guards to become sadistic [and] prisoners to become hysterical,” he said at the time.

Archival materials paint a more complex picture of the prisoner’s exit. In raw video that was edited out of the documentary, the prisoner also states that he acted up in order to leave the experiment. Back in 1971, he told researchers that he “made up several schemes whereby [he] could get out. The easiest one … was just to act mad, or upset, so I chose that one.”

Even the prisoner said he was unsure how exactly to view his exit from the study. Act and real emotion were muddled for him, he explained.

“The big thing, I couldn’t decide whether the prison experience had really freaked me out, or whether I induced that freaked out thing,” he says in an tape labeled “Final Reactions to the Experiment.” “Even while I was being upset, I was manipulating and I was being upset.”

Zimbardo’s public response does not explicitly address all of French author Le Texier’s specific criticisms. Neither does much of the prison experiment’s recent discussion in the media; U.S. coverage of Le Texier’s work has been minimal.

“It looks like the truth is not interesting if it’s not written in English,” Le Texier wrote in an email to The Daily, adding that he sent Zimbardo an earlier version of his paper in April. He contends that Zimbardo focused on some of Blum’s points because they’re not always anchored in documents from the archives. Testimony from participants nearly 50 years later is not nearly as convincing as recordings and contemporaneous notes, Le Texier said.

The archives, for example, clarify that guards knew what outcomes the experimenters were hoping for, Le Texier writes in his paper. On orientation day, Zimbardo told his recruits that his grant was meant “to study the conditions which lead to mob behavior, violence, loss of identity, feeling of anonymity.” Le Texier also notes that some guards spoke or wrote to researchers of seeing themselves as experimental aids rather than subjects – people helping the scientists study prisoners’ reactions.

Zimbardo declined in an email to respond specifically to Le Texier’s points, referring The Daily to his lengthy public statement.

Another one of Zimbardo’s rebuttals to his detractors involves an opinion piece published in The Stanford Daily in April of 2005. In the op-ed, Carlo Prescott – an ex-convict who served as consultant on the prison experiment – slammed Zimbardo and Maverick Entertainment, the production company behind the final iteration of the Stanford Prison Experiment movie. Prescott takes credit for several of the discipline techniques used by guards in Zimbardo’s study, like covering prisoners’ heads with bags.

The problem, according to Zimbardo: Prescott never wrote the piece. Zimbardo instead pins the op-ed on Michael Lazarou, a producer who lost the rights to a movie about the prison experiment and who Zimbardo theorizes wanted to get back at him.

“It’s white boy’s language, it’s not the language of the ghetto,” Zimbardo says to explain why Prescott, who is African-American, couldn’t have written the critical article. Zimbardo’s online response puts the claim less bluntly: “The writer had a very distinctive legalistic style and vocabulary, not at all like Carlo’s,” he writes.

Zimbardo has rounded up other evidence, but the truth of the matter is unclear. Seeking a retraction of the op-ed this summer, following broader public criticism of the experiment, he offered The Daily corroboration from Brent Emery, the Stanford Prison Experiment movie’s producer. Emery provided emails from 2005 in which he says Prescott denied writing the piece. In an email this summer to The Daily’s editor-in-chief, Emery said that Prescott had also told him Lazarou drafted the op-ed for Prescott to sign. Meanwhile, in a recorded phone call posted to Zimbardo’s website this summer, Prescott affirms to the professor’s assistant that he was never involved in the article in any way. The Daily does not have access to its op-ed correspondence from 2005, and opinion editors from the time did not recall details of publishing the piece.

Several months after first raising the issue, in late September, Zimbardo presented The Daily with a typed retraction request that he said Prescott had signed. He told The Daily he drafted the letter. When asked in August about the retraction request that Zimbardo was eagerly pursuing on his behalf, Prescott said he did not want to speak and hung up on the paper’s editor-in-chief.

Contacted while The Daily was still weighing the retraction request, Prescott initially did not respond with comment for this story. Reached by phone on the morning of Oct. 19, after the retraction request was denied, Prescott refused to answer questions and said he did not want to be bothered again.

“I’m tired of being tortured by something that happened in the past,” he said.

“It didn’t pan out for me,” he said at one point, referring to the prison experiment. He repeated the sentiment later: “It didn’t work for me.”

Asked to discuss the retraction request, Prescott hung up.

Later that morning, Zimbardo sent The Daily’s reporter and editor-in-chief an email with the subject line, “DR ZIMBARDO URGES YOU TO CEASE AND DESIST FROM CALLING CARLO PRESCOTT.” Prescott, he said in capital letters, was not well and did not want to talk with student reporters about the Stanford Prison Experiment, “NOW OR EVER.”

“I SHALL BE TAKING THIS CASE TO MY LAWYER SOON,” Zimbardo closed his email.

Lazarou, for his part, denies any involvement with the op-ed and provided The Daily with an email chain from 2006. In the chain, he tells an accusatory Zimbardo that he spoke with Prescott, and that Prescott never denied authorship. In fact, he writes, Prescott recalled sending a similar letter to an LA Times reporter in response to a story on the prison experiment. (The LA Times writer declined to comment).

For Lazarou, the whole episode is an indicator of how much the summer’s events have frazzled Zimbardo.

“From his perspective, I think it’s self-preservation,” said Lazarou, who, with growing alarm, looped in his lawyers this fall after seeing Zimbardo’s accusations against him pop up in a Wikipedia article. “Unfortunately, you can’t make shit up about people.”

Over the phone, Lazarou — like Prescott — projects frustration. He said he’s baffled by ongoing discussions of the Stanford Prison Experiment, baffled that people are still asking him about movie rights he lost more than a decade ago. He’d already been contacted by Blum the freelancer, and now he was on the phone with another reporter, denying authorship of a 13-year-old, student newspaper op-ed that Zimbardo said was borne out of revenge.

“What’s going on?” he said. “Why is this continuing to – why is this still – what’s going on?”

Unchaining the Stanford Prison Experiment: Philip Zimbardo’s famous study falls under scrutiny
A 2005 op-ed credited to Carlo Prescott, an ex-convict consultant on the Prison Experiment, claims that Prescott was behind certain guard behaviors like covering prisoners’ heads with bags. Zimbardo disputes the authorship of the op-ed (Courtesy of Stanford Libraries).

Changing understandings

Despite the heavy scrutiny, Zimbardo’s experiment seems unlikely to leave either the classroom or public discourse.

Chris Farina, who teaches AP Psychology at Palo Alto High School, has mixed feelings about the prison experiment, which he presents to students as a classic example of how a person’s situation can influence their behavior. After reading up thoroughly on both sides of the argument, he doesn’t think he’ll stop teaching the study – or showing his students “Quiet Rage,” a documentary that largely hews to Zimbardo’s side of the story. He’ll just spend more time discussing the experiment’s methodology, probing its weaknesses.

Farina doesn’t quite buy the summer’s headlines declaring the prison experiment a “sham.”

“They seem as overhyped as they’re claiming the Stanford Prison Experiment itself is,” he said. “Does it have some problems with it? Absolutely. But a total sham? I don’t know.”

Some researchers believe it’s time to kick Zimbardo’s prison experiment out of the psychological canon. Simine Vazire, a psychology professor at UC Davis and advocate of so-called “open science” – which emphasizes integrity and replicability in research – marvels that it took the examination of journalists to force a serious reevaluation.

“Psychology wants to be respected as a science,” she said. “And so I think it’s hard to criticize the things that have actually penetrated into the public.”

As cofounder of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science, Vazire has been at the front lines of what scientists dub the “replication crisis” – a realization among scientific communities, including the psychology community, that many famous findings are not reproducible. With attempts at replication felling more research, the open science agenda isn’t always popular. Vazire said she understands why influential scientists and gatekeepers in her field push back.

She wishes, though, that this pushback took place more frequently in the open.

“Instead what I see happening a lot is people in meeting rooms making decisions, and sometimes I’m in that room with them, and the arguments I hear are not really scientific arguments,” Vazire said. “They’re more about the politics or whose toes are going to get stepped on, and I think those arguments wouldn’t stand up if they were made publicly.”

Popular psychology textbook authors surveyed by The Daily said they are tweaking, rather than cutting, their coverage of the controversial study. The few scientists who keep the study out of their texts said they never included it to begin with. “The study is so obviously methodologically flawed as to be worthless from a scientific perspective,” said one author, Boston College psychology professor Peter Gray.

Several authors felt unable to leave the prison study out, given its cultural cachet. John Mitterer, whose “Introduction to Psychology” textbook already devotes half its discussion of the prison study to criticism, puts the dilemma this way: Should we leave Freud out because his theories have been debunked? What about Jung? “These are all things that are already part of the popular imagination,” he said.

Mary Hughes Stone, a professor at San Francisco State, also won’t stop teaching the prison experiment any time soon. While she believes the study provides valuable insight into human behavior, she said she asks students to think critically and never presents any finding as definitive.

But nuances are often lost in introductory courses, and a student video project on the prison experiment passed on by Stone displays little awareness of the complexities that all sorts of critics, from Banuazizi to Blum, have catalogued. The student sums things up neatly in voiceover as the screen fades to black: “[Zimbardo’s] experiment proved that any person can turn bad under certain pressures and roles.”

Unchaining the Stanford Prison Experiment: Philip Zimbardo’s famous study falls under scrutiny
The Stanford psychology department has not issued a statement on the summer’s controversy over the Stanford Prison Experiment (RYAN COHEN/The Stanford Daily).

Silence at Stanford

Over the summer, as scholars weighed in on Twitter and in the media, one group of psychologists was particularly quiet about the Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo’s colleagues at Stanford. Few have joined the conversation publicly, and the department has no official comment, following guidance from University Communications.

Brian Wandell, a former psychology chair, believes Stanford has “a special responsibility” for ensuring that the experiment it gave its name to is correctly understood. He demurred, though, when asked whether Stanford is doing a good job of this – “no judgments from me,” he says. It’s the same answer he gives when asked whether Zimbardo has been forthright about his study.

“I don’t want to judge people,” he responds. He likens the study to a work of art, something lacking qualities of a true experiment but still instructive. He saw Zimbardo’s response to the criticisms – emailed out to all the Stanford psychology faculty – but he says he’d need to go back and spend more time on it to weigh in.

“We know there’s no control group,” Wandell added later. “It’s an event. It’s a demonstration. And Phil in his own self-description always said about himself that [was] what he was good at – he was good at demonstrations.”

Wandell is far from Zimbardo’s area of expertise, social psychology. He spends his days thinking about magnetic resonance imaging and how pictures form on the back of the eye. And so, early in the summer when Blum’s article came out, Wandell turned to his colleagues in social psychology. What did those closest to Zimbardo’s work think?

Wandell says he never got much of an answer. One professor agreed to circle back with him later, when they got a chance to talk in person, but the conversation hasn’t happened yet. Another faculty member was reluctant to dig into the issue.

“He just felt it’s a sad end to Phil’s career,” Wandell said. “So we didn’t go over it.”

Lee Ross, one of only two Stanford professors in Zimbardo’s subfield who agreed to speak with The Daily, has been more vocal on behalf of his longtime colleague. He is one of the few remaining psychology faculty who were present in 1971 when Zimbardo ran his study. Amid all the controversy this summer, he emailed his thoughts out to the entire department, responding to a request from Zimbardo to help him fend off allegations of fraud.

In his note, Ross critiqued the experiment only gently, making a case for its illustrative value. “It showed what could happen and made us all think about exactly why it unfolded as it did,” he wrote. He stresses that the study was an “N=1” demonstration, just one of many possible outcomes influenced by the personalities that Zimbardo and his team happened to recruit.

Ross questions the study’s application to a standard U.S. prison, where employees’ roles are more circumscribed than those of Zimbardo’s guards. Ross believes his colleague’s work applies most fruitfully to situations like Abu Ghraib, where guards were able to use -–and abuse – greater discretion.

“[The study] captured the extent to which people put in positions of authority without clear rules tend to improvise and look to see what they can get away with, does anyone stop them,” Ross said.

When Blum’s article came out, Ross said, Gordon Bower – the other Stanford professor who briefly glimpsed the prison experiment firsthand – wrote to him. ‘Should we do something?’ They wondered. Should the department publish a defense? (Bower says he does not recall this conversation). Eventually, Ross said, they agreed that a coordinated Stanford statement would be inappropriate: “Some of us know the situation well and some don’t; we should be free as individuals to say whatever we want to.” Bower wrote a public testimonial to his friend’s character; Ross emphasizes that his colleague is a “serious scientist” with many important textbook and research credits. The department, though, stayed silent.

 

The showman

One word comes up repeatedly when people describe Zimbardo: “Showman.”

His fame is entwined with his ability to captivate public attention with his work, setting his sights on not only journals but also TED Talks, late night shows and Congressional hearings. For many admirers, this showmanship is a strength that helped Zimbardo fill classrooms and draw students to his field: Zimbardo taught his courses with the same theatrical flair that characterized his prison study, from the hypnosis demonstrations to the blaring music that opened each class and that Zimbardo selected to match his subject matter. A lecture on memory might begin with Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were,” a class on the prison experiment with Santana’s “Evil Ways.”

The academic world can be suspicious of those who cater readily to a general audience. One former Ph.D. said that in a way, Zimbardo was ahead of his time – a zealous communicator who sought out wide impact long before the likes of Malcolm Gladwell led more academics to embrace popular science.

But Susan Brennan Ph.D. ’90, now a psychology professor at Stony Brook University, suggests Zimbardo’s ambitions were not so out of step with those of the department. Yes, Zimbardo was a showman, “But we were being trained to be a certain kind of impactful scientist,” she said.

As a graduate student at Stanford in the late ‘80s, Brennan recalls being coached by other faculty in the art of presentation to a general audience. “They would say, ‘Well this is all well and good, but it’s just not very interesting, you need to be upfront about the interesting part,’” she said. “‘You don’t need to present all the details.’”

“That’s true in a good talk,” Brennan said, but in a research report it’s crucial to share the nitty-gritty elements that allow others to reproduce your work.

“I’ve since come to believe that it’s super, super important to be careful about the message you convey,” she said. She thinks her field’s mindset is shifting similarly amid hand-wringing over failed replications, although she’s bothered by certain trends, like popular journals’ publication of quick-read articles with “gee-whiz findings” but few details. “I don’t like it, in general, when the need to be a showman outweighs the need to be accurate and precise and to craft a message appropriately.”

Zimbardo’s CV is lengthy, his publications in the hundreds, his research spanning everything from shyness to how our concepts of time influence our thoughts and behavior. Much of his work, Brennan says, is respected and well-replicated.

However, having studied experimental design and the way that even an experimenter’s gender can alter the way subjects behave, she has little confidence in the prison study’s results after reading this summer about details that never made it into the standard story.

“If you tell an undergrad what you’re expecting, even if you signal it without telling them, most of them will try to give you what you want,” she said.

Brennan’s most vivid memory of Zimbardo, from back when she worked as his teaching assistant, involves butting heads with the professor when she felt that his efforts to entertain during a lecture became inappropriate. Older than most of her peers and emboldened by her pre-Ph.D. years working in tech, Brennan said, she emailed Zimbardo to suggest changing some images on presentation slides that she thought could come across as sexist.

She says she remembers one slide in particular, of a blonde woman posed provocatively on Stanford’s campus, that struck her as problematic – it was meant to jokingly illustrate why Zimbardo came west to the University. By Brennan’s account, Zimbardo replied to her email on editing the slides along the lines of, “not necessary.”

Zimbardo denies responding that way and said that, on the contrary, he used the slide as launchpad for discussion before cutting it. By his account, he mentioned the issue during his next class, asking for a show of hands to indicate who found the slide offensive and inquiring why no one else had challenged him to remove it. “I would have been impressed if he had [done that],” Brennan said – she says the discussion ended with Zimbardo’s email.

As a teacher, Zimbardo recounted, he regularly encouraged students to speak against him and spent 10 minutes of class time each week on an “open microphone” session in which class members could criticize anything he’d said.

“That’s something I did which was unique,” he said.

Zimbardo takes issue with the “showman” descriptor and its potentially critical implications. Holding a large lecture class’s attention and making students care about your material is hard, he said. There’s nothing wrong with being an entertainer.

Several former Ph.D.s felt the same way, praising Zimbardo’s compelling presence in the classroom. He was a beloved teacher to many: Emailing the professor after this year’s homecoming weekend, one alum recounted that, when asked to sum up their Stanford experience in a word, some people volunteered the name “Zimbardo.”

“His undergraduate introductory psychology classes were so popular that at one time there was some discussion about whether they could be held in the football stadium,” wrote Craig Anderson M.A. ’78 Ph.D. ’80, now a psychology professor at Iowa State University, in an email to The Daily. “Stanford University has benefited greatly from having him on the faculty.”

And Zimbardo is open about his desire to rivet audiences.

“I’m always thinking of, how can I frame it, how can I say it so my mother would say, ‘you know what, that’s interesting,’” he said in the Stanford News video marking his farewell lecture in 2007. “It’s important to get it right. But to me, it’s equally important to make it interesting. And in academia there’s not as much value on making things interesting.”

“There’s not the world of academia and the general public,” he added. “It’s people. People with different levels of education, people with different levels of interest, and I want to reach the world.”

Psychology, and in particular social psychology, offers research findings with broad appeal and applicability to everyday lives: It tell us that we can achieve our goals with a “growth mindset,” that children mimic violence they see on TV, or that we view rudeness as a sign of power. But Wandell, the former psychology chair, thinks the desire for great impact is a common denominator at Stanford. “We like to think of ourselves more than most universities do as a university that thinks hard on topics that matter,” he said.

“When we fail, we can fail pretty big,” Wandell added. “And when we succeed, we succeed big.”

Unchaining the Stanford Prison Experiment: Philip Zimbardo’s famous study falls under scrutiny
Zimbardo and his fellow researchers turned Jordan Hall, Stanford’s psychology building, into a mock jail for their experiment (Courtesy of Stanford Libraries).

Disputed lessons

For the students who responded to an ad for study participants back in 1971, the longevity of talk around the Stanford Prison Experiment is bewildering.

Some participants in the study feel vindicated by Blum, Le Texier and others’ findings. Others are confused at why, half a century later, they’re still talking about something that seemed at first like just another odd summer job.

What memories they still have of the experiment offer something for all sides.

Jim Rowney, an incoming freshman at UC Berkeley at the time of the experiment, signed up to earn $15 a day without any notion that he would participate in something important. He was saving up for a stereo for his room and thought little of the experiment after it ended. He was incredulous when, nearly 30 years later, he got a call from ‘‘60 Minutes.’’

The incredulity grew when the ‘‘60 Minutes’’ reporter began speaking of violence and drawing parallels to Nazi Germany – Rowney remembered the prison experiment as “a crappy way to make 60 bucks.”

By his fifth day in Jordan Hall’s mock prison, Rowney was filthy. His whole stay at the Stanford Prison, he never showered, and the books he’d brought to entertain himself were confiscated. Finally, he wanted out. After asking to meet with someone in charge – he can’t remember whom – he began to cry.

Two other prisoners had left early by then, after succumbing to what Zimbardo and his fellow researchers described as breakdowns induced by the stress of their role.

Rowney doesn’t remember whether he thought the other prisoners’ breakdowns were “real” or not. Regardless, he’s skeptical that his or the other students’ meltdowns show something novel about social roles’ ability to transform healthy students.

“It was more the fact that your privileges and movements and everything else we take for granted was restricted,” he said. “It was very uncomfortable. The beds were uncomfortable. The pillows were uncomfortable. Everything was uncomfortable … It was not quite what [prisoners] expected.”
Who wouldn’t have been upset? he argues.

And yet, Rowney remembers moments when he really did fall into his prisoner role, trying to impress guards with his good behavior. The climax was his “parole hearing” on the fourth day of the experiment. He didn’t even know what would happen if the parole board ruled in his favor; he just found himself appealing with all his might.

“When they started asking questions I slipped right into the role of, ‘Hey, I’m trying to be a good prisoner, can I get out,’” he said.

Unchaining the Stanford Prison Experiment: Philip Zimbardo’s famous study falls under scrutiny
Several guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment have been critical of the study and its findings. One claims he was just acting; Zimbardo says his behavior went “beyond” that (Courtesy of Stanford Libraries).

Dave Eshleman, notorious as the harshest of the guards, is unequivocal that his behavior – key to Zimbardo’s narrative – was a charade. As he told Blum and has long said in interviews, he loved acting and was studying the discipline at the time of the experiment. He says he wanted to give the researchers something interesting to work with; speaking to The Daily, he added that he figured they were spending a lot of money on the study and didn’t want it to go waste. He thinks he might have felt a desire to do “a good job for the boss.”

“Every single day I went in there with the goal of, you know, making it an uncomfortable environment for the prisoners so the researchers would get the results they wanted to get,” he said.

Eshleman doesn’t recall the sort of explicit cues that Blum and Le Texier cite archives for. All he remembers now is that no one stopped him as he pushed into meaner territory. Every day, he said, he would take his act a bit further – and no member of the research team stepped in to say, “tone it down.” “So we took that as approval and support,” Eshleman said.

Eshleman’s claim of acting is swept aside in the 60 Minutes piece. “You’re trying to tell me that wasn’t a natural thing?” the reporter, Lesley Stahl, asks him, her voice skeptical. Interviewing Zimbardo later, she asks him what he makes of Eshleman.

“My sense is that’s a level of sadism that goes above an acting role,” Zimbardo says. “The belligerence, the having them to do pushups, the sit-ups, cleaning toilet bowls, it goes beyond the constraints of the role.”

Zimbardo’s response today is similar, and he points in particular to Eshleman’s sexual degradation of the prisoners at the climax of the study, right before it was called off. Eshleman, who called this moment the guards’ “ultimate escalation” after “several days of dreaming up news tactics,” said he and his friends drew inspiration from films and fraternity hazing; again, he claims it was all to help the researchers. “With that mindset, you might imagine why few considered whether their actions were ethical,” he wrote in an email.

For Zimbardo, the prisoners’ humiliation is evidence that Eshleman’s role has warped his behavior.
Critics, on the other hand, wonder if Zimbardo’s got the interpretation wrong – if what he created was something akin to the equally notorious Milgram experiment, in which experimenters pushed participants to deliver electric shocks to anonymous others. Aggressive guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment went to troubling lengths to please the people in charge, they say.

Experimental archives show that participants viewed their behavior in the study in different ways. One guard responded to a 1973 follow-up survey on the prison experiment by dismissing his actions as “contrived,” while another wrote that the worst part of his experience was the “times when [he] really felt the guard role [he] was playing.”

These days, Eshleman is often asked to speak as a guest in classes. His latest visit was to West Valley College, where his friend is a professor. When the professor announced Eshleman’s visit to her students, they reacted with horror – they thought they were about to meet a psychopath.
“They said, ‘oh my god, he’s a monster,’” Eshleman says. He laughs. “She had to tell them, look I know the guy. He’s very mild, but he’s an actor.”

And yet, Eshleman admits, there’s a certain point at which, as Zimbardo argues, the question of acting or not acting is moot. Psychology professor Ross also contends that, while participants “played their roles as best they could,” it makes little difference to a prisoner — research subject or real — whether a guard embraces the role he is hired for or enacts expectations of it.

