Miguel Samano – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Tue, 06 Feb 2018 16:59:14 +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 Miguel Samano – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 We can’t lose ourselves in ethnic literature until we give up identity politics https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/06/we-cant-lose-ourselves-in-ethnic-literature-until-we-give-up-identity-politics/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/06/we-cant-lose-ourselves-in-ethnic-literature-until-we-give-up-identity-politics/#respond Tue, 06 Feb 2018 13:00:36 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1136185 A young Chicana was photographed mid-scream holding up a copy of La Raza, the East L.A. newspaper that chronicled the Chicano Movement of the 1970s. It read, “La Raza Raided: Editor, Staff, Imprisoned.” The Autry Museum of the American West had on display a collection of photographs by La Raza staff. Among other things, photographers […]

The post We can’t lose ourselves in ethnic literature until we give up identity politics appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
A young Chicana was photographed mid-scream holding up a copy of La Raza, the East L.A. newspaper that chronicled the Chicano Movement of the 1970s. It read, “La Raza Raided: Editor, Staff, Imprisoned.”

The Autry Museum of the American West had on display a collection of photographs by La Raza staff. Among other things, photographers snapped shots of plainclothes officers in the midst of spying on civilians, the bruised and bloody bodies left over from LAPD beatdowns and the moments before a sheriff’s deputy killed the journalist Ruben Salazar.

I took away from the Autry’s exhibit an appreciation for two aspects of effective journalism: First, that journalists can preserve the past for the present. Second, that the work of preservation often involves unmasking the ways that power works to infiltrate, repress and occasionally silence efforts to resist or document it.

Both aspects mirror an approach to the humanities that members of the Harvard community  have described as a tradition of “skeptical, detached critique.” This approach focuses on recovering what a text originally meant. As with professional journalists, the personal beliefs of interpreters working under this approach are irrelevant at best and, if not put aside, likely to distort the text’s meaning.  

In contrast, Harvard’s  “Mapping the Future” report outlines another group of interpreters seeking “enthusiastic identification” with their texts by placing themselves and the texts within a common heritage. Whether that heritage is construed in terms of the nation – as happened when national literature departments such as French and Spanish first arose — or in terms of ethnicity, race and gender, the focus is fundamentally on identity.

Study under this approach is often framed as a form of “powerful solidarity” with those authors who share an identity with their interpreters. On our own campus, the Who’s Teaching Us? campaign advocated for this approach less than a page into their proposal for, among other things, changes to Stanford’s curriculum: “students of color need teachers who reflect their own experiences and teach their histories … Western focused curricula reproduce the social conditions that globally oppress non-White/non-Western people.”  And so the search for meaning risks giving way to the crises of identity politics.

If I am being honest, La Raza matters to me as a Chicano because it is in some sense about me. But, if the issue were as simple as wanting more visibility for Chicanx culture, I’d be selling short the reason why, I think, La Raza deserved to be on display at a museum focused on the American West; that is, because it provides an additional perspective on our common historical heritage.

Debate on the canon needs to move past identity politics. Ethnic literature needs to be read within our humanities and ethnic studies courses, but it needs to be read as literature. We should embrace ethnic literature because of its radically imaginative act of taking us outside of ourselves — of allowing us, if only for a moment, to give up on identity. The best model for accomplishing this I know remains the tradition of skeptical, detached critique, for in striving to understand what a text originally meant, we can often unsettle our assumptions about history, the world and our place in both.

Arguments for a variety of identities and experiences represented in a curriculum, and especially one about “great books,” do not go far enough if their goal is to have more students read about people who are like them. In fact, arguments along these lines are beholden to the same logic that has often constrained what counts as canonical. Take the politically conservative National Association of Scholars’ defense of “Western civilization” requirements against “multiculturalism” and identity politics: In studying the West, “[students] usually finished with at least a partial recognition of their civilization as a grand monument to human achievement and something with which to identify.”

If the basis of a canon remains who can identify with it, the justification for including some works but not others can always be that only some works represent the perennial questions of the human experience (i.e., that everyone can identify with them).

