Dear Stanford, So here I am thinking my last column was a week ago and I’ve wrapped it up nicely when the Daily offers me a chance to write a senior reflection piece. Great, I think. Sentimental part two. But I say yes, as I do too often, and so find myself sitting at a…
I wonder why it is that we acclimate to change so quickly. The presidential election, suspension of the Stanford Band, CAPS drama and justice ad infinitum became facts of our social fabric as quickly as they happened, and the quarter system is merciless as always in its impartiality to the world around us.
That ethnography will likely never happen, and I know that as the months pass it becomes less and less relevant and less and less needed. But I can’t work up the courage to delete the file.
We’re nearing the end of the 2016-2017 academic year, and I’ve been thinking about Kardinal Kink again recently. Part of it is a selfish sort of nostalgia – I’ve been co-president for just about three years now and am getting ready to graduate – but a larger reason for writing about Kardinal Kink is because I’m genuinely proud of the work we’ve been able to do at Stanford since our founding late in the 2012-2013 academic year.
In activist communities, resilience of this sort seems rare. Rather than hear stories of activists who failed and recovered, we’re far more likely to hear stories of others who failed while interacting with activists and how devastating their failures must have been to them.
I’ve been meaning for the past two years to write a column on Inside-Outside strategy, or more colloquially, the general philosophy or strategy of organizing that prioritizes both those activists/advocates embedded inside political structures, and those based outside of them.
Arguing that “Stanford shows only good things, and hides the bad things” seems at this point to be a drastic oversimplification of how this university works.
Two years have passed since 2015, and activism has changed. Many frosh come pre-politicized, and a campus-wide movement is notably absent, swapped out for an endless number of smaller projects, initiatives and events.