A Los Angeles Times article from 2004 quotes Doug Korpi, the prisoner who says he faked his breakdown: “When you see it in their eyes, it doesn’t matter if they say they were just acting,” said Korpi. “They were into it.”

Trust

In March, months before Le Texier’s book and Blum’s article were published, participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment got a curious email in their inbox.

Titled “Invitation to Participate in Survey about Stanford Prison Study,” the email – sent under Zimbardo’s name – asked the former guards and prisoners to spend 45 to 60 minutes answering detailed questions about themselves and the experiment, nearly 50 years later. Stanford Psychology Professor Geoffrey Cohen Ph.D. ’98 and his lab created the survey over several years, in consultation with Zimbardo; Cohen says he wanted to reach out to participants in classic studies to probe the lasting influence of certain experiences.

John Mark ’73 knew right away that he wasn’t going to respond. He said he didn’t want to give Zimbardo anything that he could edit, that the researcher could cut and paste to serve his needs.

“I don’t trust him,” Mark said. “I look at what he did with the experiment. And I think you can edit a lot of things to look completely differently. I don’t even give him the satisfaction of sending him back something telling him I think he’s full of shit … I don’t respond.”

He isn’t the only person to withhold. Cohen said he has yet to examine the study’s results but lamented that just six or seven of some 20 participants replied.

Mark thinks the story of the Stanford Prison Experiment will, in the end, be about the psychology of the researcher rather than the psychology of his subjects. “In the long run, it’s gonna say more about Zimbardo … than what he wrote about before he was questioned,” Mark said.

Mark signed up for the Stanford Prison Experiment believing he would be part of something noteworthy, after a close scare in which he was almost arrested in a foreign country left him particularly sensitive to the plight of prisoners. His sympathies for the underdog made him a dismal guard, called out by name in researchers’ notes for his reluctant performance.

Mark is the guard in the archival recording of a researcher urging a participant to be tougher; he has no memory of the exchange, but he recognizes his voice in the audio.

By the end of the experiment, Mark said, he felt used, angry about the conditions inflicted on participants and the way prisoners and guards were pitted against each other. The longer Mark mulls over those six days from 1971, he can’t help but feel that Stanford, a place he loves, let Zimbardo get away with questionable work. “I think Stanford was Zimbardo’s enabler,” he says. If Wandell believes Stanford has a special responsibility to make sure the Stanford Prison Experiment is properly understood, then Mark believes Stanford’s already been negligent.

Study participants who spoke with The Daily blame the media, too. They said journalists have been as eager as Zimbardo to tell a captivating story, editing irregularities in people’s accounts out of pieces or dogging them for the answers they expect to hear. Eshleman, the guard, recalls telling an interviewer at one point, “You’re asking all the wrong questions.” Rowney, similarly, remembers feeling like 60 Minutes went after Eshleman, drawing out the sinister in his responses.

“I mean, they really made him look bad,” Rowney said.

Even when participants are quoted, their views can be downplayed – as in one 2015 New York Post article that rounded up many critical voices.The reporter spoke to Eshleman as well as a highly skeptical scholar; in her research, she also came across Mark’s disavowals and the Stanford Daily op-ed attributed to Prescott.

All these people are heard out in the body of the piece. But the headline still reads, “Inside the twisted experiment that turned students into evil sadists.”

 

Unchaining the Stanford Prison Experiment: Philip Zimbardo’s famous study falls under scrutiny
Amid the criticism this summer, Zimbardo has continued to make public appearances and promote his work. He’s pivoted from studying evil to studying heroism (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

‘Food fights’

While some participants say the prison experiment has eroded their trust in Zimbardo and the media, Laura Freberg – a psychology professor at California Polytechnic State University and the president of the Western Psychological Association (WPA) – worries about how to acknowledge her field’s “food fights” without eroding students’ trust in psychology as a discipline. She believes these scientific disputes are healthy, a sign that things are working properly. Psychologists are “crabby bunch of people,” she says, and if you can find a room where everyone agrees, something is probably wrong.

But how do you do justice to a finding with many asterisks in the public sphere? Or in an introductory psych class?

“You are walking a tightrope,” she said. “You want people to think that we know what we’re doing. So if we present a conclusion in class, you want the students to have some faith … But at the same time you want to encourage critical thinking and skepticism.”

Freberg is up-front that she’s fond of Zimbardo, having interacted with him in the context of the WPA. Zimbardo’s wife, a respected psychologist at UC Berkeley, will take over as the organization’s head next year. Freberg admires Zimbardo’s career and, in particular, his recent work on cultivating people’s capacity for heroism, his pivot from evil to good.

A researcher with “a lot of respect for the classic studies” who once sparred with her textbook coauthor over whether to include the prison experiment, Freberg says she’s enjoyed watching Zimbardo and his critics parry, although she worries that he’s taken the jabs too personally and that detractors can pile on to the point of viciousness. She wonders if the contentiousness of discussion around the replication crisis might scare younger researchers, who see older professors taking highly personal hits for their work.

“You made a mistake in your interpretation or whatever, so that means you’re not a worthy psychologist anymore – that’s really destructive, and I don’t want that message going out there to younger scholars,” she said. “That’s very stifling, I think.”

In a show of unity, two researchers that have been at odds with Zimbardo for years – the professors behind the BBC prison study with contradictory findings – recently signed a joint statement with Zimbardo and his fellow researcher on the prison experiment, Craig Haney. The statement affirms scientific common ground and backs off personal criticisms, despite Le Texier and Blum’s suggestions that Zimbardo misled the public about key parts of his study.

“We regret instances in which our statements appeared to involve ad hominem criticisms or used intemperate language,” the four researchers state. “Although it is legitimate to debate the accuracy, comprehensiveness, and meaning of research reports, we have no definitive evidence that any signatory of this statement committed scientific fraud or deliberately misled others about their research findings.”

UC Davis’s Vazire, on the other hand, thinks it’s fair to criticize the scientist as well as the finding when it seems the scientist has been negligent. If a researcher is sloppy, she said, “We do have, I think, a lot of discomfort in calling that out.” She thinks critics can stay respectful without pulling punches.

“Some people think you shouldn’t even use their name, you should just refer to it as the Stanford Prison Experiment or whatever – the study without naming the researcher,” she said. “But nobody thinks that when we’re saying positive things about the study.”

“I think there’s this asymmetry that researchers want all the fame and glory and credit that comes with positive attention to their work,” she continued. “But if it’s criticism, even valid criticism, then all of a sudden it’s really important that we keep it completely impersonal.”

Within her specialty, neuroscience, Freberg has witnessed many once-accepted studies be undermined by new advances in MRI technology. The traditionally exorbitant cost of such tools meant that many early experiments built conclusions off of tiny samples of 10 or 15 people – a statistical headache. She’s watched some scientists take blows to their work gracefully: Take, for example, a professor at UCLA whose studies on social exclusion weren’t replicated. The professor had found that a dinner or party snub lights up the same brain circuit that’s activated by the physical pain of, say, whacking your shin.

“That’s a great story, I love that story,” Freberg says. She used to feature it in her textbook. But the research doesn’t hold up. The UCLA professor had to acknowledge the study’s faults, and move on.

Freberg has also watched scientists under fire dig in their heels. “It’s very difficult for people to accept the idea that maybe they don’t have as strong a case,” she says.

“Science,” she remarks later, “is a very human process.”

Zimbardo remains invested in his seminal study’s preservation in academia and popular culture, even as he expresses frustration with people’s fixation on one part of his long career. He said that those he consulted about his official response to prison experiment critics had to continually advise him to tone it down, to meet his doubters in the middle.

But the way Freberg talks, you’d think the Stanford Prison Experiment controversy was just a blip, something Zimbardo can set aside. He hasn’t shied away from public appearances following the furor over his early work. His alumni weekend lecture in October drew 300 audience members, and his Twitter account promotes recent and upcoming visits to everywhere from Abu Dhabi to Sigmund Freud University in Vienna. The former American Psychological Association head is a star at conventions and talks, sitting for hours to give autographs.

He’s slated to speak at the WPA’s annual conference in April.

“Come on down to Pasadena,” Freberg says. “We’re gonna have a good time, and you can get a selfie with Phil Zimbardo.”

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

This article has been updated with additional comments from Lee Ross. The piece has also been updated to attribute the idea that Michael Lazarou wrote an op-ed for Carlo Prescott to sign to a phone conversation with Prescott described by Brent Emery.

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Student communities convene for midterm election watch parties https://stanforddaily.com/2018/11/07/student-communities-convene-for-midterm-election-watch-parties/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/11/07/student-communities-convene-for-midterm-election-watch-parties/#respond Wed, 07 Nov 2018 09:39:41 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1146423 Two years after Trump’s victory shocked a left-leaning campus, students said the evening’s outcomes were largely expected, even as they mourned results in certain high profile Congressional races.

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As midterm results unfolded on Tuesday night, students held watch parties around campus to observe an election that is widely considered a referendum on President Donald Trump and his leadership of the Republican party.

Two years after Trump’s victory shocked a left-leaning campus, students said the evening’s outcomes were largely expected, even as they mourned results in certain high profile Congressional races.

After 2016’s upset, people are “more realistic about what’s likely to happen,” said Tinuola Dada ’19, who spent Tuesday evening at Stanford in Government’s (SIG) watch party in ZAP. She thinks students have become more engaged in politics since the presidential election.

“A lot of people don’t pay attention to the midterms,” she said. “Even if you don’t show up to something like [a watch party], it’s very expected that you vote in the midterms, which for our demographic has not historically been the case.”

Mixed reactions

The SIG gathering — traditionally one of Stanford’s largest election-night events — drew some 40 students who alternately booed and cheered over Pizza My Heart as results came in. No one was particularly surprised by Democrats’ House takeover or Republicans’ continued hold on the Senate after weeks of similar predictions from pollsters. Attention focused instead on several Democratic candidates across the country: Beto O’Rourke’s longshot campaign to unseat Republican Senator Ted Cruz, and Stacey Abrams’s and Andrew Gillum’s Democratic bids for governor in Georgia and Florida, respectively.

Texan Isaiah Drummond ’20, SIG’s Co-Director of Diversity and Outreach, was particularly excited about O’Rourke’s candidacy — and disappointed when analysts began calling the Senate race for Cruz. He wasn’t alone: Members of Stanford’s sizeable Texas population planned a “Texas Flag Rager” to be held in White Plaza if O’Rourke beat the odds and won.

Bring your Lone Star flags, your Whataburger table numbers and your thickest southern cotton UT shirt,” the organizers wrote in a Facebook event posting. “Stupid-loud Cotton Eye Joe. Californians are not welcome, and we will be checking state IDs.”

Despite O’Rourke’s loss, Drummond was encouraged by the fact that O’Rourke — who would have been the first Texas Democrat elected to the Senate in 30 years — came within three percentage points of Cruz and bolstered liberal candidates across the state.

“If you look closely at the U.S. House in Texas, you can see a lot of it was galvanized by the Beto campaign,” he said. “A lot of seats that are traditionally Republican have switched over.”

While conservatives are a minority on campus, they have also been invigorated since the 2016 election. The Stanford College Republicans’ (SCR) watch party on Tuesday was a testament to their growing numbers and their influence on the campus political scene; about 30 students came to Potter House lounge, up from the 13 students who gathered two years ago in Lantana and expressed surprise at Trump’s victory.

“I would say that the mood in the room is very good,”  SCR treasurer Ben Esposito ’21 said.

According to Esposito, the Republican crowd was watching many Midwest races closely — including the candidacy of Stanford alum and Republican Josh Hawley ’02, who defeated incumbent Claire McCaskill for a Missouri Senate seat. Speaking to The Daily early on in the evening, he called the results so far a “mixed bag” but drew attention to the polarizing role of Brett Kavanaugh’s contentious Supreme Court confirmation leading up to the midterms.

“Every single red-state Senator who voted against Kavanaugh lost,” Esposito observed.

Esposito and SCR President John Rice-Cameron ’20, upon seeing The Daily’s reporter attempt to take a photograph of the organization’s gathering, charged at her, insisting that photographs could not be taken at the event without the consent of all of the individuals pictured. Speaking with the reporter outside the watch party and without Rice-Cameron present, Esposito asked that he personally witness her delete what she had photographed of the watch party.

In October, a SCR “Change My Mind” tabling event in White Plaza made headlines after Rice-Cameron alleged that Melinda Hernandez ’21 shoved him. Hernandez, on the other hand, said that she had only touched Rice-Cameron on the chest after he refused to stop video recording her. Rice-Cameron did not ultimately press charges.

White Plaza, a public space on campus, legally allows for visual recording (but not audio recording) without the consent of all parties involved, according to First Amendment legal expert Jim Wheaton. Though the College Republicans’ watch party occurred in a student residence rather than a University-designated “free speech area” like White Plaza, it was sponsored by a Voluntary Student Organization open to all students, and was well-attended by both College Republicans members and generic Potter residents.

At the end of the night, SCR told The Daily in a statement that while they were “disappointed” to see the Republican loss of the House, they were “glad to see that the House Freedom Caucus should retain its strength and that the resulting Democrat majority should be fairly weak.” The College Republicans also celebrated the GOP’s success in the Senate, including against those they called participants in “the partisan madhouse known as the Kavanaugh hearings.”

Meanwhile, the Stanford chapter of the International Socialist Organization took a broad view of the election outcomes, focusing on future organizing.

“No matter what the results are, we need to build an independent socialist left to fight against capitalism and the far right,” a representative wrote in a message to The Daily.

The Stanford American Indian Organization (SAIO), which hosted a watch party at the Native American Cultural Center lounge, expressed excitement for the election of the first two Native women to Congress. However, the group emphasized “the work that still needs to be done in this country” to adequately represent indigenous peoples’ interests.

“By continuing to have our voices heard through representatives like Sharice Davids, Deb Haaland and the multiple other indigenous individuals who ran for office, we can hope to restructure the institutions which so often attack our communities,” SAIO wrote in an email to The Daily.

Amid the focus on statewide races, students also eyed results in their home areas. SIG Vice Chair of Operations and watch party attendee Ana Cabrera ’20, who is from Cuba and voted for the first time in 2016 after becoming a U.S. citizen, was happy that Democrats took back two Congressional districts close to where she lives. In the past, she’s been frustrated by a string of Republican officeholders despite what she describes as a growing Democratic wave among young people.

Larger races were more of a letdown for Cabrera, as current Governor Rick Scott narrowly won a Senate seat in her home state. She also referenced Florida governor-elect Ron DeSantis’ controversial ad showing his young children building a wall of blocks in a nod to President Trump’s border wall and immigration agenda.

“I just can’t believe that someone like [DeSantis] was able to win,” Cabrera said. “There’s definitely a lot of feelings of frustration at the statewide level, but I am very hopeful for local elections,” she added.

Casting votes

Christina Li ’21, co-director of nonpartisan group Stanford Votes, stressed the importance of turnout and said she believes her group was successful in raising awareness about the election.

“Hopefully people were able to take action,” she said.

Not everyone made it to the polls, and some students expressed confusion Tuesday about where they were registered to vote. Watching results in the freshman dorm Cedro, Alexander Lerner ’22 admitted that he forgot to send his absentee ballot to Florida.

Other students couldn’t imagine not participating. In Soto, Kevin Li ’22 — an Iowan who has spent hundreds of hours over the past two years canvassing for candidates — said the election “means the world” to him.

“To have it all boil down in one day is such an intense feeling there wasn’t any way that I couldn’t watch this election,” Li said.

Some watch party members at internationally-themed Hammarskjöld​ House, or Hamm, were unable to vote in the elections because of their citizenship. But they still followed races closely, conscious of the broader impact of U.S. politics.

Brigitte Pawliw-Fry ’19, an international student from Ontario, Canada who helped organize the watch party, said she saw the event as one piece of a larger effort to immerse Hamm residents in different perspectives on timely issues. Pawliw-Fry noted that the citizenship status of Hamm residents ranges from non-citizens to first-generation citizens, including people granted citizenship just a few months ago.

“I’m not able to vote but feel very implicated in this because, as Canadians, we’re super affected by what the U.S. does,” she said.

About 15 people joined the watch party at its peak, Pawliw-Fry said. Co-organizer Sima Biondi ’19 believes one deterrent to watch party attendance was Trump’s victory in 2016.

“People know a bit more about this election and care about it a little bit more, but it’s also hard to watch given the trauma of two years ago,” she said. “People just don’t really want to see it.”

Biondi and fellow watch party co-organizer Katherine Irajpanah ’19 both reported voting in the election. Although Pawliw-Fry could not vote, she noted her excitement to see about 1.5 million felons who have served their sentences receive the right to vote with the passing of Proposition 4 in Florida.

“For me, it’s really exciting to get to engage with international students as well people who haven’t registered to vote, to get to share this very exciting process for democracy,” Irajpanah said.

 

This article has been corrected to note that Ana Cabrera ’19 criticized a campaign ad for gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, not senatorial candidate Rick Scott. This article has also been updated to describe the distinction between White Plaza, a University-designated “free speech area,” and the Potter lounge, an inside area accessible to all residents and other students. It has also been updated to clarify that Ben Esposito did not originally know how many photographs the reporter had taken at the SCR event, and that he spoke with the reporter outside the lounge after the dispute over the photography. The article has also been updated to clarify that Democrats took back two Congressional districts close to where Cabrera lives. The original article noted that Democrats took back “several” districts, but it did not provide a number. The Daily regrets these errors.

 

Shirley Cai, Richard Coca, Patrick Monreal and Cooper Veit contributed to this report.

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu, Holden Foreman at hs4man21 ‘at’ stanford.edu and Erin Woo at ekwoo ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Fraught mascot https://stanforddaily.com/2018/09/20/fraught-mascot/ Thu, 20 Sep 2018 18:31:40 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?post_type=tsd_magazine_post&p=1143259 The pin was vulgar beyond words — a grinning UC Berkeley bear, bent over what is meant to be an Indian, a half-clothed, black-braided man whose blobby shape resembles a Dino nugget. This wasn’t vintage memorabilia, someone’s token from their college days back in the 60s when Stanford’s mascot was still the Indian. This shiny […]

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The pin was vulgar beyond words — a grinning UC Berkeley bear, bent over what is meant to be an Indian, a half-clothed, black-braided man whose blobby shape resembles a Dino nugget.

This wasn’t vintage memorabilia, someone’s token from their college days back in the 60s when Stanford’s mascot was still the Indian. This shiny game-day pin was new.

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A pin worn by a Cal tuba player at a recent Cal-Stanford game (Courtesy of Dahkota Brown)

That’s what unsettled Dahkota Brown ’20 the most this February after he spied it on the vest of a Cal tuba player. Brown, a member of the Miwok tribe in California, was in Berkeley for a basketball game as part of the Stanford Band, trading with the Band’s Cal counterparts for the mementos they stick on floppy white hats. The Cal tuba player — face reddening as Brown asked about the Indian pin’s story — explained to Brown that a UC Berkeley alumni group makes and distributes the baubles as the Big Game approaches.

Brown proposed a trade: his Aerosmith pin for the alumni handout. The Cal student quickly accepted.

“Afterwards, he told me that he actually felt like a cleaner person without it,” Brown said.

The pin was another addition to Brown’s collection of Native-depicting mascot items that he seeks to “take out of rotation”: pennants, T-shirts and other paraphernalia that he began accumulating back in high school, when he would face off on the football team against the Calaveras High Redskins. The Calaveras fans donned fake headdresses and war paint.

Yelling “Kill the Redskins” and “Scalp ’em,” the home crowd didn’t feel so supportive.

The same month that he encountered that Stanford Indian pin, Brown was named the Stanford Tree. For the next year, he would dance in a homemade leafy costume at games as the University’s unofficial but beloved mascot. As the first Native student to win the title of Tree, Brown is cognizant of how his new role resonates with school history. This history helped motivate his run. The slogan of his bid for Tree was a joking imperative: “Make the mascot Indian again.”

Brown’s reclaiming of the Indian mascot is the latest in the old emblem’s evolution at Stanford — its rise, its removal in the early 70s and its resilience on the fringe.

Stanford is often cited as the first Indians sports team in the country, either school or pro, to completely disavow its name. As a movement stirred, some institutions followed quickly: Dartmouth, for example, removed its Indian nickname and mascot only two years after Stanford, in 1974. Other teams held on to their branding for decades. The Cleveland Indians retired their controversial Chief Wahoo icon just this year amid pressure from protestors and Major League Baseball as well as a competing campaign to #KeepTheChief.

The story of Stanford’s Indian mascot is in many ways one of swift, progressive shifts. It’s a story of student activism that made quick gains with quiet tactics in an era of bitter confrontations between protestors and school administrators.

But Stanford’s mascot is also a story of resistance to change: of love for tradition, of opposition both predictable and unexpected, of a racial caricature that keeps popping back up and a dispute about Native American representation playing out around the country. Franchises and student teams — Washington Redskins and Calaveras Highs alike — continue to divide, and one analysis from a few years ago estimated 2,000 Indian mascots remaining in the U.S.

“We used to be the Indians, and now there’s a Native student who is the mascot,” Brown said. “Kind of ironic, kind of funny, but there’s still a very serious issue that lays underneath it all.”

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The Stanford Daily’s book of “Li’l Indian” cartoons from the 1940s (Courtesy of Stanford Libraries)

The Stanford Indians

The Stanford Indian was a belated addition to the University’s identity, officially adopted by student government in 1930 some 45 years after Stanford’s founding. The Indian name grew in prominence under star football coach Pop Warner. “FUTURE MEMBER OF INDIAN TEAM SIGNS UP EARLY,” a Daily headline from 1931 declared. A seven-year-old boy named John Williams had already pledged to play for “the Big Red Machine.”

Stanford’s new moniker was an echo of Warner’s early coaching career. Before Stanford, he headed up the nationally competitive football team at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which became the model for a host of boarding schools built to assimilate Native Americans into white culture (“I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked,” Carlisle’s founder once said). The Carlisle team was called the Indians.

The Stanford Indian may have taken root late, but it would become a ubiquitous — and crowd-pleasing — part of Stanford’s identity. The mascot gained star-power thanks to the odd devotion of a man with no connection to the University: Timm Williams, known to fans as “Prince Lightfoot” or “Chief Lightfoot.” Starting in 1952, Williams spent 20 years as the live incarnation of Stanford’s mascot, chanting and dancing at halftime in a headdress and casting hexes on the Indians’ athletic foes.

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Yurok tribe leader Timm Williams performed for two decades as Prince Lightfoot, the live incarnation of Stanford’s mascot who danced at halftime shows (Courtesy of The Stanford Daily Archives).

Williams was a polarizing figure. He was a Yurok Indian from northern California, a leader-spokesperson for his tribe, who pushed for Native American rights and served briefly as Governor Ronald Reagan’s advisor on Indian affairs (he was fired months after Stanford renounced its mascot). But Williams also eventually found himself pitted against fellow Native Americans who felt that his performances demeaned their cultures.

He showed uncommon devotion to Stanford sports, so loath to miss a home game that he once showed up to dance while recovering from the flu. But he had no alumni or employee ties to the school. No one gave him money; Prince Lightfoot was largely his brainchild and his prerogative. He even paid for his feathered costume and, for a while, his travel to keep up with the teams.