As Edward Said has pointed out, an identity-based view of education misses the point of college.  Instead, we should “regard knowledge as something for which to risk identity” and the freedom to read literature not about us as “an invitation to give up on identity in the hope of understanding and perhaps even assuming more than one.”

But neither should we see literature envisioned as a project of cross-cultural empathy, as that’s still thinking in identitarian terms. Reading literature may, allow us to “interface with people from various backgrounds,” as Eliane Mitchell puts it, and understand their interiority, though this strikes me as a justification for reading that’s most often employed for literature on the margins.

“While no one would argue that the strongest reason for including ‘Jane Eyre’ in the English syllabus is so that African-American students (or any students, for that matter) can come to feel sympathy toward the experiences of nineteenth-century English women,” the literary critic Michael Hames-Garcia reminds us, “a parallel argument about ‘Invisible Man’ is commonplace.”

We need to move beyond thinking within our own, or other people’s, identity categories — and using them to decide which texts are worth reading — and towards a project of continuous self-creation and re-creation in literature. This approach is amenable with, if not necessary for, an understanding of the canon as a series of “great books” through which we can come to know ourselves and our place in the world. Its promise is that it folds ethnic literature into the canon for its status “on the margins” makes it likely to propose revisions to our collective body of knowledge.

Indeed, there are no “margins.” Once we begin taking seriously the idea that all we take for granted about ourselves and our world is historically contingent, we can begin giving up on the idea of transhistorical aesthetic values to define what should count as our canonical works — a point that has been repeatedly expounded by scholars of color.

In a discussion of the relative merits of Ralph Waldo Emerson in comparison to W.E.B. Du Bois and other authors of color, Hames-Garcia wrote, “The Souls of Black Folk could be demonstrably superior in aesthetic terms to Emerson’s essays once one no longer perceives these essays apart from the material human misery and joy they refer to, ignore or obscure.” He concludes that, “social context and what texts tell us about ‘possibilities for human flourishing’ become essential knowledge for evaluating them.”

That’s the promise of the skeptical, detached form of scholarship: it brings the world of ethnic writers sharply into focus and makes the urgency of studying them clear. For DuBois this — and not merely identification — explained the role of art in the world. “What has Beauty to do with Truth and Goodness — with the facts of the world and the right actions of men?” he wrote. “That somehow, somewhere eternal and perfect Beauty sits above Truth and Right I can conceive, but here and now in the world in which I work they are for me unseparated and inseparable.”

I can think of few words more descriptive of studying literature than truth and beauty; rather, the search for truth mediates the experience of beauty. Not that these two words don’t stretch beyond the realm of the humanities, as will be clear to anyone who has read a gripping news story or visited a well-curated museum exhibition. The trouble is recovering an approach to knowledge motivating exhibitions such as La Raza at the Autry for discussions of what we ought to read, and how we ought to read it.

I exited the Autry reviled by the police brutality committed against other Chicanos. My revulsion could be explained, in Audre Lorde’s words, as “touching that terror and loathing of any difference” within myself to see “whose face it wears.” But neither Lorde nor her starkly identitarian views can ever account for the sense of beauty I experienced — and continue to experience as I study ethnic literature. The recognitions we experience in artistic and cultural history are memorable because we see a truth  —we know the place, we see a face — as for the first time. And they are more beautiful for the face, in many ways, never quite being like mine.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post We can’t lose ourselves in ethnic literature until we give up identity politics appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/06/we-cant-lose-ourselves-in-ethnic-literature-until-we-give-up-identity-politics/feed/ 0 1136185
Nuestras murales: Comunidad and the value of dialogue https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/29/nuestras-murales-comunidad-and-the-value-of-dialogue-2/ Tue, 30 Jan 2018 02:57:13 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?post_type=tsd_magazine_post&p=1135755 “The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes” (1988) by José Burciaga is one of Stanford’s most controversial murals. Its critics have raised a fuss over Burciaga’s choice to have socialist revolutionary Che Guevara depicted as a hero despite the atrocities he committed against Cubans during Fidel Castro’s rise to power. Residents of the Chicano/Latino theme dorm […]

The post Nuestras murales: Comunidad and the value of dialogue appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
“The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes” (1988) by José Burciaga is one of Stanford’s most controversial murals. Its critics have raised a fuss over Burciaga’s choice to have socialist revolutionary Che Guevara depicted as a hero despite the atrocities he committed against Cubans during Fidel Castro’s rise to power. Residents of the Chicano/Latino theme dorm Casa Zapata, who serve as this Stern Dining mural’s unofficial stewards, have shot back that the mural is open to numerous interpretations and therefore is not intended to represent the views of the Zapata community.

