While popular attention often focuses on glaring factual inaccuracies, fake news or Trump’s tirades towards the media, I fear these are merely symptoms of a broader shift in attitude. Specifically, as others have already written, and as witnessed both through political rhetoric and polling, the populism that has fueled recent electoral victories centers on a marked distrust of “experts.”
At its core, Stanford is both a birthplace of new information and a marketplace of ideas, and The Daily plays a vital role in this academic enterprise.
Some in the University’s administration have come to see Stanford’s cultural DNA as “high-risk.” To be fair, this comes in the context of a broader birth of the university incorporated, bringing changes to campuses across the country. But this raises special questions at Stanford – can the culture of a place simply be changed by fiat, and, if so, what happens to a University that loses the spirit that defined it through the course of its long ascendancy?
The Stanford Portal, a shipping container that allows individuals to have face-to-face contact with others in distant portals, opened on Monday. The Portal uses immersive video and audio features to facilitate the long-distance conversations.
In a statement released Monday, Stanford’s Board of Trustees announced that the University will not be divesting from the fossil fuel industry. The announcement comes in response to a campaign on the issue by the student group Fossil Free Stanford.
A total of 1,318 high school seniors received letters of acceptance to Stanford’s Class of 2020 on Friday. An additional 745 early action students were accepted in December. The 2,063 admits came from a pool of 43,997 applicants, the largest in Stanford’s history. A further 3.6 percent of applicants were given a place on Stanford’s waitlist.
Stanford is announcing the launch of a new graduate scholars program and associated $750 million endowment. The Knight-Hennessy scholars program will be analogous to the Rhodes and Schwarzman scholarships, aiming to attract the world’s most talented graduate students to Stanford for studies across the University’s seven schools.
The “digital humanities” is an increasingly popular field of research within humanities departments at Stanford and beyond. Yet what exactly is the digital humanities? To gain a better understanding of this approach to scholarship, The Stanford Daily sat down with Caroline Winterer, professor of history and director of The Stanford Humanities Center, whose recent research focuses on digital analysis of Benjamin Franklin’s correspondences.