“I have a real feeling for Stanford — it is a great school with great students,” Williams told The Daily 15 years into his mascot tenure. “I like to think, too, that the students appreciate my being at the games.”

Prince Lightfoot wasn’t always controversial. For many, he was beloved. By the late 50s, the mascot even had his own weekly TV show on which he danced, told legends and showed crafts, all in full costume while the Stanford Band played his theme song.

Hal Mickelson ’71 was in the Band as a student, and the Band spent a lot of time with Williams. Mickelson would narrate over the PA system during halftime as Williams performed (“And now Prince Lightfoot will put his hex on the Trojans of USC…”). Mickelson, who visited Williams up in his Crescent City home after graduating, recalled a man whom Band members admired and learned from.

Loyal to his friends and to the University, Williams would come to feel abandoned by Stanford.

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Indian caricatures like these decorated Stanford merchandise until the early 70s, when when the University sought to make its mascot less cartoonish (Courtesy of The Stanford Daily Archives)

‘We were all horrified’

Elissa Patadal ’74, one of the Native students who successfully campaigned against Stanford’s mascot, had barely heard of Stanford when she applied; she thought it was in the Ivy League. So, Stanford’s mascot came as a surprise. About to leave for freshman year, Patadal was watching a Stanford football game in the living room with her family when Prince Lightfoot came out to entertain.

“We were all horrified and terribly embarrassed,” Patadal said. The Prince’s dance was all wrong.

Patadal and her family weren’t the only new Stanford community members who balked at the mascot. A recent push to recruit minority students had brought more Native students to Stanford than ever before in 1970 — that fall, over 20 of them entered a school that five years ago had enrolled a single Native student across all grades. Many of these new arrivals on the Farm saw Prince Lightfoot’s performances as a mockery, a stereotype-laden mishmash of traditions that weren’t all Williams’ to draw on. To them, the “hexes” turned tribal religion into play; the mouth-slapping “woo-woo” sounds were offensive; Williams’ Sioux-style feather headdress was out of place on a Yurok.

Feathers are earned through worthy acts, says Dean Chavers MA ’73 ’75 Ph.D. ’76, a Native graduate student who arrived the same year as Patadal. In all his life, Chavers has been bestowed two feathers — gifts from people who thought his activism was “badass.”

Timm Williams was out on the football field sporting feathers in the hundreds.

“Timm, let’s have some pride here,” Chavers recalls appealing to Williams in a meeting between the man behind Prince Lightfoot and the new Native students, who had just formed the Stanford American Indian Organization (SAIO) and would gather every Sunday in a frame house near the Law School. According to Chavers, the students extracted a promise from Williams that he’d cut out certain aspects of his performance, like the hexes.

But the next football game rolled around, Chavers said, and nothing had changed.

“We went to every home game for all the years we were there, and it was just degrading to watch him out there doing his silly thing,” he said.

Williams and the founders of SAIO had opposite views on what Stanford’s mascot meant for Native Americans. Williams argued that serving as Stanford’s mascot was an honor, something that would elevate Native culture in the public eye. He stuck by this reasoning years after the Indian mascot’s removal, at a 1980 talk on campus that drew mostly yellow-arm-banded opponents — the latest of increasingly implausible attempts to resurrect an issue that University administration had declared closed. Stanford’s Indian was a symbol of courage, Williams insisted at that 1980 gathering.

“We don’t need people shutting us out and forgetting about us,” he told the crowd, adding strangely, “An American Indian would rather be kicked than forgotten.”

Williams found others to back him up in his positive view of the Indian mascot’s impact. A fellow leader in Yurok tribe, Dorothy Haberman, wrote scathingly of the SAIO students in 1972, saying that they are “evidently ashamed of their beautiful Indian blood” and that if they disliked the mascot so much, perhaps they should go find another school. The Native community both within and without Stanford was divided, particularly because of Williams’ role — 107 members of William’s Klamath River Yurok group signed a letter urging the Indian mascot’s preservation.

“We feel, as Indians, we are being crucified by our very own,” Haberman wrote.

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This year, the Cleveland Indians stopped using their controversial Chief Wahoo mascot (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

A national dispute

Today, supporters of Indian mascots in sports point to a Washington Post poll that found nine out of 10 Native Americans say they aren’t offended by the name of the Washington Redskins, whose owner Daniel Snyder has resisted calls for the nearly $3 billion franchise to rebrand (“We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple,” he told USA Today. “NEVER. You can use caps”). That nine out of 10 statistic means that Native opinion hasn’t changed much since 2004, when the Annenberg Public Policy Center conducted a similar survey.

“I’m proud of being Native American and of the Redskins,” a Chippewa teacher from South Dakota told The Post in 2016. “I’m not ashamed of that at all. I like that name.”

Still others echoed Timm Williams’ argument about raising Native Americans’ national profile, or told The Post they simply didn’t care. “The name is nothing to me,” one man said.  

When the NCAA pushed member schools to review potentially offensive mascots in 2005, ultimately banning the Indian, it gave exemptions to several teams that secured the blessing of the Native tribes they were named after. The Utah Utes, Central Michigan Chippewas, Florida State Seminoles and Mississippi College Choctaws all argued that they could use the Indian mascot inoffensively.

“That the NCAA would now label our close bond with the Seminole people as culturally ‘hostile and abusive’ is both outrageous and insulting,” Florida State president T.K. Wetherell said. He threatened legal action before his school was granted an exemption.

These schools say they’ve worked with tribes to encourage more thoughtful use of their mascots and avoid denigrating or mischaracterizing Native communities. Citing the input of the Saginaw Chippewa Chief, Central Michigan University urges fans not to use imitative chants or face stripes (the Chippewas have roots as hunter-gatherers who wore war paint only in rare circumstances).

Indian mascot critics, on the other hand, contend that something offensive to even a minority of Native Americans should be dropped. They also cite a growing base of research on racial representation and the psychological effects of Indians’ portrayals in popular culture.

The American Psychological Association issued a statement against Indian mascots in 2005, citing scientific studies. More findings have followed since asserting that such mascots reinforce racial stereotypes — not in a way that study participants admitted to, but implicitly, in a way that emerged through their mental associations. In a set of studies published in 2008, a team of researchers — two of them Stanford-based, another a Stanford alum — found that Native students’ self-esteem, esteem for their communities and ability to imagine achievement-oriented “possible selves” were all lower after exposure to Indian mascot images.

When European Americans were shown Indian mascots in a different study, they reported higher self-esteem than participants shown a control image or an image of the “Fighting Irish.”

“[Indian mascots are] actually making white students feel better about themselves, which to me is an even more dramatic problem,” said Adrienne Keene ’07, a Cherokee Nation citizen and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University.

Keene, who’s written about mascots on her blog “Native Appropriations,” has become a prominent voice pushing back on misrepresentations of Native Americans. Her Twitter account @NativeApprops has over 65,000 followers.

Despite the opinion polls touted by Redskins fans, Keene thinks the movement against Indian mascots has made headway recently, eroding the “myth” of the often cartoonish depictions as honoring a culture.

And this movement gained an early victory at Stanford.

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Before abolishing the Indian mascot entirely, Stanford replaced the old cartoon mascot with a more “dignified” chief. (Courtesy of Stanford Libraries)

‘The right thing to do’

The early 1970s was no quiet time at Stanford. Opposition to the Vietnam War had galvanized students to bolder action and more open confrontation with their school administration than ever before. The same school year that Chavers and his fellow Native students arrived, a protest against ROTC’s presence on campus devolved into four hours of chaos as students hurled rocks and police unleashed tear gas. A sit-in the next year left dozens injured and $100,000 in damages. Unrest was the norm.

As one Daily columnist reflected in 1975, you could almost miss the Indian mascot’s removal amid all the drama.

But for Bill Stone ’67 MBA ’69 — then an assistant to University President Richard Lyman in a Quad Building 10 newly outfitted with shatter-resistant glass windows — the Native students pushing for a new mascot stood out all the more for their muted tactics. Stone has forgotten many details of that era now, but he can still recount how the students crowded politely into the administration’s lobby area for one of their visits, waiting to make their case to the president. He was used to getting calls from the police chief during lunchtime about activists bearing down on the office from White Plaza: “they’ll be there soon,” the chief would warn.

“They didn’t come and pound on the doors like many student protests at the time,” Stone said of the SAIO students. “They made an appointment.

The students’ arguments were convincing and their goals straightforward, he said. “It was the right thing to do.”

But Chavers says President Lyman was not immediately receptive to the students’ agenda, which focused on the mascot but sought more broadly to carve out a stronger place for Native cultures at Stanford. In their first meeting the fall of 1970, he recalled, Patadal asked Lyman about Indian Studies classes — to which Chavers remembers Lyman saying something like, “If an Indian student comes to Stanford, he has to come on the same terms and conditions as all other students.” The Native American Studies program at Stanford wasn’t founded until 1996, long after its peer UC Berkeley launched a program in 1969.

Lyman writes about his change of heart on the mascot issues in a letter to alumni explaining the Indian’s removal. Initially, he thought the move extreme — why not just revise the mascot? And at first, that’s what Stanford did, ditching its traditional cartoon depiction of the Indian. The Bookstore stopped ordering items with a bulbous-nosed caricature, opting instead for what the University deemed a more “dignified” chief. However, to many Native students’ disappointment, the stocked up merchandise was still available by request.

Even the incremental change from cartoon to solemn profile left some bewildered.

“I’m dumbfounded,” a rep for Governor Time Co. told The Daily after the paper declined an ad for its newly designed Stanford Indian wristwatch. They hadn’t gotten the memo about the mascot’s new look. “We thought that was the Stanford Indian,” the representative added. “This is new to us.”

The student government was also instructed to redesign its paychecks, which featured 10 miniature Indians thumbing their noses.

The next school year, in 1972, 55 Native students signed a petition calling for the Indian mascot to be removed altogether. Even the revised image of the Stanford Indian did their race a disservice, they said.

“People will fail to understand the human side of being Indian,” the petition asserted, “as long as they can choose instead to see only the entertaining aspects of Indian life.”

The petition went to University Ombudsman Lois Amsterdam, who lent her support in a memo to the president.

“Stanford’s continued use of the Indian symbol… brings up to visibility a painful lack of sensitivity and awareness on the part of the University,” she wrote, urging the mascot’s immediate disavowal.

Local and state groups who heard about the motion wrote in with their endorsements. Within a few months, student government had voted 18-4 to drop the Indian, and in April of 1971, Lyman put his authority behind the mascot’s abolishment.

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Supporters of the Stanford Indian mascot took out an ad in The Daily in 1980 to advertise an event on campus with Timm Williams (Courtesy of The Stanford Daily’s archives)

‘Draconian decision’

In her memo to Lyman, Ombudsman Amsterdam was optimistic about Stanford alums’ willingness to leave the Indian mascot behind. Alumni devotion to the school is much deeper than a symbol, she argued: “Surely we do not expect less from our alumni than we do from ourselves; and we should not disparage the alumni by assuming that they would cling obstinately to a symbol of the past whose present inappropriateness has become plainly apparent.”

Some alumni did accept the transition without protest. Others lauded the decision. But still others clung — fiercely. And opposition to a move questioned as “political correctness” came from more than just nostalgic graduates.

For students like Charlie Hoffman ’73 MBA ’76, a former Daily staffer, Lyman’s edict on the mascot was an outrage — not for its shedding of tradition, but for the undemocratic way it changed the face of the school. These days, Hoffman believes the school was right to phase out the Indian. But back then, the mascot question quickly became tangled up in broader resentment toward University politics.

“This was a draconian decision rammed down the students’ throats,” Hoffman said. “Boom, the Indian mascot was gone … In an era where students were trying to have their voice, it was another instance of the University [acting] really, at the end of the day, all-powerful.”

Lyman anticipated the need for some sort of broader input on such a controversial decision, his ex-assistant Stone said, even though administrators and SAIO members argued that representing a race respectfully shouldn’t be a matter of majority-rule. The school formed a committee, which dutifully included representatives from the alumni crowd in an effort to “allow groups … to feel they have been consulted,” as The Daily paraphrased Stone back in 1972.

But diehard Indian fans on the group would later complain that the decision had been made from the start. Despite the decisive vote in student government, nearly 60 percent of the student body as a whole voted to keep the Indian, and a majority of the mail that deluged Stone in the president’s office advocated the same.

Foremost among the mail-senders: alumni. The Buck Club, Stanford’s athletic booster group run by alums, passed a resolution in favor of the Indian, and letters to the administration threatened withheld donations.

“It’s not going to close the school,” the fundraising office told Stone when he queried them.

Certain alumni had already been watching with displeasure as Stanford’s student body became more activist, more liberal, more racially and culturally diverse. Stone recalls laments that Stanford “had been taken over by Communists.” For these critics, the mascot’s removal was further proof of the University’s wayward bent — part of a bigger frustration with Stanford’s trajectory. The Indian issue pervaded the newsletters of one right-leaning alumni group called the New Founders League, even though restoration of the mascot was never one of the organization’s official goals (the League’s 800 members sought everything from ROTC’s reinstatement on campus to an end to affirmative action admissions).

“In terms of alumni support [for the league], there is nothing that has brought out support anywhere near that for the Indian,” Lowell Berry ’24 told The Daily in 1977, five years after the mascot was nixed. “Some of our people would like to drop the Indian issue, but with the support as great as it is, we would be doing our supporters a disservice to ignore it.”

Around that time, Stone became president of the Stanford Alumni Association, and he remembers a distinct weariness in his predecessor toward the challenge of reconciling Stanford’s past and present. Backlash over the mascot change was one symptom of something larger; Stanford, like the rest of the country, was changing rapidly, in ways that some people would never be comfortable with.

The former Alumni Association president “was tired of spending all the time arguing,” Stone said.

The Tree came about as Stanford struggled to settle on an official replacement to the Indian and as a 1975 Daily poll of the student body failed to find consensus. The Band debuted a Tree mascot in jest at that year’s Big Game, having narrowly voted down competitors “Holy Order of Fries” and “Steaming Manhole Covers.” But the Tree stuck. Today it remains the emblem of the Band rather than the University, which reverted to its original moniker the Cardinal.

During all the mascot confusion and even after its resolution, the Stanford Indian persisted in unofficial ways: on T-shirts and Big Game paraphernalia, in defiant newspaper ads and opinion columns.

Years after the Indian’s abolishment in 1972, the Friends of the Stanford Indian was registered as a new student group, while an outside-campus organization of the same name claimed over 2,000 members. The Stanford Band manager complained to The Daily that the Friends’ leader — a Palo Alto insurance executive who bore no formal ties to the University — had tried to offer him money to put the new Tree mascot aside. Meanwhile, the Indian’s most ardent supporters were vindicated when, in the late 70s, Timm Williams snuck back onto the football field to cheers and the war chant drumbeat of the Band.

The University did move to sideline Williams, telling campus police not to let him in the stadium. But that didn’t stop another man in traditional Native American regalia, a member of the Nez Perce tribe invited by alumni, from riding a horse onto the field using a fake pass that police traced back to the Friends of the Stanford Indian.

It didn’t stop people from writing in to the school, hopeful that their mascot would return. “I am still answering letters from alumni asking when the Indian will come back,” Director of University Relations Ron Carlson said in 1985.

And it didn’t stop an alumnus in 1989 from marketing watches, buttons and more bearing a cross-eyed, cross-looking Indian man. He argued that the mascot didn’t have to be divisive.

“Old alums should have a right to be nostalgic,” Robert Fuller ’60 said at the time.  “[The Indians] existed at one point. My attitude is that there isn’t anything racial about it. If I thought there was, I’d stop doing it.”

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Alumni wear Stanford Indian gear at 2012 reunion homecoming (Courtesy of Adrienne Keene)

A ‘dead issue’?

In 2012, 40 years after President Lyman’s administration declared the Stanford Indian a “dead issue,” Class of ‘07 graduate Keene spotted the Indian’s cartoon figure at her five-year homecoming reunion.

She saw it stickered on a traffic cone. On the matching outfits of two different couples. On the white shirt of an undergraduate student who posed for her camera. She saw it right as she arrived on campus, on pins proudly worn by members of the Class of 1962 — fastened to an elderly man’s hat, to a woman’s name tag. “Class of ’62 Reunion — Skin the ‘Cats,” the pins read, a reference to a rival mascot. They showed a naked mountain lion shivering while a cross-eyed, hatchet-wielding Indian in a loincloth holds up its bloody skin.

There was nothing honoring Native Americans in this mascot, Keene thought.

Fraught mascotShe walked away, sickened from the pin-wearing woman who cheerily obliged for a photo. She was too angry to say much, too angry to hear much. Like Brown, the new Tree, Keene was shocked above all by how intentional the artifacts were. They were modern creations, not found souvenirs.

“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, my grandpa went to Stanford and I pulled this out of the basement,’” Keene says.

As someone who helped to plan the reunion, Keene had been heartened to read the Stanford Alumni Association’s rules on the old mascot in her training packet, which emphasized that the Indian was hurtful even if “not meant to be offensive when adopted.” The Stanford Alumni Association does not “fund, use, distribute or condone officials mailings, memorabilia or activities that use the Indian mascot,” Victor Madrigal ’94, director of alumni and student class outreach, wrote in an email to The Daily.

And yet, according to an email about the Indian pins sent to 2012 reunion organizers, someone had found the pins at a class check-in table. With the Class of ’62, at least, the Alumni Association’s guidance on mascots either hadn’t gotten through or hadn’t been heeded.

Madrigal did not say specifically how the SAA handled the incident, only that it continues to make volunteers aware of the mascot policy. The Class of ’62 pins would never be made or given out with the Alumni Association’s consent, he added. (Class representatives did not respond to a request for comment, nor did they respond to Keene when she contacted them back in 2012).

“On rare occasions we have had to address isolated situations,” Madrigal said.

Stanford Indian gear is not common these days. Still, Mickelson, the former Band announcer, swears he can find an Indian sweater, scarf or necktie within 10 minutes amid the tailgate parties at any home game. He hypothesizes that for some alumni, wearing Indian paraphernalia is an act of defiance, “to kind of show that you can’t control ‘em.” But he also understands the devotion that many feel to a tradition.

“There were Stanford fans who were prepared to have Stanford Indians license plates on their cars and markers on their gravestones because they identified so strongly with the team,” he said, recalling fans’ reactions to losing the mascot.

The same month as her  2012 reunion homecoming — the one where she saw so many contemporary tributes to the Indian — Keene received an email from one of her friends on campus, forwarded from a student in the Class of 2014. It was an order form circulating on Stanford chat lists. Stanford Indian apparel was in high demand.

“To meet the overwhelming desire of, well…everyone, I am starting the process to make a new batch of those magnificent Stanford Indian Sweaters that people won’t shut up about,” began the email from Nick Hoversten ’14.

Hoversten says he was a “naive 20-year-old who thought that throwback Stanford Indian sweaters would be cool.” He didn’t get “what the big deal was.” After an initial batch of just 10 or so sweaters piqued both student and alumni interest, Hoversten planned to scale up to 60 for his second order.

He never completed it.

Carly Kohler ’13, a student vocal against the Indian mascot, messaged Hoversten over Facebook. At first, Hoversten says, he went on the defensive, explaining why he didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. But then Kohler explained that she just wanted to hear his side.

“Looking back, I think my initial response of entrenching and becoming defensive is unfortunately typical of what we see happen in these scenarios,” Hoversten said. “What wasn’t exactly typical though, was Carly’s response to that initial response. She was understanding and compassionate, and that allowed us to have a conversation rather than a shouting match — and I ended up learning a lot from her.”

Hoversten and Kohler’s Facebook conversation turned into a lunch. Hoversten went to a meeting of local Native American leaders. Alongside Kohler, he gave talks to Stanford’s Greek community about what they’d discussed — and about why he was wrong to send out the cavalier sweater form, even if he didn’t mean to hurt anyone.

“If I had known how they would affect others,” Hoversten said, “I definitely wouldn’t have made the same decision.”

Growing awareness

Brown, the new Tree, had a tedious but time-honored task this summer: sewing the costume he’ll dance in for the rest of the year. Every Tree makes their own outfit, and while a friend welded the metal frame together, the rest is up to Brown. Each leaf of cloth-sheathed Styrofoam takes him over half an hour to make, he said; he’s hoping to have 70 by the end of the summer.

His favorite leaf so far is cut from a shirt mailed to him by Steven Paul Judd, a prominent Native American artist. Earlier this year, Brown posted an open call for fabrics and designs from the Native community that he could highlight in his creation. Judd responded with “his take on the Incredible Hulk,” Brown explained. The T-shirt he sent shows a Native person reading a newspaper article about a treaty being broken, prompting his transformation into the “Indigenous Hulk.”

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Artist Steven Paul Judd’s envisioning of the “Indigenous Hulk” (Courtesy of Steven Paul Judd)

Brown has spoken out against Native mascots for a long time, starting in high school. His local advocacy led him to speak in Washington, D.C. on the issue and testify before the California State Assembly for the California Racial Mascots Act, which banned public schools from playing as the Redskins.

Just as Stanford led the way in abolishing Indian mascots, California became the first state to enact such a law. The handful of schools affected have been slow to fully phase out their mascots, the Daily Cal reported last fall, and some school officials remain openly disdainful of the change and what they see as the overreaction of a uptight society. The legislation also does not attempt to regulate less commonly condemned team identities like “Indians” and “Braves.” But for the guy who used to listen to the home fans shout “Scalp ‘em,” it’s still a big victory.

The Racial Mascots Act provides “an opportunity for Native youth to obtain an education free from mockery,” Brown said in 2015 after the law was signed into effect.

Brown’s work on Indian mascots, college access and other issues has made him something of a “superstar” in the Native education sphere, said Keene. She sees Brown’s new role as a testament to how far Stanford has come since the days when Timm Williams’ hex-casting Indian was the University’s dominant representation of Native Americans.

“I think it’s really powerful and kind of cool,” Keene says, “that we used to have Prince Lightfoot, quote-unquote ‘dancing’ around the football game — this Native guy in a fake Indian costume playing to the crowd and playing into those stereotypes — and now we have Dahkota, who is a proud contemporary Native person … embodying all of the subversive and irreverent things about being a Stanford Tree.”

Brown hopes to leverage the Tree role to push back on continued use of the Stanford Indian. He’s thinking of making some sort of announcement with the authority of the mascot behind it.

“Like right at the beginning of football season, publishing something as the Tree saying I’m not going to pose for pictures or anything if you’re wearing Stanford Indians gear,” Brown explained. “Just so people are aware.”

Already, the Band is part of an annual “Defend Our Honor” campaign organized by the Stanford American Indian Organization, the group that Chavers and his fellow Native students founded back in 1971. Every year around homecoming, as alumni flock to campus, SAIO distributes shirts meant to focus attention on why the Indian mascot is problematic.

Keene noticed the Band’s show of unity in wearing Defend Our Honor shirts when she was back at Stanford for another Class of ‘07 reunion, this time in 2017.

“It’s not something I think we’d have seen 10 years ago, five years ago,” she said.

Keene is glad the University takes a clear stance on the mascot but wishes that it wasn’t always Native students bringing use of the old mascot to people’s attention. It would be nice, she says, if “other folks could hop in and do that labor,” too.