An attack on the mural could, in one view, be an indirect way to critique specifically Chicanos and Latinos living in the dorm. Immediately prior to the above debate, this community, or comunidad, had been under attack, along with other communities of color, by the campus’s conservative publication, the Stanford Review, during a particularly rough student government election season.

I sympathize with concerns that critiques of an ethnic community’s art can be proxies for attacks on the community itself. Artworks do not usually lend themselves to such easy meanings that aesthetic considerations are always reducible to primarily political statements. Few people would interpret art hanging in a museum that way, yet that is precisely how Chicano murals are too often interpreted.

A reading of Burciaga’s mural as a primarily political statement is particularly unfair. My own interpretation is that the mural is about the multiplicity of views among Chicanos, that as a product of internal critique and discussion among over 200 Chicano activists and students, the mural serves as a metaphor for the role of dialogue as a foundational principle in a free society and for comunidad.

“The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes” should enjoin members of comunidad to live up to their principles. Dining underneath the mural reminds me that my ethnic heritage connects me to a tradition of dialogue. The worthiness of that tradition should be judged by the instances when defending dialogue proved most difficult. Here, I want to examine how arduous ensuring unfettered dialogue can be and to how instructive Burciaga’s mural is towards achieving that end.

During his time as Zapata’s resident fellow, Burciaga polled community members for their choice of Chicano heroes to include in the mural. He asked both Chicano students at Stanford and older Chicano activists from the 1960s living in the Bay Area. While the activists concentrated their votes among a small group of people who either played important roles in the Chicano Movement or served as symbolic historical figures during it, the students spread theirs out among 240 candidates.

Many of the students’ choices were included in the mural despite not being the most popular choices. As Burciaga explained in his essay collection “Drink Cultura,” the community-oriented nature of Mexican and Mexican-American culture made identifying individual Chicano heroes difficult. Aside from obvious candidates, on which many students agreed with the activists, many students voted for the everyday people in their lives: “mothers, fathers, grandparents, Vietnam veterans, braceros, campesinos and pachucos.” Most of the students’ choices stand behind the selected few Burciaga depicted sitting down for supper. Without these people to fill in the background of the mural, the sense that the mural represents a Chicano community invested in communal values arguably disappears.

The mural models conviviality as a cornerstone to Chicano community. Living with one another requires more than deferring to whatever the majority backs; we must be willing to inhabit the same spaces, even when we disagree on matters as foundational as who our heroes are or what we believe. By the time Burciaga painted his mural, conviviality played a leading role in a Chicano canopy of ideas. A steadfast commitment to dialogue was its wellspring.

Genuine dialogue can be much harder to achieve outside of choosing a mural. In the messiness of campus politics, dialogue has been effectively redefined into a form in which each side presumes itself right and brooks few disagreements. During my time at Stanford, this kind of dialogue has occurred whenever one side dons the mantle of the oppressed, only to forget that others, including those with whom they most deeply disagree, have cause to suffer too.

One particular moment stands out to me because I am a proud member of my comunidad, yet I witnessed it failing to uphold the value of dialogue.

The moment was provoked by the Stanford Review’s ill-conceived response to the activist coalition Who’s Teaching Us? The Review chose to satirize the coalition by releasing a list of demands, one of which angered comunidad:

“WE DEMAND that Stanford builds a wall around El Centro and makes MEChA pay for it.”

Because the demand targeted a Chicano/Latino community center and singled out a Chicano/Latino advocacy group with language peculiarly similar to then-presidential-hopeful Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, members of comunidad interpreted it as a racist dog whistle. For the children of Mexican immigrants especially, the demand hit too close to home.