Still, she thinks she’s seen less of the Indian mascot in recent years. Something, she said, seems to be working.

Meanwhile, another issue has drawn the Stanford Native community’s attention as the University struggles with whether to rename campus buildings and the street of Stanford’s address, erasing references to Junipero Serra. Serra, a newly-sainted Catholic priest, was behind the California mission system that devastated Native tribes. After years of debate and protest among students, and a University committee so hung it had to be disbanded, Stanford announced in September that it would rename two buildings and seek to change its address.

The move to drop Serra’s name, just like the decision to drop the Indian mascot, is largely the work of Native student-led activism. The conversation around renaming strikes at many of the mascot debate’s core issues, with dueling charges of politically correct revisionism and disrespect to an entire people — one more way that, despite the University administration’s assertions back in 1972, the Stanford Indian controversy is diminished but never quite dead.  

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

Olivia Mitchel contributed to this report.

 

Editor’s note: The online version of this article has been updated to reflect the University’s recent announcement that two buildings named for Father Junipero Serra will be renamed. Because the announcement came after our print publishing deadline, this information was omitted from the print version. 

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Trump considers allowing Russia to question McFaul https://stanforddaily.com/2018/07/18/trump-considers-allowing-russia-to-question-mcfaul/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/07/18/trump-considers-allowing-russia-to-question-mcfaul/#respond Thu, 19 Jul 2018 05:08:49 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1142976 President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin discussed the possibility of Russian authorities questioning Stanford professor and former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday.

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President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin discussed the possibility of Russian authorities questioning Stanford professor and former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul ’86 MA ’86, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday.

Sanders said that Trump “didn’t commit to anything” earlier this week in his private meeting with Putin, for which only interpreters were present. However, Sanders said, the president called Putin’s request to interrogate McFaul and 10 other American citizens – in exchange for U.S. participation in the questioning of Russia intelligence officers indicted for meddling in American elections – “an interesting idea.”

Sanders said the president would consult with his team before making a decision. Lawmakers and diplomats, meanwhile, were quick Wednesday to decry Putin’s proposal and Trump’s consideration of it as everything from “outrageous” to “batshit crazy.”

McFaul spoke out as well.

“I hope the White House corrects the record and denounces in categorical terms this ridiculous request from Putin,” McFaul, who served as ambassador in the Obama administration, tweeted. “Not doing so creates moral equivalency between a legitimacy US indictment of Russian intelligence officers and a crazy, completely fabricated story invented by Putin.”

The Kremlin wants to interrogate Putin critic McFaul about “illegal activities” and as a “person of interest” in Russia’s investigation into financier Bill Browder MBA ’89. Browder, once a major investor in Russia, successfully lobbied for U.S. legislation punishing human rights offenders in the country.

State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said she could not speak on behalf of the White House but called the Russian government’s accusations against the American citizens in question “absolutely absurd.”

In a tweet, McFaul said he appreciated the State Department’s response and highlighted the gap between their message and the White House’s.

“Yet again, Trump has one policy towards Putin. Rest of administration has a second policy towards Russia,” he wrote.

Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell said that Trump could be impeached if he turned McFaul over for questioning. Others such as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, California’s Rep. Mike Levin, Virginia’s Sen. Mike Warner and former ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Powers also voiced their support for McFaul.

Some on Stanford campus weighed in too.

The Stanford College Republicans posted critically of Trump on its Facebook page, saying that no diplomat, “current or former, should ever be made available for interview or worse by a hostile foreign power.”

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Editor’s farewell: Journalism as a collective effort https://stanforddaily.com/2018/06/20/editors-farewell-journalism-as-a-collective-effort/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/06/20/editors-farewell-journalism-as-a-collective-effort/#respond Thu, 21 Jun 2018 03:27:39 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1142193 When I first joined The Daily as a high school intern, I was just getting used to the idea that journalists had to call people on the phone.

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When I first joined The Daily as a high school intern, I was just getting used to the idea that journalists had to call people on the phone.

A student who loved to write, I’d stumbled into journalism without a clue what it really was. I imagined people sitting around at their computers, typing furiously — but I hadn’t given much thought to where the words came from. (My school didn’t offer a journalism class, and apparently, I hadn’t watched enough reporting movies). Now, I learned that my success depended on talking a lot with strangers. I spent my summer with The Daily psyching myself up before pressing the “call” button, camped out in all the places where I thought my family was least likely to overhear me — standing outside in the backyard, perched on top of the washing machine in the basement.

These phone calls were my first lesson in journalism as a fundamentally collaborative project — one reliant on a whole lot more than the writer who finally sits down in front of a blank document.

The transformation I’ve undergone since those nervous calls isn’t uncommon, I think, for Daily staffers. Plenty of outgoing EICs have written about The Daily as a profound learning experience. While some of us come in with significant knowledge, others join unsure of what journalism even consists of. My most vivid takeaway: A reporter — and anyone who wants to contribute productively to their community — can’t do much alone. This is clearer to me than ever after spending the last half of this school year overseeing the sprawling process that puts out a paper each weekday and jolts into high gear at breaking news or the arrival of an intriguing tip. The work we put out has all sorts of fingerprints on it; it’s the product of both teamwork within the paper as well as bridges between us and the community we cover.

Looking back at the interviews I’ve done for The Daily, I marvel above all at the faith that was placed in me as part of an institution, a newspaper. Daily staffers are students, not experts. We make mistakes. We learn on the job. And yet, we’re afforded special access to people’s stories and special pretext to probe all parts of campus. Here, I think about the researcher who took a full hour out of his day to explain the science of chimeras to me. The source who worried that speaking to reporters could jeopardize their relationships and their work, and talked anyway. The woman who told me that, decades ago, a Stanford emeritus professor accused of sexual assault had terrified her by literally chasing her around a house. The people who told me things I’ve promised not to repeat.

None of The Daily’s work is possible without the people who open up to us, sharing their perspectives and bringing us into the sides of Stanford and its surroundings that we don’t know about or don’t readily have access to. This is particularly important given that The Daily has a ways to go before we represent the diversity of communities and experiences we seek to cover. When we struggle to tap into all corners of campus and understand all that goes on here, our coverage falls short. When we make a conscious effort to find and gain the input of the people we rarely hear from, it succeeds.

The Daily has also taught me that journalism, at its best, is a group project rather than a solitary one of the kind I imagined back in high school.

Like many freshman writers, I took a long time to warm to The Daily’s community. I showed up to beat meetings to claim my stories, wrote pieces in my room and shared Google Docs with my editors on time (at that point, with both The Daily and my schoolwork, I had yet to learn the magic of extensions). When cross-outs and rewritings popped up on my shared drafts, I felt like I’d done things wrong.

Those early memories of The Daily are eclipsed now by others, of all the times that working closely with other people made journalism more fun, more powerful. Here, I think of the group texts that pinged at all hours of the night with updates from four, five, six people helping to make a story happen (you know you’re a college student when you text everyone at 3 a.m. and hear back right away). I think of the two days before Thanksgiving break when we managed to push out two investigative articles only because we worked in a team. I think of gratefully overhauling pieces I wrote that my peers at the paper looked over — because everyone needs an editor.

I think of phone calls made not from the basement, hidden, but from The Daily’s conference room with other staffers huddled around, eager to hear what was said.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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William Blake and Yayoi Kusama: Endless Myth https://stanforddaily.com/2018/06/18/william-blake-and-yayoi-kusama-endless-myth/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/06/18/william-blake-and-yayoi-kusama-endless-myth/#respond Mon, 18 Jun 2018 20:06:18 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1142433 When I walked into the screening of the movie “Kusama – Infinity,” a handful of people were already there, gathered on the green couches of FloMo, eyes glued to the screen. They were all familiar faces, except for the one woman in the corner, about my mom’s age—wearing casual khakis, and a serious expression as […]

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When I walked into the screening of the movie “Kusama – Infinity,” a handful of people were already there, gathered on the green couches of FloMo, eyes glued to the screen. They were all familiar faces, except for the one woman in the corner, about my mom’s age—wearing casual khakis, and a serious expression as she watched the opening credits. Her name is Heather Lenz, and the film is the culmination of her 17 year documentary enterprise, focusing on the life and works of Japanese artist (and veritable badass), Yayoi Kusama. I had never heard of her, but as the movie continued, I became increasingly enraptured.

It is hard to pinpoint a single work that embodies Kusama, but the movie is aptly titled for a recurring theme in her work. One of her most recently acclaimed pieces, Endless Love, expresses this theme most explicitly: It is a retrospective that displays her “Infinity Boxes,” in which spectators enter a room full of mirrors. In the essay “Doors of Perception,” Mika Yoshitake describes it as “Rooms … meant to be disorienting, with thousands of versions of yourself fragmented and repeated into an illusion of infinite space. There is certainly this idea of losing oneself in the infinite expanse of the universe.” The title of the essay references William Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite. / For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Blake is referring to something he calls Poetic Genius, or “inner vision.” The phrase might now evoke a stereotypically self-indulgent (not to mention vaguely unwashed) image of an “Artist Figure.”  But for these two, this “inner” vision was at some level, literal. As a child, for instance, Kusama was overwhelmed by a vision of flowers, which spread from her mind into the wallpaper, spilling onto the staircase in her home. She became, “obliterated by flowers,” just as Blake often suggest that the spirits intermingling in the margins of his poems are real, if we break through the “cave of the senses.”

The essay “Doors of Perception” does not probe further the connection between Blake and Kusama, other than the titular suggestion of the “psychedelic” or hallucinatory element in these authors’ works. Any other exploration of the relationship has been relegated to the US National Library of Medicine, in which the single essay, “Hallucinations in Art,” discusses Blake and Kusama from a medical, not hermeneutic perspective (Kusama, for instance, was diagnosed with OCD). And while pathologizing their mental states might be helpful to diagnosticians, I think it prevents us from seeing these two as artists, or (might I suggest) visionaries, with a web of elusive, powerful, and surprisingly interconnected existential concerns that extend beyond a diagnosis.

You might know Blake without knowing—his most famous quote (which makes its way around the Tumblr-sphere) is appropriately popular, for it conveys a conviction in his own work: “I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s.”

For Blake, this creation took the form of an elaborate mythological system, involving (among many others) Orc and Urizen, godlike figures, who don’t come directly from any other mythological or religious system. Orc, the force of creative energy, is always in danger of transforming into Urizen, the imposer of law, the embodiment of tradition and Reason. Thus, Creation is always in danger of ossification, as the dynamic nature of making walks the treacherous line between the dynamic, inspired mind (what Blake would call “poetic genius”) and the rigidity of an external world—the world of systems, of institutions. In order to counterbalance this tendency toward systemization, Blake creates a web of characters ever-elusive and ever-transmorphing into one another. This change makes him a difficult subject to, say, write an analytical paper about, and an alluring prospect to the literary theorist.

Kusama is similarly concerned with creation and destruction, spirituality and the soul. However, rather than portray these values in Urizenic or Orc-like characters, her mythology emerges in the nets and dots and webs that have come to permeate her work. They recur in different forms, over time and space.

These webs both “entrap and fascinate” Kusama; she is at once captive to them and responsible for giving them form. And like Orc, there is always the possibility that without expression, they will overwhelm her from the outside in. And so she constantly paints, sculpts, thinks, writes; just as in Blake’s worlds, she she lives in a cycle of “destruction and creation.”

Like any mythology, the webs have an origin story, captured in Lenz’s documentary.

During her flight from Japan to America as a young woman, Kusama looked down and saw “ever-expanding nets on the surface of the ocean.” Like the flowers on the walls of her childhood home, these patterns became fodder for artistic production, and an inchoate version of what would become a famous series of web-like prints.

The plane marks a turning point for Kusama both artistically and culturally; America held promise—it was the land of art, of freedom from the fetters of parental disapproval, the land of Georgia O’Keefe. And yet it came with its own constraints: she was a woman and a foreigner in a world dominated by white men.

The documentary follows Kusama as she diligently “Protested against the close-minded system of art.” And in a way, she was forced to—for it was either protest or go unnoticed. Protesting for her meant persistent appeals to gallery owners and fellow artists; she was known for a “lust for publicity”—the only way to get her work displayed. Her protest was also aesthetic, for she was the first of any artist to work with soft sculpture, with repeated images, and the previously mentioned Infinity Room. These were aesthetically and philosophically original, for they forced the audience into an actively participatory role—you were no longer viewing the art, but necessarily experiencing it (by way of connection, this sort of readerly engagement is also a dominant feature in Blake’s work, often induced by his hard-to-pin-down webs of characters, wily narratives, and not-clearly-related illuminated drawings).

Despite their novelty Kusama’s work generally met with tepid critical reception. And yet, as the documentary slowly and heartbreakingly unfolds, each of these new forms were adopted (whether intentionally or not) in following months by figures like Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, white men, whose repeated, eternally recurring imagery and soft sculpture met with international critical acclaim. The disparity in recognition drove Kusama into a depressive state.

In his time, Blake was similarly overlooked, perhaps more for the fact that he published only handful of his works. Strangely, however, the height of his popularity came in the 1960’s (see: Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, the Doors), just at the time Kusama was at her most prolific, and perhaps most undervalued. And yet his literary themes seem to anticipate her many of the systems of oppression that constrained Kusama.

Originally from London, Blake was also deeply concerned in the formation America, the land of revolution. Written in 1793 (136 years before Kusama’s birth), “America: A Prophecy” is a Blake’s vision of the American Revolution, sparked by the revolutionary energy of Orc. And while he endorses the resistance of a tyrannical oppressor (King George, in this case), his poem is not all that hopeful for the fate of the new country; he disapproved of the slavery on which America was founded, as well as the lack of sexual revolution; worried that this rebellious spirit would fade into yet another tyrannical system.

Kusama was also a visionary in a political sense. She headed many anti-war “happenings,” protests celebrating the human form, even conducting gay marriages in the U.S. some 40 years before it was legalized. These movements gained her publicity and notoriety, particularly in her hometown of Matsumoto, where she was vilified for her radical beliefs, and especially the nude protests she organized, pictures of which her family purchased in order to hide and destroy.

There is an uncanny resemblance between this image and Blake’s depiction of a fiery, revolutionary in his “For Children.” Both figures extend their arms outward in an ecstatic, violently self-liberating motion. And in a way, it makes sense: Kusama embodies the visionary, the artistic energy necessary for revolution, at the same time as she faces the social and political oppression that Blake anticipated would plague America, over 100 years earlier.

The final scenes of the documentary trace Kusama’s recent focus on collage. Many of these, like The Soul Going Back to its Home, are paired with poems, in which she contemplates a sort of Infinite Love, an eternal present, webs connectivity between, and—like with the Infinity Mirrors —the self and other. In one installation, a video shows her reading a poem: “Amidst the agony of flowers the present never ends … I become a stone, not in time eternal but in the present that transpires.” These multifaceted art pieces bring to mind the quote from the book about William Blake: “The important thing to remember is that [Blake] was always writing about the human soul.” The soul comes to represent something of that inner vision, that personal creative spark encapsulated by the two artists’ creations, as well as a shared sense of spirituality—embracing a sort of internal God, what one Blake scholar calls “the Holiness of all Life, The Brotherhood of Man”, and what Kusama might call “My Eternal Soul” or “Infinite Love.”

Lenz ends Kusama’s story with in a heroic gesture: Not only does she gain worldwide acclaim (check out her instagram!), but she is also welcomed back to the hometown that alienated her for her radical views.

And yet, like Blake’s “America,” the the documentary leaves us on a less optimistic note; despite Kusama’s success, us only 3-5% of artists in galleries today are women. In the discussion afterward Heather Lenz mentioned the challenges facing female artists, artists of color, suggesting that filmmakers face the most gender inequality: “Can you name more than one or two female directors?” She asked the room. No one responded.

Even so, there was something redemptively Kusama-esque about Lenz’s perspective and work, which screened at Sundance this year, and which has also gained critical acclaim.

Just as Blake’s text has “The force of a new universe behind it,” Kusama insists that “we all live in our own worlds.” Kusama was relentlessly committed to her own, despite the inordinate opposition she faced. While she lacks the bright wigs and flashy polka-dot gear, Heather Lenz similarly continues her work because she has something she needs to say. She, like Kusama, reminds us of what Blake posited 200 years ago: We create because we inhabits worlds particular to us, and—whether they are Urizen or Birds of the Soul, biopics or analytical essays—if we do not make them, no one else will.

Contact Emma Heath at ebheath ‘at’ stanford.edu. This is Emma Heath’s final article with The Daily (for the time being).

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Sterling K. Brown urges graduates to ‘shine’ by pursuing their calling https://stanforddaily.com/2018/06/17/sterling-k-brown-urges-graduates-to-shine-by-pursuing-their-calling/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/06/17/sterling-k-brown-urges-graduates-to-shine-by-pursuing-their-calling/#respond Mon, 18 Jun 2018 06:33:41 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1142428 Sterling K. Brown ’98 called on graduates at Stanford’s Commencement to let their “light shine” by embracing their strengths and passions for the broader good while not worrying about matching others’ achievements.

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In a high-energy speech Sunday, acclaimed actor and Stanford alum Sterling K. Brown ’98 called on graduates at Stanford’s Commencement to let their “light shine” by embracing their strengths and passions for the broader good while not worrying about matching others’ achievements.

“Don’t worry about anybody else’s light,” Brown said. “Don’t try to compare yours to anyone else’s. If you have found that thing, that purpose in life that gives you access to maximum enthusiasm, trust that.”

“I’m not talking about a job, I’m not even talking about a career,” he continued. “I’m talking about a calling — that thing that forces the metaphorical lampshade from your soul and mandates that everyone wear sunglasses in your presence because you just that damn bright.”

Sunday’s ceremony marked the awarding of 1,673 bachelor’s degrees, 2,433 master’s degrees and 1,000 doctoral degrees. After the traditional Wacky Walk parading graduates’ costumes — which mimicked everything from avocado toast to the blockchain — and an introduction from University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Brown took the stage. His speech waxed both serious and funny while drawing on Brown’s Cardinal roots, from his unexpected major choice to the inspiration he still finds in a close friend from Stanford, Andrew Daher ’98, who died young after graduating,

Brown used Daher as an example of the metaphorical brightness that students should aspire to, someone who always did his “absolute best” while also boosting others.

“This dude… stayed with me till damn near the sun came up,” Brown said, recalling a time when Daher helped him on a p-set. “He wouldn’t let me fail.”

Brown kicked off his address with a rousing “Class of 2018, Nerd Nation, how we doin’ this morning? I’m a little hype, I’m a little hype.” First, Brown gave the audience a statement and a question.

He said his speech would include elements of AAVE, short for African American Vernacular English – because that’s what he’s comfortable with, and because he’s “home” talking with fellow Farm community members.

The question: “Have any of you ever been asked to do something that everyone automatically assumes you’ll be great at, but in the back of your mind, you have no idea what you’re going to do?”

He was referring to his invitation to speak at Commencement. Brown’s speech was often self-deprecating, and he emphasized the difficult time he had writing it. He said he ultimately drew inspiration from quotes by what he called his “big three” philosophers: Socrates, Plato and Lao Tzu.

“#StayWoke,” he said after presenting the Socrates quotation “An unexamined life is not worth living.” “Can I get an amen?” he said about another one of the Greek thinker’s sayings, “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.” Brown linked the quote to his own struggle drafting.

“Then I take a breath, and I remember my speech doesn’t have to look like anybody else’s,” Brown said, “My speech is my speech, and they can’t do what I can do, and I can’t do what they can do. So why am I even trying?”

Brown found an unlikely passion for acting at Stanford. He entered college planning to major in economics and go into business, but after encouragement from Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and former drama professor Harry Elam, he became a drama major.

“Students will choose majors not because they love a subject, but because that’s what they’re supposed to do or that’s what will get them a job,” Elam told The Daily earlier this year. “[Brown is] an example of choosing a major differently — [pursuing] something that you believe in, something that you want to work at and are committed to.”

Now, Brown’s starring role as Randall Pearson on the TV show “This Is Us” has won him an Emmy, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award, among other honors; he is the first African-American man to win either of the latter two awards in the categories he was recognized for. As Tessier-Lavigne noted in his introduction, this year the actor also made TIME magazine’s list of 100 most influential people.

Despite his accolades, Brown urged students to avoid perfectionism and treat it as an asymptote, prioritizing process over product: “The journey towards [perfection] is infinite, but the destination can never be reached,” he said.

He also emphasized individuals’ role in a greater good, drawing on a quote of Socrates’ — “I am not an Athenian or a Greek but a citizen of the world.”

“This is nationalism versus globalism, this is very ‘Black Panther,’ right?” he said.

In the course of discussing the philosophers’, Brown related another quote from author and spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson.

“It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most,” he quoted Williamson saying. “We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.”

Brown used that language of light throughout the rest of his speech, urging graduates to be the person that “changes the room for the better” when they walk in — the person who, in Brown’s mother’s words, is asked back.

Brown emphasized that excelling to one’s full potential isn’t selfish, but rather, beneficial to everyone around. We should celebrate others’ success, he said, while not being afraid of our own.

Later, Brown also cautioned against “vilifying people who don’t see the world through the same lens as ourselves.”

“Intolerance is still intolerance, even if it’s for the intolerant,” he said.

Brown echoed Tessier-Lavigne’s earlier advice to students to pursue what makes them feel purposeful, whatever that may be. Tessier-Lavigne described how famed writer and alum John Steinbeck ’23 asked a Stanford professor about the secret to writing a good short story; the professor replied that “a story could be about anything and could use any means and technique at all – so long as it was effective.”

“Just as there is no magic formula for writing a great short story, there is also no magic formula for living a life of purpose and of exploration,” Tessier-Lavigne said.

Brown, whose credits besides “This is Us” include films “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” “Marshall” and “Black Panther” as well as the TV shows “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” and “Army Wives,” reflected on his move to acting as a shift toward the calling that he hoped all the graduates in the audience would find for themselves.

“The desire to illuminate the human condition was always the thing that gave my life the greatest sense of purpose,” he said.

Wrapping up, Brown listed who he “shines” for — his city of St. Louis, his family and friends, Daher and “Chocolate Cardinal” (This wasn’t Brown’s first speech-shoutout to Stanford’s black community: “Stand up, Chocolate Cardinal in house!” Brown called out while accepting his Emmy in 2016).

“Class of 2018, it is your time now,” Brown finished. “Take your light and show us the way.”

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu,

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Knowles: Average is underrated https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/27/knowles-average-is-underrated/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/27/knowles-average-is-underrated/#respond Fri, 27 Apr 2018 12:12:12 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1140168 Pursuing challenge in our academic home territory comes easily to us. We’re eager to push ourselves in the areas we already have aptitude in. It’s harder, in our four short years at Stanford, to prioritize challenges outside our areas of strength.

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Here’s my standard response nowadays when people ask me what I’m studying:

“English, but I’m seeing what else I can cram in.”

As senior year approaches, I’m feeling an urgency to fit everything in — to use my remaining units to the max. I think this is pretty natural for students facing down their last few quarters at Stanford. But I’m also trying to make up for time I wish I’d spent a bit differently: I regret not leaving my academic comfort zone earlier and more frequently.

To be sure, there are plenty of ways to challenge yourself at Stanford without striking out into fields unfamiliar to you. As an English major here, I’m thinking of the short story drafts that got ripped apart by an unusually honest and unfailingly helpful workshop teacher; I’m thinking of the critical readings that I’ve annotated with more question marks than comments, knowing I’ve only digested a fraction of a complex argument.

But I think that pursuing this kind of challenge — challenge in our academic home territory — comes easily to us. We’re eager to push ourselves in the areas we already have aptitude in. We want to build on our strengths — and that’s great.

It’s harder, in our four short years at Stanford, to prioritize challenges outside our areas of strength.

Freshman and sophomore years in particular, I hewed largely to the subjects I was more comfortable with (my riskiest academic move sophomore year consisted of signing up for CS 106A). What held me back was, for the most part, nervousness. I was nervous about studying something that I thought I’d be mediocre at; most of all, I was nervous about doing that at a place like Stanford, where each major is filled with people who have been achieving incredible things in their fields, often for a long time. I enrolled in 106A with a real fear that I just wouldn’t be cut out for coding in Silicon Valley’s feeder school. I was ready to take the course credit/no-credit before I’d even looked at the syllabus.

Being just average at something — or decidedly below average — is underrated, particularly here. Being toward the middle or the bottom of the bell curve keeps you on your toes. It means you have to work extra hard. It means that, whatever happens, you’re going to learn. The fact that Stanford’s swarming with people at the top of what they do is an amazing gift, but it also presents a special danger because it’s easy to convince ourselves to give up on something before we’ve even tried.

In high school, we had to take every subject, even the ones we weren’t as great at. Not so at Stanford, where WAYS general ed requirements are well-intended but minimal and tempting to treat as just another hurdle to jump over, a space to fill with easy units. I love the freedom of college as much as anyone else, but I also see how this freedom gave me permission to pull back on subjects out of apprehension about my skills or my workload or both.

If I could go back in my academic career, I’d think less about what I’m capable of and more about what I want to be capable of.

How lucky that I’m here for another year.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

This piece is part of the Vol. 253 Editorial Board’s Admit Weekend series. Read the rest of the editorials here.

 

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Two poems by Jacob Langsner https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/20/two-poems-by-jacob-langsner/ Fri, 20 Apr 2018 07:54:43 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?post_type=tsd_magazine_post&p=1139774 Stuck in my Head Yellow light Lasers – daisies – Budding, implicit In thin air – blooming In a bed of powder – white Silk upon your upper lip, Fertilizing growth – Feeding lust – With a sharp inhale – A breath of fresh air, And signal to my fingers – The roots at your […]

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Stuck in my Head

Yellow light
Lasers – daisies –
Budding, implicit
In thin air – blooming
In a bed of powder – white
Silk upon your upper lip,
Fertilizing growth –
Feeding lust –
With a sharp inhale –
A breath of fresh air,
And signal to my fingers –
The roots at your hips –
Grow deeper.

A change in light
From yellow
–
Daisies –
To green

 

To Be a Giraffe
Or, a Tall Order

A prayer to nature’s altar –
Greatest feet,
On the ground, of course
And head in the clouds
And heart in-between –
Unseen,
And herd
Pumping through our common vein
Liquid courage, bitter
Blood
And a wish –

For honest time
I ask the gentle giant,
drowned in former pleasures –
final breath,
indulgent in the promise
of something more, fulfilled –

Honest –
 Not words, but written, still
In time that moves like honey,
And hands around another
Moving all the same

A laugh is mine
Is yours, a moment
Is ours –
Reflected, absent –
A synchronized exhale
And goosebumps

Or just a neck
Strong enough to stick out
but not so long
that I trip
and lose my head.

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1139774
University responds, students petition after proposal for plaque quote draws scrutiny https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/31/university-elaborates-students-start-petition-after-dispute-over-plaque-at-turner-assault-site/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/31/university-elaborates-students-start-petition-after-dispute-over-plaque-at-turner-assault-site/#respond Wed, 31 Jan 2018 08:29:47 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1135831 Stanford proposed the quote “I’m right here, I’m okay, everything’s okay, I’m right here" as one of several options to adorn a plaque at the site of Brock Turner’s sexual assault, the University has confirmed.

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Stanford proposed the quote “I’m right here, I’m okay, everything’s okay, I’m right here” as one of several options to adorn a plaque at the site of Brock Turner’s sexual assault, the University has confirmed.

Last Wednesday, the Fountain Hopper blasted Stanford for proposing the phrase “I’m okay, everything’s okay,” a selection that law professor Michele Dauber — a family friend of Turner’s victim who proposed re-landscaping the area of the assault — likewise criticized, calling it “out of context.” 

The University initially said it could not comment because communications between Stanford and representatives of the victim, known publicly as Emily Doe, were confidential. However, the University later released some details of the exchange, including three quotes proposed at one point by Stanford as options for the plaque, which was intended to display words from Doe’s statement to Turner upon his sentencing.

The University made the suggestions after Doe’s initial proposal of a quote that the University objected to. Doe followed up with another quote and ultimately withdrew from the plaque’s creation after Stanford rejected that one. The plaque was to be part of a marker near Kappa Alpha, where the University last year replaced the area of Turner’s crime with benches and a fountain.

The quote that came under the Fountain Hopper’s scrutiny comes from a passage in Doe’s letter in which she describes putting on a more cheerful face for her sister in the wake of the assault.

“Instinctively and immediately, I wanted to take away her pain,” Doe wrote of her sister. “I smiled at her, I told her to look at me, I’m right here, I’m okay, everything’s okay, I’m right here.”

In the same paragraph, Doe goes on to describe what she kept from her sister.

“She did not know that beneath my sweatsuit, I had scratches and bandages on my skin, my vagina was sore and had become a strange, dark color from all the prodding, my underwear was missing, and I felt too empty to continue to speak.”

According to University spokesperson E.J. Miranda, the University suggested two other quotes along with the one that sparked criticism: “You are beautiful, you are to be valued, respected, undeniably, every minute of every day, you are powerful and nobody can take that away from you” and “On nights when you feel alone, I am with you. When people doubt you or dismiss you, I am with you. I fought every day for you. So never stop fighting, I believe you.”

Miranda said Stanford objected to Doe’s first quote from her statement to Turner because the University found it “inappropriate to the purpose of the garden as a place for contemplation and solace.” The second quote, Miranda said, was rejected because a sexual assault counselor felt it would be “triggering” to some victims of sexual assault.

Miranda declined to provide the quotes, however. Dauber, too, has declined to give more details.

“I don’t want to engage further with the University’s various changing stories about this,” she wrote in an email to The Daily, saying she had supported the idea of acknowledging what happened at the re-landscaped site “by centering the victim’s voice and experience.”

Meanwhile, the Stanford Association of Students for Sexual Assault Prevention (ASAP) has drafted a petition calling on the University to publicly apologize for rejecting Doe’s choice of quotes, take back its own proposals and install the plaque with the quote Doe had first suggested.

In an email to The Daily, ASAP co-president Stephanie Pham ’18 said that the University-chosen quote that came under fire from the Fountain Hopper was “absolutely insensitive and appalling” and “an insult to the Stanford community.”

When I saw that Stanford had agreed to move forward with [the re-landscaping plans], I was proud of the University for stepping up and trying to provide some sort of remedy to the survivor of the case,” Pham wrote. “However, Stanford choosing to reject the survivor’s chosen quotes is an act that only further silences survivors.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

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Brock Turner appeals sexual assault conviction https://stanforddaily.com/2017/12/02/brock-turner-appeals-conviction/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/12/02/brock-turner-appeals-conviction/#respond Sat, 02 Dec 2017 18:31:58 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1134336 Turner's 172-page appeal demands a new trial and seeks to overturn the convictions requiring that Turner register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

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Former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner is appealing his conviction of sexual assault.

His 172-page appeal demands a new trial and seeks to overturn the convictions requiring that Turner register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. Turner sexually assaulted an unconscious woman outside a Kappa Alpha party in 2015.

Originally found guilty of three felony counts of sexual assault, Turner’s six-month sentence sparked public outrage and an ongoing campaign to recall the judge. Turner’s appeal brief contends, among other arguments, that Turner was denied a fair trial by a “failure to present constitutionally sufficient evidence as to any of the three counts of conviction.”

“What we are saying [is] that what happened is not a crime,” John Tompkins, Turner’s legal adviser, told NBC. “It happened, but it was not anywhere close to a crime.”

Two Stanford graduate students testified in Turner’s trial last March that they saw him on top of an unmoving woman and that, when confronted, he tried to flee. Turner was ultimately convicted of assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated or unconscious person, sexual penetration of an intoxicated person and sexual penetration of an unconscious person.

Turner’s appeal brief argues that the prosecutor biased the jury by saying throughout the trial that the assault took place “behind a dumpster” rather than in the open space between dumpsters and a basketball court outside Kappa Alpha.

The prosecutor’s characterization “implied an intent on the appellant’s part to shield and sequester his activities,” the brief states, also citing negative associations with dumpsters such as filth and criminal activity.

The appeal criticizes the trial process for omitting consideration of a lighter offense for Turner and denying his legal team a chance to present evidence about his good character to the jury. The brief also states that Judge Aaron Persky ’84 A.M. ’85, now facing the recall effort, at one point didn’t respond satisfactorily to a “critical jury question.”

Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen told the Mercury News Friday that “Brock Turner received a fair trial and was justly convicted.”

“His conviction will be upheld,” Rosen said. “Nothing can ever roll back Emily Doe’s legacy of raising the world’s awareness about sexual assault.”

Law professor Michele Dauber, a friend of Turner’s victim who is leading the recall movement against Persky, weighed in as well, calling the argument that Turner was deprived of justice “ridiculous.”

“The problem with this case wasn’t that Judge Persky was unfair to Brock Turner, it was that Judge Persky was unfair to the victim when he sentenced Turner to only a few months in county jail,” she said in a statement.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu. Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

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GSB server exposed social security numbers, salaries of 10,000 Stanford staff https://stanforddaily.com/2017/12/01/server-exposed-social-security-numbers-salaries-of-10000-gsb-staff/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/12/01/server-exposed-social-security-numbers-salaries-of-10000-gsb-staff/#respond Fri, 01 Dec 2017 18:59:08 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1134321 Incorrect permissions settings on a Graduate School of Business (GSB) server exposed the names, birthdays, salaries and social security numbers of 10,000 staff for six months last year, the University reported Friday.

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Incorrect permissions settings on a Graduate School of Business (GSB) server exposed the names, birthdays, salaries and social security numbers of 10,000 staff employed University-wide in 2008 for six months last year, Stanford reported Friday.

While the University does not have evidence that the personal information leaked was accessed, it began notifying those affected Friday. The Information Security office has also hired a data forensics team to investigate across the University for privacy breaches and is asking all groups on campus to “urgently” review permissions on their files.

Revelations of the breach follow news broken yesterday by Poets and Quants that an MBA student found, re-identified and analyzed confidential data on financial aid spanning 2008 to 2015; any member of the GSB community could access information that included students’ income, assets and prior employment. The student discovered that the GSB does not award fellowship money solely on need, as it previously claimed, instead offering additional funds to some candidates. According to the student’s analysis, the GSB’s aid favored women and showed bias against international students.

Recent University privacy breaches extend beyond the GSB. Last month, The Daily also discovered permissions errors in a University-wide file-sharing system called AFS that let anyone from the Stanford community – as well as people from other schools that use the same platform – access information on sexual assault cases prepared from campus therapy sessions and emails about student conduct issues, among other confidential information.

“We extend the deepest apology to the employees and former Stanford students who expected that their personal information would be treated with the greatest care by campus offices,” Randy Livingston, vice president for business affairs, told Stanford News Friday. “This is absolutely unacceptable. Our community expects that we will keep their personal information confidential and secure, and we have failed to do so.”

Stanford will offer credit monitoring and fraud protection to those involved in the GSB leaks and has established a call center to answer questions that can be reached at (888) 684-4998.

According to Stanford News, the University only discovered the leaks involving thousands of non-teaching employees on Nov. 27. The data, used for setting salaries, was open to members of the GSB.

Investigations into a breach involving the GSB began back in February, however, when the MBA student brought his financial aid findings to Jack Edwards, director of financial aid for the GSB, according to Poets and Quants’ article. The GSB IT team secured the data he had accessed within an hour. But IT did not recognize how far the leaks extended and did not pass the breach of privacy on to other offices or the GSB Dean for further investigation, according to Stanford News.

The University said the personally identifying information on employees was inadvertently made public in September of 2016 and was locked by early March along with other improperly shared GSB files.

Ranga Jayaraman, associate dean and chief digital officer for the GSB, announced in an email Friday to the GSB’s faculty, student and staff lists that he is leaving his job.

“I take full responsibility for the failure to recognize the scope and nature of the J Drive data exposure and report it in a timely manner to the Dean​ and the University Information Security and ​Privacy Office​s,” he wrote. “I am fully accountable for this inexcusable error in judgement.”

Jayaraman, a tech veteran who was previously Chief Information Officer at Nvidia, said in a phone call to The Daily that, earlier this year, his team was “so focused” on fixing permissions on the folder containing the financial aid files that they didn’t search the folder to determine what else was exposed. Explaining why the IT team simply moved on, he said file permissions are a “regular problem in the world of IT,” though he could not remember dealing with other permissions errors during his tenure at Stanford.

He told The Daily that while he did not resign, he understands that leaders of technology organizations have to answer for mistakes.

“Things like this can happen and do happen, and there are times that we have to … take accountability,” he said. “So I signed up for this.”

GSB dean Jonathan Levin addressed the leak of financial aid data in a Nov. 17 email to GSB students, faculty and staff, stating that the aid information was improperly accessible starting in June of 2016. He said he personally learned of the issue only in late October upon receiving the MBA’s students report and that the GSB then launched an investigation.

In response to the data breach episodes across multiple file-sharing platforms, Stanford’s Information Security office and IT staff are “working … to develop a comprehensive plan for addressing this problem broadly and sustainably,” the Stanford News article stated. The University plans to conduct audits of file permissions both automatically and manually, as well as work to raise awareness about potential data leak issues.

However, Michael Duff, assistant vice president and chief information security officer, cautioned last month in response to the AFS leak that the scale of the University’s various file systems mean that permissions errors are not “something there’s a 100 percent solution for.”

“The challenge is how to achieve a zero error rate in the permissions across the hundreds of millions of files [and] folders stored at Stanford,” Duff said.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

This post has been updated with information about the departure of Ranga Jayaraman.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the server exposed the data of GSB staff, not University-wide staff. The Daily regrets this error.

 

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Privacy breaches in University file system affect 200 people https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/17/privacy-breaches-in-university-file-system-affect-200-people/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/17/privacy-breaches-in-university-file-system-affect-200-people/#respond Fri, 17 Nov 2017 12:07:23 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1133761 Stanford is in the process of notifying some 200 people — a mix of employees and former students — that their privacy may have been breached due to incorrect settings in one of the University’s file-sharing systems.

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Stanford is in the process of notifying some 200 people — a mix of employees and former students — that their privacy may have been breached due to incorrect settings in one of the University’s file-sharing systems.

Until this week, files including sexual violence records based on counseling sessions, confidential University statistics and emails to the Office of Judicial Affairs — some with names and email addresses attached — were left broadly available on an internet server that students, faculty and staff from over 50 institutions regularly use. Any Stanford faculty, student or staff member with a SUNet ID was able to access the sensitive files; The Daily also found that an MIT student username and password were able to grant access.

The University was unaware of the data breach until it was notified by The Daily last Thursday. The Daily withheld reporting on the leak until the University secured all confidential information and notified affected parties.

“This is absolutely unacceptable and the campus is working diligently and urgently to assure that shared files are secure throughout the university,” wrote Stanford spokesperson Lisa Lapin in an official statement Thursday. “A thorough university investigation is under way as to the extent and duration of the file exposure.”

“We extend the deepest apology to the employees and former Stanford students who expected that their personal information would be treated with the greatest care by campus offices,” she added.

Stanford has used the Andrew File System (AFS) directory, where the sensitive information was until recently kept unlocked, since the 1990s. Every user with a SUNet ID is allotted 5 GB of data for personal storage and may also use the file system to access course materials and other resources.

But the sprawling server — home to over two decades of information from a range of departments in the University — compromised, among other data, 247 emails addressed to the Office of Judicial Affairs and at least 38 files recording confidential information on crimes, mostly sexual assaults, described to campus mental health counselors, the Office of Community Standards and other groups. The latter information on sexual violence was intended for tracking and reporting under the 1990 Clery Act, which mandates disclosure of campus crime.

Michael Duff, assistant vice president and chief information security officer, said that while the University can track overall AFS activity, it cannot track who has accessed specific files and folders. He said University IT also can not yet determine exactly how long many files intended for privacy were accessible for.

Compromised personal data

Within each directory, some folders and files were secured against general user access, even as the Clery files and confidential emails were left open to Stanford community members as well as people from the many other organizations that use AFS.

In the Vice Provost of Student Affairs (VPSA) directory, a file containing emails addressed to the Office of Judicial Affairs detailed concerns ranging from spousal assault to Honor Code violations to a discrimination complaint against a current faculty member. All correspondence included contact information for the sender, revealing names, email addresses and often phone numbers.

One of the Clery files also included the name and email address of the reporting party.

Most of the other Clery documents omitted names, noting instead basic demographic information such as gender, age, class year and ethnicity, as well as the accused student’s group affiliation at Stanford, in addition to a summary of what they reported.

But in a community the size of Stanford, data can be identifying even without names. Some of the documents described victim and assailant as narrowly defined as a pair of roommates of a certain class year living in a specific dormitory, or a student of a specific age and ethnicity assaulted by an upperclassman in a particular student group. Many of the files were also accompanied by dates.

In some cases, the level of detail present might have identified a reporting student to an acquaintance in the same social circles — or potentially to the individual they accused of assault.

In files where the involved parties may be identifiable, the University must notify the individuals. According to Duff, that’s where the University Privacy Office needed to make judgments on just how revealing the previously-accessible information was.

“If the population that fits given descriptions is large enough, no one would be able to identify that person,” Duff said. “It’s a whole field into itself — identification or re-identification of the data so that we can determine who we need to notify.”

Files recording sexual violence cases in a Clery Act folder were generated when an individual or a “Campus Security Authority” — for example, a counselor at Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) — filled out a web form created by the University’s Sexual Violence Advisory Board.

While many of the files are based on information disclosed to CAPS, James Jacobs, director of Vaden Health, emphasized that Vaden had no role in managing the Clery report files and that CAPS counseling records, which are separate from Clery data, have not been compromised.

“Vaden clinical records … have been and continue to be completely separate, completely protected and not shared,” he said.

According to Jacobs, CAPS and other entities on campus no longer file Clery reports with the AFS-linked system. Further, he said, CAPS therapists are no longer among the campus entities expected to make Clery reports.

The Clery files, which span from 2012 to 2015, were located within a folder owned by the Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS). However, according to the University, the summaries of individuals’ cases were not intended for police use or investigation; they were meant solely for fulfilling the University’s duties under the Clery Act, which a non-officer employee of SUDPS oversees.

CAPS’ website states that chart notes from a counseling session — recorded electronically — are kept for 10 years by law but protected with “strict security measures … including physical safeguards, encryption, and password protection.”

The University emphasized that because the Clery reports were generated from a separate process than in-session counseling notes, “SUDPS did not and does not have access to counseling records maintained by CAPS.”

But due to the mistake in the Clery folder’s privacy settings, the text entries to the Clery forms were essentially public.

In some cases, the Clery files potentially shed light on University decisions that confounded and angered many students when they were first announced.

One file described a sexual assault involving two members of the Stanford Band. Another file detailed a student’s account of being sexually assaulted by another student after at a campus event on the Quad.

A handful of files dealt with students who recalled experiences of sexual assault or molestation before they ever came to Stanford.

According to the University, it generally “would have been challenging if not impossible to conduct an investigation” given the high level information recorded in most of the forms.

Confidential University information

Other directories previously left unlocked on AFS include the Office of the President and Provost, the Vice Provost for Student Affairs and Vaden Health Center. Within these folders, however, subfolders and files had varying degrees of privacy.

Files that were accessible included 10-year compilations of University statistics produced each academic year by the Office of Institutional Research and Decision Support. Specific datasets marked as confidential range from statistics on faculty ethnic and gender diversity to detailed breakdowns of financial support for graduate students and levels of government-sponsored activity by school and laboratory.

Some documents include data from other institutions as well, such as a report comparing Stanford with its peer schools on metrics such as median student income, financial aid, research funding sources and faculty diversity. Stanford has since reached out to these schools to apologize for the breach.

Documents like these were not publicly available elsewhere — for example, on the University website — but were unlocked in AFS.

Budget planning resources, as well as memos between then-Provost Condoleezza Rice and the Faculty Senate, were likewise open to anyone with AFS access, including users from other schools.

What is AFS?

Named after Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon of Carnegie Mellon University, the Andrew File System has been in use at Stanford for close to three decades and is also used by a variety of universities and research laboratories. AFS allows a large number of users, each with their own computers, to access a centralized digital workspace owned by their institution or workplace.

Whenever Stanford affiliates log into a desktop machine with their SUNet ID and password, they are accessing the data stored in their personal AFS workspace. For example, students can download useful files into their workspace on a library computer and retrieve that file again when they log in to a dorm cluster computer.

At the same time, AFS allows individuals to use all the institution-owned resources that they are granted access to from their home computers. For instance, computer science majors often use AFS to download and submit homework assignments by entering the directory corresponding to their course.

“Essentially all of my assignments for CS classes are stored there,” said Jorge Ochoa ’18, a computer science major. “I keep my code there for safekeeping and because we have to upload our homework to AFS anyways to turn it in for most classes.”

One of the biggest concerns raised by the AFS data breach: It is hard to know who may have seen or even saved the exposed files during the time that they were accessible.

“I don’t usually need to look for things outside of my personal folders, but I have clicked around a bit either out of curiosity or trying to find class resources which are in a different directory,” Ochoa said.

When asked specifically about the SUDPS and Judicial Affairs files found by The Daily, however, Ochoa said he hadn’t seen any of the information in question.

Andrew Milich ’19, a computer science student who has used AFS for coursework, said that most students doing their homework would probably not stumble into places they shouldn’t be.

“The file system is a little hard to work with,” he said, although he admitted there could be a temptation to browse around. “You kind of have to know what you’re looking for to find something.”

Duff emphasized that any student who finds a security problem in a Stanford system is required by the Honor Code and Fundamental Standard to report the issue immediately to the Information Security Office, the University Privacy Office or another relevant department.

Every institution that employs AFS groups the folders used by its member departments into a single top-level directory. Since AFS was also designed to help different organizations share files, top-level directories are typically visible to users from other organizations that use AFS — meaning that organizations have to take charge of protecting their own information from non-members.

According to Duff, each department at Stanford is responsible for setting its folders and files to the correct accessibility level. That means that the University “relies heavily” on these subgroups to manage their files well. Centralized oversight is difficult, he said, not just for AFS but also for all file-sharing systems, from Dropbox to Google Drive.

“The challenge is how to achieve a zero error rate in the permissions across the hundreds of millions of files [and] folders stored at Stanford,” Duff said.

He added that the sheer scale of the systems needed to store information for an organization the size of Stanford means that each department must take charge of its own security.

The very top-level directory for Stanford, ir.stanford.edu, is overseen by University IT and has the correct settings, according to Duff.

Asked about what support Stanford provides to departments on setting AFS access, Duff pointed to online documentation, saying that “those using AFS are expected to understand how it works.”

However, Duff did describe actions that University IT can take to better ensure information privacy. For one, he said, it can improve awareness about privacy setting issues; right after The Daily informed the University of the incorrectly shared files, Duff emailed Stanford’s over 1,300 IT professionals with a note about the situation and extra tips for managing permissions.

“Inevitably, there are going to be some folks who maybe don’t understand how the permissions work, and they’re not IT people, these are just regular staff members and employees,” Duff said. “Because AFS has been here for so long, I do think there’s an element of, someone else set up the permissions a long time ago and over time just kind of forgot they were open and then other people starting dumping stuff in there.”

According to Duff, a push to move Stanford away from AFS toward other systems such as Box and Google Drive is underway; he hopes the process will prompt departments to review outdated files.

Still, he warned that the permissions errors are not “something there’s a 100 percent solution for.”

“As much as we will try, and we have tried for many years, to do all this stuff right, the scale makes it really tough,” he said.

Duff said that University IT adjusted settings on particular AFS folders to protect the mistakenly public data within two hours of being notified. But cleaning up after the leaks is a longer process. For instance, the University had to request the deletion of cached webpages on Google to prevent people from finding sensitive information even after it was locked.

Potential ramifications

According to Chief Privacy Officer Wendi Wright, the University is “informing individuals in accordance with FERPA and state privacy notification requirements, as applicable.”

Legally, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) protects “any information that protects the privacy of student education records” from being shared without written permission.

There are also additional state privacy laws — both statutory and constitutional — covering both students and employees.

According to Robert Rabin, Stanford’s A. Calder Mackay Professor of Law, the University could also be liable to tort lawsuits based on public disclosure of private fact if victims of the data breach can prove that a harm occurred (for example, that their information was accessed and used during the period that it was available).

“There could be two different pathways to responsibility,” Rabin said. “Vicarious liability is where the University is responsible for any branch of the university in violation. The other pathway is negligent supervision, that would be a direct claim that the University should have exercised greater oversight over the branches.”

However, Rabin also said that going into court is an expensive and time consuming process, especially when harms might not be tangible. He was not confident such cases would be pursued, but did stress the significance of the blunder.

“If a vice provost or the department of public safety or whoever is not exercising sufficient caution about protecting student privacy, then the university should be concerned about that,” Rabin said.

In addition to the strictly legal ramifications, Stanford Law Professor and sexual assault activist Michele Dauber worries that there may be consequences for those considering reporting sexual assault in the future.

“One concern that I have is that when survivors find out that Stanford was not adequately safeguarding information that they thought was confidential, they may be even more reluctant to report sexual assault,” she said. “We don’t want students to feel reluctant to report, but an incident like this could have a chilling effect on the willingness of victims to come forward.”

Dauber emphasized that this is especially worrisome given that the last campus climate survey indicated a very low percentage of victims actually report their experiences with sexual assault to anyone at the University.

“The mistake was obviously inadvertent, and I’m sure whoever did it feels terrible about it,” Dauber said. “I’m sure that it wasn’t like Stanford wanted to do this, but this is important, and it’s important to get it right.”

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu, Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu and Ada Statler at adastat ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Harassment, assault allegations against Moretti span three campuses https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/16/harassment-assault-allegations-against-moretti-span-three-campuses/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/16/harassment-assault-allegations-against-moretti-span-three-campuses/#respond Thu, 16 Nov 2017 10:07:39 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1133565 two new allegations of Moretti sexually harassing graduate students have surfaced: one from a woman who says she had to set a dog loose to get Moretti to stop propositioning her and leave her house late at night and another incident described by multiple sources who say Moretti lost a job opportunity at Johns Hopkins after a graduate student reported that he touched her inappropriately.

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One week before he was first publicly accused of sexual assault and harassment by a former graduate student, Emeritus Professor of English Franco Moretti was profiled in The New York Times as a self-proclaimed revolutionary in literary scholarship.

Moretti, a founder of Stanford’s Literary Lab, has helped pioneer the growing field of digital humanities, approaching texts as data that can be computationally analyzed en masse. In the process, The Times writes, he has become something of a celebrity in the literary world by “promoting a ruthlessly impersonal idea of both scholarship and literary history itself.”

The beginnings of that celebrity loomed large in Kimberly Latta’s account earlier this month of the power dynamic underlying her public accusations of rape and sexual harassment against Moretti, her former professor at UC Berkeley. Moretti said he had only consensual sex with Latta, and he emphasized that he was just a “visitor” at Berkeley with “no prospect, back then, of ever being part of the American academy.” But Latta recalled feeling uncomfortable about sexual advances by an instructor who, even back then, was popular and admired.

“I was, of course, eager to work with him, I felt very much compelled — like it was a requirement of me,” Latta told The Daily. “If I was going to work with him, I would have to sleep with him.”

Now, two new allegations of Moretti sexually harassing graduate students have surfaced: one from a woman who says she had to set a dog loose to get Moretti to stop propositioning her and leave her house late at night and another incident described by multiple sources who say Moretti lost a job opportunity at Johns Hopkins after a graduate student reported that he touched her inappropriately.

Jane Penner was a doctoral student in English attending a summer seminar at Dartmouth when, she says, she had to fend Moretti off with her dog. Neither she nor Latta talked about their experience outside their circle of friends until the #MeToo movement encouraged Latta to formally contact Stanford with her account after over three decades. The third woman declined to speak to The Daily altogether.

“There wasn’t an obvious channel [to report],” Penner wrote in an email. “Second, Franco was a brilliant and powerful scholar. As a mere grad student beginning her dissertation, I couldn’t risk inviting his enmity.”

Moretti denied all accusations.

Berkeley, 1985

In the spring of 1985, Franco Moretti’s star was rising. Halfway into a one-year visiting professorship to Berkeley from the University of Verona, the first English language version of his book was out, and he was working and mingling at Berkeley with some of the hottest names in literary theory of the time.

“He seemed to be the most popular guy around,” said Latta. “He was in with the young, cool, hip people; he wasn’t in with the older statesmen of the department. He was one of the new, brash, young, hip, ‘we’re cool, we’re doing the Berkeley thing.’”

Meanwhile, Latta was a first-year graduate student in English. An invitation to dine with Moretti and some of his colleagues in English early in the semester struck her as “thrilling and wonderful,” an induction of sorts to an academic inner circle.

“It meant I’ve arrived; he thinks I’m smart,” Latta recalled thinking. “In the end it made me think the opposite because it meant he’s not interested in my brain.”

According to Latta, Moretti’s overtures to her escalated into one-on-one dinners, personal meetings in each of their apartments and public declarations of love — which she says Moretti relayed to her after the fact — that made rounds among the English faculty. Latta said she remembers Moretti telling her she reminded him of the heroine in “Le Rouge et le Noir,” or “The Red and the Black,” a novel about a man who seduces for his personal advancement.

These declarations mortified Latta even as she continued to “relish” his mentorship, said Michael Harrawood, an older undergraduate student in the department who heard about her dynamic with Moretti as it developed. Latta said she would sit in class with another professor, a friend of Moretti’s, and feel “intimidated” by the thought that the professor knew and apparently condoned her interactions with Moretti.

Latta recalls her relationship to Moretti as one of “jovial bullying” on his part and shamed acquiescence on hers. For instance, she said that he would try to hold her hand as they were walking on a street and cajole her in a way that she described as “friendly” but “pushy” — an attitude she felt powerless to resist.

“I thought ‘I can’t.’ I felt very afraid; it felt completely wrong,” she recounted. “I didn’t want to [hold his hand]; I didn’t want anyone to know, ironically, because I felt ashamed of myself. I felt ashamed it was happening, and I wasn’t strong enough to say ‘get the f— away from me’… I just didn’t have the strength.”

“So yes, I complied with him,” Latta said.

According to Latta, the uneasy compliance culminated in two counts of sexual assault after Latta explicitly rejected sex — once at her apartment and once at his.

“It was really traumatizing because I had a dissociative experience of being out of my body,” said Latta. “So I told myself, ‘This is not happening; this is happening to my body.’”

Moretti, on the other hand, said in an email to The Daily that his sexual intercourse with Latta was “fully consensual” and that they parted “on good terms” after further one-on-one meetings that were initiated by Latta as well as by himself.

Latta said she can believe that Moretti had a completely different notion of what was happening than she did. In her original post on Facebook, she recounted Moretti telling her that “‘you American girls say no when you mean yes’” after she said “no” to sex.

Aftermath at Berkeley, 1985

“I had to talk to him,” Latta said of their contact for the rest of the semester. “He was my professor, even after this.”

Although she eventually dropped out of the class to avoid him, she said, remembered that he gave her an A on the “crappy” final paper she submitted the following semester.

“Maybe that’s why he thinks it was friendly, because he didn’t totally fail me for the class,” said Latta.

Harrawood remembers being disturbed by the idea of Moretti “body-blocking” Latta and forcibly kissing her in his office — but he did not know that Latta’s complaint against Moretti also consisted of sexual assault until her public post this month. Of the parts that she did tell him, he said, his response was sympathetic but impotent.

“Kimberly told me and Tad [Piori], and we believed her, but someone asked me the other day: Why didn’t I report it?” said Harrawood. “And it was the first time I thought of it, and actually, I’m a bit ashamed of myself… It never occurred to me because I didn’t know who you reported stuff like that to.”

Frances Ferguson, another professor in the English department, was the go-to person for Berkeley Title IX cases at the time. According to Ferguson, Harrawood could not have stuck up for Latta without Latta initiating a formal report herself — the Title IX regulations at the time allowed solely firsthand reports to launch formal investigations, while third parties who had witnessed violations could only corroborate.

Latta said that she eventually paid a visit to Ferguson after the incidents of assault. Both women recall the meeting, but where Ferguson said she was “worried” about Latta’s emotional state at the time, Latta remembers Ferguson as “wooden” and “impassive.”

According to Latta, she was especially unsettled by the knowledge that she was talking to a colleague of Moretti’s as opposed to someone from another department. When Ferguson asked her not to say Moretti’s name outright — a practice that Ferguson said was required for Title IX complaints that were not intended to be formal reports — Latta assumed that Ferguson already knew the name of the accused because she was a friend of Moretti’s, the former student recalled.

Both Moretti and Ferguson denied knowing each other at the time, though they would have occasion to meet again during the informal hiring process at Johns Hopkins that gave rise to another allegation against Moretti.

Ferguson said that Latta did not mention the sexual assault during their conversation, an account that Latta believes to be true, though she does not remember what exactly she said. Latta remarked that her perception of Ferguson and Moretti’s relationship would likely have prevented her from speaking out.

Latta told Moretti about the meeting and said he threatened to ruin her career through a colleague whose wife was a “powerful attorney”; Moretti denies the claim and said he had no such connections at the time.

At the end of the school year, Moretti returned to Italy, where he would stay for another four years before accepting a post at Columbia. Ferguson and her husband, English professor Walter Benn Michaels, moved on to Johns Hopkins in 1988. Latta made no formal report, and no administrative action would ever be taken. But Latta, who took a seven-year-long hiatus from her doctorate after getting her M.A. from Berkeley in 1986, could not leave the events of the year behind.

“I wanted his support, I thought in the beginning — I thought it was because he really admired me and thought I was a bright young woman,” said Latta. “But it was not, and at the end of it all, I felt utterly insecure about myself as a student and as a thinker. I felt like my brain had been destroyed in a way.”

Dartmouth, 1995

Latta is not the only woman to accuse Moretti of inappropriate advances.

Penner said she met Moretti in 1995 while attending the School of Criticism and Theory, a six-week summer seminar that allowed graduate students in the humanities to learn from prominent faculty. The program, now hosted at Cornell, was held that year at Dartmouth in New Hampshire.

At the time, Penner was a doctoral student in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Moretti was still a professor at Columbia.

One evening, Penner said, she hosted a party at the home she was staying at for the seminar. According to Penner, Moretti lingered long after all the other guests had left to make sexual advances on her.

“I rebuffed him, but he continued to press his case and tried to touch me,” she told The Daily over the phone. “I continued to say no and asked him to leave.”

Then, she said, Moretti became “physically aggressive” — literally chasing her around the house downstairs.

“He acted as if it were a game, but I was alarmed,” Penner recalled, saying she feared both immediate physical harm and the professional repercussions of turning him down.

Not knowing how else to stop the harassment, she said, she ran upstairs to her bedroom, where she had shut in her dog for the party. She remembered that earlier in the evening, Moretti wouldn’t come inside the house until she put the dog away, apparently because he disliked the animals. Only when she let her dog out of the room did Moretti finally leave, she said.

While she wasn’t physically hurt, Penner said the episode left her shaken.

“He scared the hell out of me.”

Jonathan Grossman, an English professor at UCLA, confirmed that Penner told him about her experience with Moretti afterward. So did Rayna Kalas, now an English professor at Cornell, who was a fellow graduate student and close friend of Penner at the time. Kalas remembered Penner telling her about the incident when they reunited at school the following term.

“I remember her saying, ‘I had a very trying summer,’” Kalas said.

After learning of Latta’s allegations against Moretti last week, Kalas said, she encouraged Penner to go public with her story. Kalas speculated that Penner — currently the vice president and head of communications at the online lending company Upstart — is in a better position to accuse Moretti than those still embedded in the academic world where Moretti has left his mark.

“I think [academics] probably would feel reticent to come forward, and so I think in some ways [Penner] is in a unique position to be clear about what happened to her,” Kalas said.

The additional accounts of sexual harassment against Moretti come at what many commentators have described as a “watershed moment” for sexual assault and harassment claims.

“Every woman has had to do a sort of calculus,” Kalas noted. “When something happens to you, you think to yourself, am I going to come forward with this? What are the repercussions going to be for me? Is it worth it? At this moment … more and more women are coming forward.”

Johns Hopkins, 1997

In 1997, 12 years after Latta made her informal report about Moretti, Ferguson was a faculty member at John Hopkins when Moretti and his wife were considered for positions in the English department.

A faculty member who joined Hopkins after the incident said she heard from Ferguson firsthand that Ferguson and her husband, Michaels, were behind Moretti’s candidacy. Ferguson did not say whether she was directly involved in the hire when asked, stating instead that the department considered the possibility of extending offers to both Moretti and his wife when faculty numbers were down.

The former professor, who asked to be anonymous, added that prospective hires at small departments in Hopkins were usually solicited by current faculty rather than through a formal search process. The English department at Hopkins currently has under 20 people, and the number was under 10 permanent faculty at the time.

The informal nature of most hires meant that the invitation for Moretti to give a talk on campus in 1997 was a sign that he was being seriously considered for a hire, the faculty member said.

She and another professor present at the time both confirmed that a graduate student in the English department reported being touched inappropriately by Moretti during his visit — and that the department did not move forward with the hire because of the student’s report.

One of the former faculty members recounted that it was only this fall, reading Latta’s Facebook post on her allegations against Moretti, that she found out that Ferguson knew of the previous incident involving Moretti. Dismayed, she contacted Latta about what she described as Ferguson’s willingness to hire Moretti despite knowing about Latta’s report.

The student who reported harassment declined to comment.

Academia’s problem

The accusations against Moretti — as well as another recent accusation of sexual assault made against now-deceased Stanford English Professor Jay Fliegelman and allegations of harassment and cover-ups at the University of Rochester — have prompted the #MeToo dialogue sweeping the entertainment world to reach into the academic space.

Harassment in academia may be a more serious issue than people realize, a recent study of 300 complaints of harassment against faculty suggests. Most of the cases involved physical (not just verbal) harassment, and 53 percent of cases involved harassers accused by multiple students.

“Academia is particularly fertile territory for those who want to leverage their power to gain sexual favors or inflict sexual violence on vulnerable individuals,” Caroline Fredrickson wrote in The Atlantic last month.

Some academics interviewed by The Daily had conflicted responses to the recent reports.

“I don’t want to see a senior professor crucified and punished at the end of his career,” said Harrawood, “and at the same time, if he did it, I want Kimberly to have peace.”

Harrawood, who describes Latta as a friendly “acquaintance” rather than a friend, spoke to The Daily for over an hour to corroborate Latta’s account over 30 years after he met Latta. He said he believed her, even as he felt torn about the public accusations against Moretti and the ensuing backlash.

“My sense of things is that Moretti had a very different idea of what was going on,” said Harrawood. “But hell … this was in the ‘80s, and the world was very different then.”

Moretti, for his part, denied the list of allegations compiled by The Daily based on accounts from the sources in this report.

“There are numerous errors of fact, regarding both the situations and my behavior, in the statements included in your email,” wrote Moretti in an email, “but for now let me simply say that I have never sexually assaulted anyone, nor have I ever knowingly engaged in any kind of unwanted contact.”

Relationships between faculty and students were more common in previous decades, some academics reflected.

In the 1990s, Moretti met a graduate student in comparative literature he would go on to marry. Her education at Columbia overlapped entirely with his tenure there, although he declined to comment on the origins or nature of their relationship at Columbia, or to confirm that they are still married.

Harrawood indicated that he knew of at least two English professors at Berkeley who went on to marry their graduate students. Berkeley did not ban sexual and romantic relationships between faculty and students until 2003.

Stanford, too, has more rules today restricting faculty-student relationships than it used to. The University’s policy was last updated in 2014.

“Even in regard to consensual relationships, Stanford has in recent years strengthened policies so as to prohibit sexual or romantic relationships between faculty and all undergraduates, as well as graduate students for whom the faculty member has — or may in the future have — academic responsibility,” wrote Stanford spokesperson E.J. Miranda in an email to The Daily.

Faculty also undergo mandatory training on sexual harassment and misconduct every two years.

Miranda said the University would inform its Title IX Office of the additional allegations beyond Latta’s, which the office is currently investigating.

Neither of the new accusations were reported to Stanford, Miranda said.

Meanwhile, the Literary Lab that Moretti founded has recently updated the “About” page on its website to specify that “no unprofessional behavior, harassment or abuse will be tolerated from any member, and we expect all participants to adhere to and further these values.”

Reflecting on office hour visits to Moretti, Latta said she does not remember what they spoke about — only that she went frequently, and that it was likely academic, because of the kind of student she was.

“I was a very ambitious student then. I did a lot of office hour visits with all my professors, always in their offices,” said Latta. “Probably I was brown-nosing, trying to get in with with my professors.”

Dedicated enough to get into a top-tier graduate school and then good enough to make it in the academic job market, Latta said she capitalized on the graduate school experience to seek personal relationships with the professors who would help to shape her career. That relentless drive, she reflected, left her and others like her vulnerable to those they sought most to impress and become close to.

“[Forming relationships with faculty] is what you’re supposed to do,” Latta said.

 

Correction: An earlier version of the article mistakenly stated that third parties witnessing Title IX violations at Berkeley in 1985 could not help with the investigations of the claims. In fact, third parties were allowed to corroborate, but not initiate, formal reports that led to official Title IX investigations – only firsthand formal reports were accepted as the basis for launching an investigation. The Daily regrets this error.

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu and Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

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Two women accuse former Stanford professors of sexual assault https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/09/two-women-accuse-former-stanford-professors-of-sexual-assault/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/09/two-women-accuse-former-stanford-professors-of-sexual-assault/#respond Fri, 10 Nov 2017 07:46:34 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1133215 Two women have recently made public accusations of sexual assault against Stanford professors, one of whom is now deceased and one of whom is retired.

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This post has been updated twice with comments from Franco Moretti.

Two women have recently made public accusations of sexual assault against Stanford professors, one of whom is now deceased and one of whom is retired.

Franco Moretti, professor emeritus in the English department, faces allegations of sexual assault, harassment and rape made by Kimberly Latta, his former graduate student at UC Berkeley. In an email to The Daily on Friday morning, Moretti said the allegations were “utterly false” and described his interactions with Latta as “fully consensual.”

The other accusation came in a creative piece — part poetry, part personal essay — published Nov. 3 in Entropy by Stanford graduate Seo-Young Chu M.A. ’01. The piece details Chu’s accusations of harassment and rape against Jay Fliegelman, Stanford’s former Coe Professor in American Literature who died in 2007. According to Chu, Stanford suspended Fliegelman for two years without pay after conducting an investigation but then allowed him to continue teaching.

Franco Moretti

Latta wrote in a Facebook post Sunday morning first covered by Stanford Politics that she had contacted Stanford authorities about the sexual assault that occurred at Berkeley in 1984-1985, while Moretti was a visiting professor. Berkeley later invited him to return as a visiting Beckman Professor in 2002.

According to Latta, Moretti “sexually stalked, pressured and raped” her while he was her professor in the department. She said that he raped her in her Oakland apartment and would push up her shirt and bra and kiss her against her will in his office.

“He specifically said to me, ‘You American girls say no when you mean yes,’” Latta wrote.

Moretti denied the accusation of rape, maintaining that she had been a consenting partner throughout their acquaintance.

“I did meet Kimberly Latta during my visit at Berkeley in 1985; we went out to dinner together one night and back to her apartment where we had fully consensual sex and I spent the night,” wrote Moretti. “I did not rape her, and am horrified by the accusation.”

He added that he and Latta continued to meet, “including at her initiative,” and remained friendly until he left Berkeley.

When Latta reported the incident to Berkeley’s Title IX office, she said that both Moretti and then-Title IX officer Frances Ferguson attempted to silence her — an account that Ferguson disputes.

While Latta wrote that Ferguson, who was also an English professor, pressured her to state only Moretti’s initials in a report as Ferguson was “a friend of his,” Ferguson described the characterization as a “real misunderstanding.”

“I scarcely knew Franco Moretti, but even if I had been a close friend of his, I believe I would have told her what I told her at the time, which is that she had two options ahead of her,”  Ferguson said. “The last thing I would want would be to discourage someone from making a formal complaint.”

As Berkeley’s sole Title IX officer, Ferguson said, she would advise individuals who reported sexual misconduct or assault of their options: file a formal complaint, which she could then investigate through the Title IX office, or make an informal complaint to the accused, which Ferguson said amounted to a letter asking the accused to desist.

According to Ferguson, she was prohibited from keeping detailed notes on any case that was not filed as a formal complaint. The misunderstanding between Latta and herself, she said, originated from notes that she kept on her meeting with Latta, which she took in case Latta or another student made another complaint about Moretti. Ferguson said she redacted Latta and Moretti’s names in the notes in deference to the policy on record-keeping with informal complaints.

Nor was she aware that Moretti’s actions had reached the extent Latta described in her post, Ferguson said. In her recollection, Latta’s report to her included interactions that amounted to sexual harassment but not sexual assault.

“I had the impression that she was saying that he was asking her to have sex with him, but he was not putting pressure on her — past just being initially soliciting her attention,”  Ferguson said. “And I had the impression that I had not thought it had reached such an extreme path that it’d be useless for her to write a letter to him to say, ‘your attentions are unwelcome, please stop.’”

The relationship between Moretti and Ferguson remains disputed by all three parties involved. Both Moretti and Ferguson deny that they were friends at the time of the incident, but whereas Moretti claims that he and Ferguson “became friends later,”, Ferguson said that she saw little of Moretti outside of chance professional encounters.

Ferguson added that she later heard from her academic network that he allegedly sexually harassed another graduate student in the 1990s, a claim that Moretti also disputes.

After Latta told Moretti about her conversation with Ferguson, he threatened to “ruin [her] career” if she pressed charges against him, Latta wrote. Moretti denies that the conversation ever happened, saying that he first heard of Latta’s complaint against him – or any other sexual harassment complaint in a university setting – only on Nov. 10, the date he responded to The Daily’s inquiry.

“I did not know Frances Ferguson at the time (though we became friends later), had no powerful attorney friends, and certainly did not threaten to ruin any career,” wrote Moretti. “I was a visitor, with no prospect, back then, of ever being part of the American academy.”

Whether or not the conversation that year took place, Latta made no further report about Moretti in the decades that followed.

After earning her degree, Latta stayed in academia as an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and Saint Louis University before switching careers to psychotherapy and writing.

Moretti, who retired from Stanford last spring and is on leave this academic year, is known for his work on literary theory and digital humanities. He was unavailable by phone when The Daily contacted him Thursday evening but responded via email Friday morning.

University spokesperson EJ Miranda wrote in an email to The Daily that Latta’s complaint is ‘new’ to the administration and that the University has reached out to Latta for further information.

“The professor has retired and is not currently on campus,” Miranda wrote. “We of course are concerned and will be reviewing the report and whether there are any actions for Stanford to take.”

For his part, Moretti said that he only learned about the sexual harassment and assault allegations against him for the first time on Friday.

“Unfortunately, I fear this accusation will have an enormous impact on colleagues, friends, and family, despite being utterly false,” he wrote.

But in her original post, Latta said she was confident of her version of events and that she hoped to stand up for other women who might have been assaulted by Moretti.

“I will take any lie detector and make any affidavits necessary to assure that he is brought to justice,” she wrote.

Jay Fliegelman

Former English graduate student Chu, now an associate professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, wrote in her piece in Entropy that Fliegelman subjected her to months of sexual harassment in addition to raping her while she was studying at Stanford.

Fliegelman also made inappropriate statements to her, she said, asking her if she was a virgin and telling her once that “All men have rape fantasies, including your father.”

She recounted a conversation with him early on in their acquaintance in which he probed her desire to stay in her Ph.D. program over a restaurant meal between just the two of them.

Feeling uneasy, Chu wrote, she tried to fend off potential advances.

“I added that I was not ‘interested’ in the way people who are dating use that word, but he could always count on me to work hard and try my best to produce good scholarship,” she recalled.

“But I’m lonely,” Chu wrote that Fliegelman replied. “I’m needy. I need to feel desirable. I need you to desire me.”

Chu said she never pressed charges against the professor but that her statements to University personnel led the school to take up an investigation concluding in Fliegelman’s suspension.

Miranda did not comment on the specifics of the case, citing ongoing privacy concerns and saying that written permission to discuss such cases – required by FERPA to share information – “is rarely provided.”

“Both California employment law and FERPA restricted what we could say at the time about the details, though it was well known throughout the campus that the faculty member was suspended and banned from the department and its building for two years,” Miranda wrote in an email to The Daily Thursday evening.

“While we remain constrained by privacy laws and cannot speak about this specific case, we take concerns of this nature extremely seriously, conduct thorough investigations and inform both parties of the outcome of those investigations,” he continued.

Chu herself could not be reached by phone or email Thursday evening.

After leaving her doctoral program at Stanford, Chu completed a Ph.D. in English at Harvard University and has been teaching and writing since. Her first book, “Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?”, was published six years ago.

Despite his two-year leave from Stanford, Chu noted, Fliegelman remained a prominent scholar up to his death at the age of 58. One section of Chu’s published piece is a letter dated June 2016, addressed to the administrators of a graduate mentoring award formerly named after Fliegelman. The award’s exact title is unspecified in her essay but apparently references an honor that the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies named after Fliegelman in 2009.

Until at least 2014, Stanford’s American Studies department also presented the Jay W. Fliegelman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Honors Research.

“If you are one of Jay Fliegelman’s former students who had an experience worth celebrating: I believe you,” Chu wrote in the letter portion of her essay. “You need not provide documentation to persuade me. I believe that, in your experience, he was a wonderful mentor. Is it too much for me to ask you to believe me too?”

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu and Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Washington University in St. Louis once gave out an award named after Jay Fliegelman. In fact, a WUSTL professor won the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ award once named after Fliegelman. The Daily regrets this error.

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Retired English professor accused of sexual assault by former graduate student https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/09/english-professor-accused-of-sexual-assault-by-former-graduate-student/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/09/english-professor-accused-of-sexual-assault-by-former-graduate-student/#respond Fri, 10 Nov 2017 01:28:56 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1133143 Franco Moretti, Stanford professor emeritus in the English department, faces allegations of sexual assault, harassment and rape made by Kimberly Latta, his former graduate student at UC Berkeley.

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Note: This report has been updated with comments from Franco Moretti and Frances Ferguson in a separate post.

Franco Moretti, Stanford professor emeritus in the English department, faces allegations of sexual assault, harassment and rape made by Kimberly Latta, his former graduate student at UC Berkeley.

Latta wrote in a Facebook post Sunday morning that she had contacted Stanford authorities about the sexual assault and rape that occurred at Berkeley while Moretti was a visiting professor in 1984-1985 (first reported at Stanford Politics). Berkeley later invited him to return as a visiting Beckman Professor in 2002. The full text of the post is available below the article.

According to Latta, she initially reported the incident to Berkeley’s Title IX officer but was pressured to state only Moretti’s initials, as the officer was “a friend of his.” Latta said she remained silent about the incident over the years because Moretti threatened to “ruin [her] career” if she pressed charges against him. After earning her degree, Latta was an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and Saint Louis University before switching careers to psychotherapy and writing.

Moretti, who retired from Stanford last spring and is on leave this academic year, is known for his work on literary theory and digital humanities. He was unavailable by phone when The Daily ccontacted him this evening.

University spokesperson E.J. Miranda wrote in an email to The Daily that the report is “new” to the administration, and that it has reached out to Latta for further information.

“The professor has retired and is not currently on campus,” wrote Miranda. “We of course are concerned and will be reviewing the report and whether there are any actions for Stanford to take.”

 

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

***

After many years of silence, and with a heavy but angry heart, I sent this email to the appropriate authorities at Stanford University today:

“Subject: Sexual Predator Franco Moretti

Dear Those Who are Concerned about Sexual Abusers at Stanford:

I am writing to report that when I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley in 1984-85, my then-professor Franco Moretti sexually stalked, pressured, and raped me. He specifically said to me, “You Americans girls say no when you mean yes.” He raped me in my apartment in Oakland. He also would frequently push me up against the wall in his office, right next to the window that looked out at the library, and push up my shirt and bra and forcibly kiss me, against my will. I reported him to the Title IX officer, who was then Frances Ferguson, Ph.D. She was a friend of his and urged me not to make a report. I insisted, but she persuaded me to leave only his initials in her documents, in case someone else reported that he had abused her. I have no reason to believe that she did not do what she said she would do. I told Franco about my conversation with Ferguson, and he threatened to ruin my career if I pressed charges against him. He said he had powerful friends who were attorneys who would ruin my name. I remained silent for all these years because I was in academia. I have told a number of people about it privately, however. These are upstanding, well-known professors of History and English at other institutions, who would certainly corroborate my story.

I am encouraged to report in the wake of the Weinstein and #metoo movements.

This man has certainly assaulted many other women over the course of his fabulously successful career. It’s time that the truth came out about this predator. I will take any lie detector and make any affidavits necessary to assure that he is brought to justice.

Sincerely,

Kimberly Latta

Kimberly S Latta, PhD, LSW

Pittsburgh, PA

 

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Stanford Humanities Center hosts largest program of its kind in the U.S. https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/24/stanford-humanities-center-hosts-largest-program-of-its-kind-in-the-u-s/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/24/stanford-humanities-center-hosts-largest-program-of-its-kind-in-the-u-s/#respond Tue, 24 Oct 2017 09:40:30 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1131686 Founded in 1980 to support advanced research in areas ranging from history to philosophy to literature and more, the Stanford Humanities Center hosts about 50 fellows and about 50 public events per year.

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As of this fall, the Stanford Humanities Center’s cohort of fellows is the largest of any humanities institution in the U.S.

Founded in 1980 to support advanced research in areas ranging from history to philosophy to literature and more, the Stanford Humanities Center hosts about 50 fellows and about 50 public events per year. The center hosted less than 10 fellows annually when it launched, most of whom came from Stanford’s faculty; its membership has grown in years since, and starting this school year, the center is hosting 12 postdoctoral scholars through the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities program.

Fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center as a whole are targeted at a wide mix of scholars: Stanford undergraduates and graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and faculty from both within and beyond Stanford may all apply. Scholars affiliated with the institute have gone on to win a medley of prestigious awards, from Pulitzers to so-called “genius grants” from the MacArthur Foundation.

Research by former fellows ranges broadly, examining everything from the moral weight of contributing to global warming to education in North and South Korea following the Korean war.

“Mixing all of those people at different stages of their career and across a range of academic disciplines is where the magic of the Humanities Center lies,” Caroline Winterer, director of the center and Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities, told Stanford News.

“The cross-fertilization of ideas is essential to cutting-edge research,” she added.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Delayed renaming committee no longer aiming for recommendation on Serra https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/18/delayed-renaming-committee-no-longer-aiming-to-make-recommendation-on-serra-issue/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/18/delayed-renaming-committee-no-longer-aiming-to-make-recommendation-on-serra-issue/#respond Wed, 18 Oct 2017 07:52:16 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1131264 After repeated delays, a committee assembled by the University in early 2016 to establish principles for renaming campus buildings and landmarks expects to release its conclusions by the end of fall quarter.

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After repeated delays, a committee assembled by the University in early 2016 to establish principles for renaming campus buildings and landmarks expects to release its conclusions by the end of fall quarter.

However, in what the committee chair describes as an effort to move an unexpectedly challenging process along, the group’s mandate has changed. At the request of University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the faculty, student and staff members of the eight-person committee are no longer aiming to form a recommendation on the issue that jump-started the renaming debate: the street and three campus buildings named after Junipero Serra, a Catholic saint who ran several California missions that have come under scrutiny for their treatment of Native Americans.

Instead, as of spring quarter, the committee is formulating general principles to guide any future renaming deliberations, said the committee’s chair, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus David Kennedy ’63.

Committee members are “still trying to come to a consensus,” he said. If the committee’s deliberations indeed wrap up this quarter, its conclusions will come almost a year later than planned.

“The task has been more complicated than I think any of us anticipated going in,” Kennedy admitted. “I think honestly [Tessier-Lavigne] was trying to simplify things for us since we were having so much difficulty.”

The shift in the committee’s mission didn’t sit well with Leo Bird ’17, an alumnus and member of Montana’s AmskapiiPiikanii tribe who as a student introduced an Undergraduate Senate resolution to replace Serra’s name. Until The Daily mentioned it, Bird hadn’t heard that the group would likely not be issuing a specific recommendation.

“I think it’s just a big slap in the face,” Bird said.

Delayed renaming committee no longer aiming for recommendation on Serra
(ROBERT SHI/The Stanford Daily)

The Serra debate

The renaming committee was formed in March 2016 under ex-University President John Hennessy, following concerns students raised about places on campus bearing Serra’s name. Serra founded the California mission network, which harmed the life and livelihood of Native American tribes in California.

Some argue that Stanford must remove Serra’s name out of respect to the Native community hurt by Serra’s legacy, while others say Serra is being unfairly blamed for the faults of the mission system and worry about judging historical figures by modern standards. The act of renaming has also raised concerns that erasing the names of controversial figures amounts to censoring a complex but important piece of history — a history that universities like Stanford have the duty to educate the public about.

Early textbook accounts of the missions’ legacy portray missionaries’ relationship to the Native Americans as one of father and child, suggesting that settlers saved “savages” from destitute lives. Modern takes give a much more critical view, noting that many Native Americans were held against their will at missions, forced into European ways of life and faced with brutal treatment for going against colonizers’ wishes. Meanwhile, Europeans brought diseases such as smallpox that decimated the Native community; over the course of the mission period, the Native American population in California was cut in half.

Many members of the Native American community at Stanford find Serra’s role in the mission system problematic.

“I think [the name] should be gone,” said Loralee Sepsey ’18, co-chair of the Stanford American Indian Organization (SAIO) and member of the California Big Pine Paiute tribe. “It should be replaced by indigenous names indigenous to the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, whose lands we are on right now.”

The issue of renaming gained attention at Stanford when Bird introduced his resolution in the Undergraduate Senate, or ASSU. The resolution, which later passed the Graduate Student Senate and Faculty Senate, supports the renaming of four specific places: Serra and Junipero dorms, both of which house freshmen; Serra House, the location of the Clayman Institute for Gender Studies; and Serra Mall, Stanford’s official address. Since Stanford does not have the jurisdiction to rename Serra Mall, the resolution seeks to change the University’s address.

Similar debates have played out at other colleges, including Yale University, where a task force recently recommended the university rename Calhoun College, named after John C. Calhoun — a 19th century senator and vice president best known for his position strongly defending slavery. Last spring at Georgetown University, two buildings named after after university presidents who sold slaves to pay the school’s debts were renamed.

Amid the renaming controversies unfolding across campuses, residents of Serra dorm in Stern Hall whom The Daily interviewed said they don’t feel strongly about the name.

“I don’t have an attachment to the name Serra,” said Olivia Flournoy ’21, a Serra resident. “Since it does represent something that harmed people in the past, I wouldn’t be against changing the name, especially if there were alternatives that were Native American.”

However, Kaan Ertas ’21, another Serra resident, believes the dorm name Serra no longer represents the missionary himself.

“Serra stands for the house of Serra and its own traditions rather than the person after which it was named,” Ertas said, adding that he is not against renaming but would not “radically support it.”

Some members of the Catholic community at Stanford feel more conflicted, said Katie Hufker ’18, president of the Undergraduate Catholic Students Association.

Hufker, who acknowledged the complexity of the issue but believes Serra deserves his sainthood — “he firmly believed that he was doing what was right at the time,” she argued — said the Catholic community as a whole is less “political” than other groups on campus and as a result has been a quieter voice in the renaming debate.

Hufker is not against having a conversation about renaming places named after Serra.

“Stanford is an incredibly diverse place with people from a lot of different backgrounds,” she said. “If there are students that are really hurt by the legacy of the missions as whole, that’s a conversation worth happening.”

However, Hufker noted that Serra is not responsible for the entire legacy of the mission system, saying that he is being scapegoated.

“The mission system changed after his death and the mission system as a whole is more than just Serra,” Hufker said.

Similarly, chair of Stanford’s renaming committee Kennedy has written previously that individuals memorialized on campuses should be considered in the “totality of [their] life” rather than discarded for offensive views common in their times. In a letter to the Princeton Board of Trustees about a proposal to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from the university’s public policy school due to his racist and pro-segregation views, Kennedy argued that choices about memorials require “the fullest appreciation of the circumstances.”

“Princeton surely does not honor Wilson because of his racial views … But it has recognized that in the fullness of his passage through this vale of tears and disappointment, while he may well fall short of sainthood, on balance his was a life of extraordinary accomplishment,” Kennedy wrote.

Discussion of removing Serra’s name has caught the attention of some outside campus as well as students and faculty.

In a letter to The Daily in 2016, a spokesperson for the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights argued that Serra as an individual helped protect Native Americans against “the violent abuses directed toward them by the Spanish colonizers.”

Jerry Underdal ’65, a retired history teacher and alumnus, has followed Stanford’s renaming committee with interest as a member of a similar committee formed for the Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD). He emailed with Kennedy several times about renaming issues and sent the professor thoughts last spring after inquiring about the Stanford committee’s progress. With a report still forthcoming in October, Underdal noted that the students who began the Serra renaming push have graduated and criticized the committee delays as “disrespect shown students who raised a legitimate and very important concern.”

In a letter to Kennedy in May, Underdal said he generally favors retaining problematic names but urged increased education about uncomfortable aspects of memorialized figures.

“I wouldn’t advise the university to take on the Pope and directly challenge the suitability of a newly elevated saint to have a freshman dorm named for him,” Underdal wrote. “But Stanford should redouble its already significant efforts to raise awareness and understanding of the Muwekma people, whose ancestors occupied this region for millennia before Europeans arrived to seize their lands and waters and annihilate their culture.”

The PAUSD committee Underdal sat on coalesced at around the same time as Stanford’s to consider renaming schools that bore the names of three eugenics proponents — David Starr Jordan, Lewis Terman and Elwood Cubberley, all of whom are also commemorated with Stanford buildings as major figures in the University’s history. Last February, the Palo Alto group recommended renaming in an over 60-page report.

Underdal said his committee grappled with reluctance from much of the Palo Alto community as it discussed name changes and urged Stanford to take action as a “leader.”

“Let’s lead the country,” he said. “This is a leading institution. It’s not supposed to follow.”

Delayed renaming committee no longer aiming for recommendation on Serra
(ROBERT SHI/The Stanford Daily)

Progress of the committee

When the Committee on Names began gathering community input in spring of 2016, it expected to have criteria for renaming by the following October and announce its recommendations in the winter. Kennedy told The Daily at the end of last school year that the committee expected to wrap up its work in “several weeks,” but deliberations stretched throughout the summer.

Bird, back home in rural Montana, said they were frustrated but not wholly surprised that the question of Serra’s name was not resolved by the time they graduated this past June. (Bird uses gender neutral pronouns.)

“They really want to flesh it out, they really want to take their time and have debate about it, but in my mind there’s nothing to debate about,” Bird said.

Discussing timing, Kennedy attributed delays to the desire to weigh a complex issue appropriately.

“We’ve had to be quite careful and deliberate and do a lot of consultation about [this] ourselves, and iterative discussions,” he said. “It’s just time consuming.”

Face-to-face discussions have proved difficult to coordinate, particularly over the summer break as members travel, and the committee has not met since June. But members were still at work, Kennedy said, exchanging emails. The two students currently sitting on the committee, Miguel Samano ’19 and Carson Smith ’19, worked over the summer on outreach efforts to two communities in particular: Catholics and Native Americans at Stanford.

The committee has met in person a total of 14 times since its formation, according to University archaeologist Laura Jones, the group’s staff member. In that time, the committee’s makeup has changed somewhat; both Smith and Samano joined last spring as nominees of ASSU, while one of the first two students appointed to the group has left since graduating in 2016. One faculty member left the committee this summer due to “competing work demands,” Jones said.

Multiple committee members did not respond to requests or declined to discuss the committee, referring The Daily to Kennedy as chair. Committee members range widely in discipline, from English (Professor Michele Elam) to sociology (Professor Matt Snipp) to religion (Dean for Religious Life and Professor Jane Shaw).

Hufker said that beyond her contact with Samano around July she has little idea of what the committee is up to, and said she just hopes that if Stanford were to ever get rid of the Serra name, the Catholic community and other groups will have a part in picking replacements.

“It seems like the process is more or less happening behind closed doors,” Hufker said. “The committee seems like a bit of a black box, but maybe that’s the way it is for all of campus, not just the Catholic community.”

Kennedy denied that the committee has felt “pressure” to complete its work, saying only that members are “eager to get it done” and citing the complexity of the task. He declined to answer questions about the committee’s discussions, saying it would be inappropriate with deliberation ongoing.

A final report will go to President Tessier-Lavigne, who ultimately decides what will be made public, Kennedy said.

Stanford spokesperson E.J. Miranda said in an email to The Daily that Tessier-Lavigne has given “some staff support to assist the committee in its work” and “has been encouraging the committee to bring its work to a conclusion.”

“However, he also respects that the committee operates independently and that it will reach its conclusions independently,” Miranda wrote.

Miranda did not respond to a question about whether the University expects a follow-up process to examine the question of Serra’s name specifically.

As the renaming discussion continues, Sepsey cautioned against dismissing debate over Serra as one about “just one person” or something that “happened a long time ago.”

“Someone who is not Native can see Serra’s name and just not have any connotations attached to it, but if you knew that history and if you grew up hearing these things, seeing that name honored can be really harmful — at least for me,” she said.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu and Claire Dinshaw at cdinshaw ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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DeVos makes surprise visit to Stanford https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/12/devos-makes-surprise-visit-to-stanford/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/12/devos-makes-surprise-visit-to-stanford/#respond Fri, 13 Oct 2017 00:04:06 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1131008 Students in Graduate School of Business (GSB) class GSBGEN 383: “Practical Policy and Politics” had a particularly high-profile guest speaker Thursday morning: Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who visited Stanford before heading to a school in Milpitas.

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Students in Graduate School of Business (GSB) class GSBGEN 383: “Practical Policy and Politics” had a particularly high-profile guest speaker Thursday morning: Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who visited Stanford before heading to a school in Milpitas.

The MBA/MSx course is taught by GSB lecturer Keith Hennessey ’90, who was assistant to the U.S. President for Economic Policy and director of the U.S. National Economic Council under President George W. Bush. According to Hennessey, students only learned that DeVos was visiting when she walked into the room.

“They were quite surprised when she walked in the room, and there was a surge of excitement and adrenaline as they suddenly realized they’d be able to ask and challenge her directly on these topics,” wrote Hennessey in an email to The Daily. “They did both, quite effectively.”

DeVos spent the full one hour and 45 minutes fielding questions from the class, with most of the questions coming from students. Hennessey declined to elaborate on the content of the session as well as any past acquaintance he might have had with DeVos during his career as a policymaker.

“I’m sorry I can’t say more about the substance because we agreed it would be off the record,” said Hennessey.

After delivering the lecture, DeVos paid a visit to the d.school, where she spoke to several students. Jacqueline Wibowo ’18 M.S. ’18 was working on a group project for a management science and engineering class when DeVos approached them in their workspace.

“She just ended up coming to our stations asking what we were doing,” said Wibowo.

Wibowo said her group was working to brainstorm a possible research question based on a single-word prompt, “money,” and was curious about DeVos’ thoughts given her background.

“She said she was thinking about her grandkids [and] how she would explain the concept of money to a two-year-old for the first time,” said Wibowo.

Wibowo added that some of her project partners had reservations about DeVos based on her decisions as Secretary of Education, but that the group agreed that she was “articulate” and her contribution “very insightful” despite their misgivings.

DeVos sparked controversy last month when she revoked key Obama-era Title IX regulations, rescinding the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter that enumerated school’s responsibilities for handling sexual assault cases and, among other things, mandated that schools use a lower standard of evidence to find guilt in such cases. DeVos has criticized schools’ Title IX programs for overstepping their authority and denying accused students due process — a focus that quickly came under fire from advocates for sexual assault victims, including many at Stanford.

Interim guidelines issued by DeVos now allow colleges and universities to decide what standard of evidence they want to employ.

“This interim guidance will help schools as they work to combat sexual misconduct and will treat all students fairly,” DeVos said. “Schools must continue to confront these horrific crimes and behaviors head-on. There will be no more sweeping them under the rug. But the process also must be fair and impartial, giving everyone more confidence in its outcomes.”

Prior to DeVos’ confirmation as Secretary of Education, campus activist groups mobilized students to oppose her appointment by calling their local and state representatives. She was eventually confirmed by the margin of just one vote, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tiebreaker.

According to GSB spokesperson Heather Hansen, the communications office did not receive advance notice of DeVos’ visit to Stanford.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu and Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Trustees decline shareholder engagement on companies’ private prison associations https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/10/trustees-decline-shareholder-engagement-private-prisons/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/10/trustees-decline-shareholder-engagement-private-prisons/#respond Wed, 11 Oct 2017 06:38:13 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1130915 The Stanford Board of Trustees announced Tuesday that the University will not divest from various companies associated with the private prison industry that a student group submitted for review last fall.

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The Stanford Board of Trustees announced Tuesday that the University will not engage with various companies  it invests in about their associations with the private prison industry, as a student group sought in a request for review submitted last September.

In a letter explaining its decision, the Board noted that Stanford does not invest directly in the private prison operators that SU Prison Divest expressed concern about in its request for review. However, to SU Prison Divest leaders’ disappointment, the Board declined to seek discussions on the issue with — and threaten to divestment from — companies that the prison divestment movement has criticized, including those that invest in private prisons, use inmate workers or provide services to prisoners such as food, healthcare and phone usage.

On Tuesday, the Board also announced plans to review Stanford’s Statement on Investment Responsibility, which guides University policy in the area. The Board expects to have new investment policies ready by next fall.

The University will not accept any new requests to review investments while the overall process is evaluated this school year.

In some areas, the Board followed the recommendations of Stanford’s faculty, student, staff and alumni Advisory Panel on Investment Responsibility and Licensing (APIRL), which concluded that corporations that invest in private prisons or use prisoners’ work do not directly harm them and therefore do not meet criteria set out in the school’s current divestment guidelines.

However, the Board broke with a majority of APIRL members on the issue of service-providing companies, which SU Prison Divest argues harm prisoners by, for example, price-gouging inmates who place telephone calls. The Board contends that these groups also do not directly cause social harm.

SU Prison Divest stated in its submission to the University that private prisons take advantage of a correctional system that relies too heavily on imprisonment and disproportionately affects marginalized groups such as ethnic minorities.

“Prison should not be profitable,” the group’s formal letter from last year states. “This request aims to highlight the consequences of what [legal scholar] Michelle Alexander calls “The New Jim Crow,” a system of mass incarceration implicitly supported by Stanford’s ongoing investment.”

The student organization called on Stanford to ask flagged companies to cut their ties with the private prison industry or else face Stanford’s divestment.

Signed by Gail Harris ’74 J.D. ’77, chair of the Board’s committee on responsible investment, the trustees’ decision letter acknowledges that SU Prison Divest’s concerns are “important and [deserve] broad discussion.” The announcement cites research by Stanford law students that “indeed portrays a troublesome picture of parts of the criminal justice system, extending well beyond private prisons.”

However, the Board disagreed with the student group that all of the companies flagged for review cause “social injury,” which by Stanford’s investment guidelines must come directly from the action or inaction of a company.

A majority of APIRL found that the four telephone companies and one food company under review for their role in providing inmates services caused social harm. With some members dissenting from the majority view, APIRL ultimately recommended collecting more information on these five groups.

SU Prison Divest, for its part, argues that such companies act against inmates’ interests.

“Cutting expenses on necessary functions including medical services, rehabilitation programs, legal services and prison staffing is fiscally profitable,” the group’s letter reads. “This is consistently demonstrated by these industries through lobbying for harsher criminal sentencing and support of lawmakers offering limited rehabilitation program.”

Concerns about the food company were based on breaches of contract that have led prisons and officials to take legal action or in some cases drop the corporation’s services, according to the Board’s response. Discussing inmates’ phone prices, the Board argued that the high costs “should be addressed” but that the biggest share of prisoners’ phone bills comes from state and local fees, which would require legislation to change. A New York Times piece on the issue cited hundreds of millions in “concession fees” that companies pay to government for contracts.

Dan Brown ’18, a SU Prison Divest leader, criticized the Board’s decision in an email to various email chat lists Tuesday afternoon.

“The board of trustees made their decision about divesting from/engaging private prison companies, banks which finance the construction of those prisons, companies that exploit prisoner labor, and companies that provide (historically substandard) services to prison facilities,” he wrote. “Their decision was essentially to do nothing.”

Brown and another group leader did not respond immediately to a request for comment Tuesday evening.

In spring of 2016, the Board reviewed and ultimately refused a similar request from student group Fossil Free Stanford (FFS) to divest from fossil fuels. The decision followed an extended campaign by FFS that included a week-long sit-in protest in the Main Quad.

The planned review of Stanford’s responsible investment rules stemmed from concerns voiced by APIRL members and groups that have submitted divestment requests, according to the Board.

“These questions and concerns have centered on ambiguities in the current statement that make its requirements for divestment difficult to apply; the efficiency of the process for acting on a divestment request; and other elements of the process in general,” the Board wrote in a statement. “We take these concerns seriously.”

A web page asking for community feedback will be up by Nov. 15.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

An earlier version of this article stated that the Board of Trustees declined to divest in various companies associated with private prisons. In fact, the student group SU Prison Divest requested that Stanford engage with these companies as shareholders, which the Board decided against. The Daily regrets this error.

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Stanford sees fiscal year return on investments of 13.1 percent https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/05/stanford-sees-fiscal-year-return-on-investments-of-13-1-percent/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/05/stanford-sees-fiscal-year-return-on-investments-of-13-1-percent/#respond Fri, 06 Oct 2017 06:19:29 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1130698 Stanford made a 13.1 percent return on its investments the past fiscal year, slightly above the 12.9 return-on-investment that U.S. higher education institutions as a whole experienced during that same period.

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Stanford made a 13.1 percent return on its investments the past fiscal year, slightly above the 12.9 return-on-investment that U.S. higher education institutions as a whole experienced during that same period.

Stanford sees fiscal year return on investments of 13.1 percent
(SAM GIRVIN/The Stanford Daily).

The latest fiscal year’s return-on-investment is a marked change from the previous year’s, when the Merged Pool of total investments overseen by the Stanford Management Company gave a return of -0.4 percent. That -0.4 percent was still higher than the median return of -2.9 percent for all colleges and universities in the country.

According to the Stanford Management Company — which invests a total of $26.9 billion comprised of money from Stanford’s endowment as well the long-term financial resources of its hospitals — the Merged Pool returned $3.2 billion in the 12 months ending June 30.

“Although comprising only a quarter of the total portfolio, public equity holdings led our result with very strong absolute and relative performance,” Robert Wallace, chief executive officer of Stanford Management Company, told Stanford News.

Meanwhile, the University’s endowment stood at $24.8 billion at the end of August, up almost 11 percent from $22.4 billion the same time in 2016.  In contrast, in the 2015-16 fiscal year, the endowment grew by about 0.8 percent.

Throughout the past fiscal year, $1.2 billion of the endowment, or slightly more than five percent of its starting value, was directed toward academic costs and financial aid. As The Daily explained in its recent overview of the endowment, the hefty fund supports about half of all financial aid at any given time and offsets tuition costs by covering part of faculty salaries and other expenses.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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President and Provost field wide-ranging questions at town hall https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/04/president-and-provost-field-wide-ranging-questions-at-town-hall/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/04/president-and-provost-field-wide-ranging-questions-at-town-hall/#respond Thu, 05 Oct 2017 04:47:55 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1130644 Long-term planning, freedom of speech, research funding and sexual assault were prominent topics during a wide-ranging “town hall” discussion hosted by University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Persis Drell on Wednesday as part of their efforts to increase their communication with the Stanford community.

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Long-term planning, freedom of speech, research funding and sexual assault were prominent topics during a wide-ranging “town hall” discussion hosted by University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Persis Drell on Wednesday as part of their efforts to increase their communication with the Stanford community. The session was open to all community members but drew mostly faculty and staff.

Improving the administration’s communication — an aspect of the University that some students have criticized, particularly in the wake of controversial University decisions such as a ban on hard alcohol and a quickly-reversed decision to suspend the Stanford Band — has been one of Tessier-Lavigne and Drell’s focuses since they assumed their roles during the last school year. In addition to the town hall series, they started holding office hours and most recently began a joint blog dubbed “Notes from the Quad.”

Before diving into a Q&A session that made up the majority of the event, Tessier-Lavigne and Drell discussed Stanford’s ongoing long-range planning process, launched last year to help formulate a vision for Stanford’s future. An open call for ideas received 2,800 submissions, which four committees focused on different areas of the University are currently sifting through and synthesizing into what Drell called “white paper” summaries to be shared with the public.

“It’s not 2,800 independent ideas; there are big themes emerging and those big themes are really important,” Drell said.

“We’re making this process up as we go along,” she added later, saying that each committee is approaching its tasks differently. “But I think actually the process itself is having a really good impact on the community.”

The “white papers” will be released during winter quarter, after Stanford’s executive leadership reviews them and discusses them with the four groups. The summaries will focus on major commonalities culled from submissions, although Drell emphasized that the University will still follow up on many particular ideas it wants to pursue. Meanwhile, she said, the administration is trying to “lay groundwork” for action on issues it knows will emerge as priorities, such as affordable housing for faculty, staff and students in the Bay Area.

During the Q&A, Drell and Tessier-Lavigne fielded several questions related to promoting freedom of expression, grappling with speech people find hurtful and improving dialogue on campus. Drell briefly mentioned UC Berkeley, where right-wing speakers have stirred heated controversy and protests, and emphasized Stanford’s commitment to allowing expression of “the broadest range of ideas.”

“There is no question that free expression of ideas leads to the expression of opinions and thoughts that are threatening to some members of our communities, particularly members of marginalized communities,” Drell said. “I struggle with this personally … I deeply empathize with those … who feel physically threatened by some of the discourse, and yet I don’t know how to prevent that without then violating something else that is core to our institution.”

Giving an example of the value she’s found in open discourse, Drell, a former physics professor, recalled being challenged once to explain what diversity brought to a physics classroom.

“Forcing myself to answer that question did more to help me understand and have the ability to articulate the importance of diversity than almost any other single interaction,” she said. “I would love to help our community go through that process more.”

Tessier-Lavigne reiterated an explanation he gave at another town hall in February, describing how the University chooses when to express its opinion on political issues. Stanford avoids weighing in on policy as much as possible to avoid “silencing voices on campus,” he said, but will take stances on issues that threaten community members or the University’s core values — such as the Trump administration’s decision to end DACA — and those that directly affect Stanford’s ability to carry out its work, such as federal funding for research.

Despite worries since President Donald Trump’s election that the White House would slash such funding, Stanford has actually found strong bipartisan support in both houses of Congress for its agenda, Tessier-Lavigne said. He reported visiting Washington, D.C. four times in the last five months to lobby for University priorities.

The White House pushed earlier this year for massive cuts to research funding, including a 20 percent cut to the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But Congress ended up approving a $1 billion increase in funds for the NIH.

“The administration’s plan is being ignored by Congress,” Tessier-Lavigne said. “We’re very pleased.”

Responding to a question about Stanford’s plans to increase the diversity of its faculty, Drell wondered aloud if Stanford could learn from the recruitment techniques of its athletics coaches. She suggested a focus on younger but promising scholars.

“What if you take some of those recruitment strategies and apply them not just to the senior, superstar faculty but to the junior faculty … or follow them as postdocs,” she said. “I do believe there is more we can be doing.”

Drell also addressed sexual assault, a topic that many schools have faced scrutiny over and that has been in the news recently as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos moves to overhaul federal guidelines on how campuses handle Title IX cases. In a statement last month, Drell said that Stanford is not changing its policies in response to DeVos’ actions.

“We are not doing what we do because the federal government tells us to,” the provost said at Wednesday’s town hall. “We intend to the right thing as best we can and be compliant with state and federal laws.”

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Stanford denounces Trump administration’s decision to end DACA program as ‘shameful’ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/09/05/stanford-denounces-trump-administrations-decision-to-end-daca-program-protecting/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/09/05/stanford-denounces-trump-administrations-decision-to-end-daca-program-protecting/#respond Tue, 05 Sep 2017 18:46:34 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1129989 In a statement released Tuesday morning, Stanford denounced the Trump administration’s “shameful” decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which has protected about 800,000 young adult undocumented immigrants from deportation to date.

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In a statement released Tuesday morning, Stanford denounced the Trump administration’s “shameful” decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which has protected about 800,000 young adult undocumented immigrants from deportation to date.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday announced plans to end DACA, with a six-month delay, giving Congress the opportunity to act on the issue. The DACA program, which former president Barack Obama created in 2012 with an executive order, allowed so-called “DREAMers” who came to the U.S. illegally as children to live and work in the country for two-year periods subject to renewal.

“I do not favor punishing children, most of whom are now adults, for the actions of their parents,” President Donald Trump said in a statement explaining the White House’s decision. “But we must also recognize that we are a nation of opportunity because we are a nation of laws.”

Stanford said that it “vigorously and adamantly opposes” the change.

“This announcement before Congress can enact a permanent legislative solution will bring further profound disruption and uncertainty to those who have met DACA’s strict requirements and are fully a part of American communities,” Stanford’s statement reads.

University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne wrote a letter to Trump last Thursday urging the White House not to end DACA.

“These young people are already full-fledged members of our communities but, through no fault of their own, face uncertain futures due to their immigration status,” Tessier-Lavigne wrote. “They have met DACA’s strict criteria, have records of academic achievement and community involvement and have contributed to the economy.”

Tuesday’s University statement called on Congress to “expeditiously pass legislation to provide permanent legal residence and a path to citizenship for our country’s DREAMers” and noted Stanford’s resources for students or employees affected by the policy change. Resources are compiled at an Undocumented at Stanford website launched at the beginning of the year and range from free legal consultations for students to counseling and academic accommodations.

University spokesperson Lisa Lapin said Stanford does not have data on how many undocumented or DACA students and employees attend and work at Stanford. The University does not collect individuals’ DACA status, she said.

Many other universities have voiced support for DACA in the wake of the White House’s announcement. The move has been popular among Trump’s conservative base but has garnered opposition from the left, many employers and several top Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, who said Friday he did not want Trump to scrap the program and instead wanted Congress to handle the issue.

Current DACA recipients will keep their protected status until their permits expire and can renew before Oct. 5 if their permits are expiring within six months, the White House said. Applications for new permits that have already been submitted will be processed, but as of Tuesday, applications are closed.

 

Below is the University’s full statement:

Sept. 5, 2017

Stanford University statement on federal administration’s plans for DACA

Stanford University vigorously and adamantly opposes the shameful decision announced today to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. This announcement before Congress can enact a permanent legislative solution will bring further profound disruption and uncertainty to those who have met DACA’s strict requirements and are fully a part of American communities.

As President Marc Tessier-Lavigne wrote in a letter to the White House last week, DACA has allowed thousands of promising students to contribute to our country. “At Stanford, we have seen first-hand that investing in their education is an investment in our country’s future, as they apply their talents to strengthening our society and to driving economic growth,” he wrote. “In keeping with our deeply held American values, they deserve the opportunity to have legal resident status and to flourish in our society.”

At Stanford, we stand in firm support of everyone in our immigrant community. Stanford will continue to advocate tirelessly for immigration reform efforts that allow us to continue to welcome students, employees and scholars who contribute to our mission of education and discovery. In that context, we urge Congress to expeditiously pass legislation to provide permanent legal residence and a path to citizenship for our country’s DREAMers.

Stanford also stands ready to provide support to students and employees who have concerns or questions about today’s announcement. Information about support services is available on the Undocumented at Stanford website.

 

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that, according to spokesperson Lisa Lapin, the University does not collect individuals’ immigration status. In fact, it does not collect information on whether students are DACA recipients. The Daily regrets this error.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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University leaders denounce ‘racism, anti-Semitism and bigotry’ after Charlottesville violence https://stanforddaily.com/2017/08/15/university-leaders-denounce-racism-anti-semitism-and-bigotry-after-charlottesville-violence/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/08/15/university-leaders-denounce-racism-anti-semitism-and-bigotry-after-charlottesville-violence/#respond Wed, 16 Aug 2017 04:54:52 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1129791 Stanford leaders responded Tuesday to last weekend’s violence in Charlottesville with a letter to students and postdoctoral scholars affirming that “racism, anti-Semitism and bigotry are antithetical to the values of our country and contrary to the fundamental ideals of Stanford.”

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Stanford leaders responded Tuesday to last weekend’s violence in Charlottesville with a letter addressed to students and postdoctoral scholars affirming that “racism, anti-Semitism and bigotry are antithetical to the values of our country and contrary to the fundamental ideals of Stanford.”

The letter, signed by three senior administrators – Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Harry Elam, Vice Provost for Graduate Education Patti Gumport and Vice Provost for Student Affairs Greg Boardman – expresses support for community members in the wake of Saturday protests by white nationalists that turned deadly after a car drove into counter-protestors, killing a woman and injuring 19 others.

“We, like many of you, have been watching the violent events and aftermath at the University of Virginia and in Charlottesville with shock and concern,” the letter, posted on Stanford News, states.

The statement will not be emailed out to all students but is being distributed to campus groups, University spokesperson Lisa Lapin said over email.

The vice provosts note in their statement that colleges and their surrounding areas “continue to be a focus for hateful clashes.” The Charlottesville conflict began when torch-bearing protestors rallied to preserve a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee that the college town moved to take down. The statue had become a flashpoint for controversy, with critics arguing that it constituted a tribute to white supremacist ideology.

In the wake of Saturday’s protests, many criticized President Donald Trump for at first not specifically denouncing the white supremacist groups at the event. Trump did not single them out for condemnation until Monday and on Tuesday held to his initial remarks blaming both sides of protestors for the fighting.

The vice provosts’ letter states that the “Stanford community stands together.”

“We stand against violence, including the rhetoric of hate that incites violence,” it reads.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Trustees approve ‘cautious’ budget, investments in housing https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/18/trustees-approve-conservative-budget-investments-in-housing/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/18/trustees-approve-conservative-budget-investments-in-housing/#respond Mon, 19 Jun 2017 06:59:45 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1129228 At its June meeting, the Board of Trustees approved what the Board chair called a “very conservatively constructed” University budget for the coming fiscal year as well as a three-year plan for investment in facilities that is largely devoted to growing housing.

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At its June meeting last week, the Board of Trustees approved what the Board chair called a “very conservatively constructed” University budget for the coming fiscal year as well as a three-year plan for investment in facilities that is largely devoted to growing housing. The Board also green-lighted next steps on a host of construction projects.

Additionally, the June meeting marked the end of outgoing chair Steven Denning M.B.A. ’78’s five-year tenure, as Jeff Raikes ’80 takes his place heading the Board. Raikes, a veteran of tech, business, and philanthropy who served as CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has been a Stanford trustee since 2012.

Raikes, who has spent the last few months shadowing Denning and going on a “listening tour” to visit dorms and meet student, staff and faculty leaders, highlighted the University’s long-range planning process, Stanford Medicine and the unique housing and transportation challenges of the Bay Area as key areas he foresees working on as chair of the Board. Above all, though, he and Denning both emphasized a desire to capitalize on Stanford’s capacity for leadership among universities and in the world.

Despite these big aspirations, Denning said that Stanford’s budget for the 2017-18 fiscal year beginning Sept. 1 is “cautious,” partly due to sluggish growth in endowment returns and uncertainty over the future of federal research funding, a major source of revenue for the University.

The coming fiscal year’s $6.3 billion budget, nearly 7 percent larger than the previous year’s, projects a surplus of $165 million.

The budget allots $20 million in “contingency funding” to cover any money shortfalls well as to fund what Denning called “experimentation” under the recently launched long-range planning process, which will map out a vision for Stanford’s growth over the next decade and beyond.

The new budget’s relatively conservative approach follows similar concerns about federal money surrounding last year’s budget, which former Provost John Etchemendy Ph.D. ’82 declared the “most sobering” the University had seen since 2009 due to a drop in government research funding.

According to Denning, Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne has been focusing recently on communicating the importance of sustained government support for research: Tessier-Lavigne joined leaders in the biotech industry to meet with the vice president and other White House figures in April, and he will return to Washington, D.C. next week.

Trustees approve 'cautious' budget, investments in housing
Escondido Village of one of the major housing projects included in Stanford’s capital plan for the next three years of facilities investments (Courtesy of Stanford News).

In addition to the budget, the Board approved the University’s capital plan, which governs the next three years of spending on physical campus improvements. According to Denning, the $4.3 billion capital plan is the largest in Stanford’s history, up from $4.1 billion last year.

Almost half of the capital plan is devoted to increasing housing for graduate students, faculty and staff as part of ongoing efforts to address a shortage of living space on and near campus – a shortage made more critical by high housing prices in the surrounding area.

A major item in the University’s housing plans is residential construction in Escondido Village, which will add over 2,000 net new beds for graduate students as well as 900 parking spots. Construction begins this November; the project is expected to finish in fall of 2020.

Trustees authorized next actions on a variety of other projects-in-progress.

The Board gave concept approval to the Middle Plaza project, which seeks to turn about eight acres of vacant lots into 215 units of faculty and staff housing as well as retail and office space. The development still needs permission to move forward from the Menlo Park City Council.

In another move to add housing, the Board also authorized the concept and site of a plan to tear down two unused on-campus homes and replace them with eight single-family houses.

Plans for a new center for the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and Electronic Communications Hub (ECH) are set to move forward following concept and site approval. The EOC’s current location at the Faculty Club is problematic because its space is cramped, fails earthquake safety requirements and takes four hours of setup. The new two story building combining the EOC and ECH will be located near a new building for the Department of Public Safety, which received design approval from trustees as the meeting.

Design approval also went to a new childcare center, expansions of the Environmental Health and Safety Facility and the Center for Academic Medicine, the first of two planned buildings in the School of Medicine that will add administrative and research space.

The Board gave its construction approval to the renovation of Frost Amphitheater, which Denning said was delayed to allow baby birds nesting in the venue’s trees to fledge. The renovation will increase Frost’s bathrooms and disability access as well as install a permanent stage that should simplify setup for performances and allow the venue to host up to 50 performers per year.

Trustees heard presentations from the director of the Hoover Institution and from the CEO of the Stanford Management Company, which oversees the University’s endowment. Finally, the Board also honored two trustees who are retiring from the group: Brook Byers M.B.A. ’70, who served a five-year term, and Susan McCaw ’84, a trustee for a decade.

Reflecting on his time as chair as he moves on, Denning said that “there are very few things that we’ve started and brought to life” during his five-year term; much of Board’s work consists of seeing existing projects through, he said.

However, he noted three areas of work that he is especially proud of.

He highlighted the Board’s selection of University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, now a year into his role, as well as its work in creating the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program, which will bring graduate students from around the world to Stanford on scholarship starting in 2018. Denning noted the quick success of the program with fundraising: It gathered $750 million within about seven months, a feat he called “kind of unheard of in the development world.” Trustees just gave construction approval to the Denning House, which will serve as hub for the Knight-Hennessy Scholars.

Denning also expressed particular pride in the construction of an “arts district” on campus with the addition of Bing Concert Hall, the McMurtry Building and the Anderson Collection.

“I think it’s one of the huge changes at Stanford,” Denning said.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ Stanford.edu.

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