Comunidad responded to the demand by having its members stand together in a wall of unity. The protest, of which I was a part, was intended as a show of resilience. We were reaffirming our commitment to each other as members of the same comunidad. Many of us who stood together continue to share memories of that moment over social media or in conversation.

What I dwell on most, though, is our collective failure to stand with those members of the campus community who were then persecuted for their commitment to dialogue as a foundational principle. The Review provoked a reaction that many of its writers — including myself at the time — did not anticipate. Nonetheless, even when the reaction was at its most distressing, many of its writers refused to retract their views. Doing so would have implied a shallow understanding of dialogue as a principle worth defending only when it is easy or convenient to do so.

After publishing its “demands,” the Review staff was put almost immediately under attack. Activists filed at least 43 Acts of Intolerance against the Review’s editors. Many even phoned individual editors’ current employers to demand their firing. I feared that if I didn’t publicly disavow the Review, I would be threatened next.

Comunidad’s wall of solidarity had us spectacularly donning the mantle of the oppressed. Activists on campus chose to target the Review largely in our name. Either we did not see members of the Review staff suffer, or we did not care. Some of us were members of Who’s Teaching Us?, the activist coalition the Review satirized. In original the list of demands we helped draft, we put pressure on the University to undo the silences obscuring our presence within canonical history and literature. But when push came to shove, we condoned, or at least did not intervene in, attempts to silence others on our campus.

It should not have mattered that the Review was being provocative. The Review has made a habit as a publication of publishing what they can reasonably anticipate will provoke overreactions all while under the aegis of wanting dialogue. What was different about the Review’s “demand” was that even its staff was taken by surprise by the intensity of the reaction. Rarely have the conditions for living out one’s principles been ideal. We should have upheld dialogue as a matter of principle, and that includes when the people asking for dialogue do not seem particularly sincere or deserving.

Dialogue, depicted in our murals as the principle structuring our comunidad, should have compelled most of us to confront a wave of public opinion with a simple request to not silence others in our name, but it didn’t.

We failed to uphold one of our principles. Worse, we revealed that we don’t hold dialogue as one of our foundations, after all — that some of us are willing to defend or vouch for dialogue only when it conveniences us.

“You would rather I stay silent,” wrote Elliot Kaufman, then an editor for the Review, in an op-ed he penned in response to activists’ attack on Review staff.

Kaufman has twice critiqued “The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes” for its inclusion of Che Guevara. The first time, as mentioned above, Zapata’s ethnic theme associates (ETAs) published an op-ed in response. In it, they emphasized the dorm’s openness to criticism and stated their hope that the op-ed would “open the door for further engagement.”

I am not sure whether the op-ed was a candid invitation for Kaufman to visit Zapata, or if it was an attempt to rhetorically silence him by implying that if there was anyone who didn’t want sincere engagement, it was him.

When he critiqued the mural a second time, the content was largely the same. But the rhetorical situation had changed. The Review was not in the campus spotlight. Fidel Castro had just passed, and members of comunidad were divided on Che Guevara’s legacy. Zapata would have gained little and risked alienating some members of comunidad had it called for dialogue. So it didn’t; dialogue was inconvenient.

Or, more accurately, dialogue with students outside of comunidad was inconvenient. Instead of responding to Kaufman via an op-ed or other public statement, the ETAs organized a debrief at Zapata for its residents and a panel composed of members of comunidad. Dorm staff were concerned more with addressing internal tensions stirred up by the mural, such as those between students with a nascent Chicano Movement-era fondness for Guevara and Castro and the children of Cuban exiles.

Comunidad does not shy away from dialogue between its own members. When difficult conversations are brought to the fore, such as whose concerns matter when comunidad represents itself to outsiders, internal dialogue isn’t only crucial to providing a space for healing and reflection; it can be the right, principled thing to do.

But the dual missions of choosing how to best represent oneself and abiding by one’s principles can also overlap. One should not be confused for the other.

When deciding how to respond to the Review’s “demand,” members of comunidad also urged internal dialogue. The wall of unity was the most popular response suggested. There was disagreement among those of us there about whether it was right to persecute Review writers by calling their employers. But we didn’t doubt that there needed to be a response. In fact, the facilitators of the event framed the dialogue, in announcements to mailing lists and in the event agenda itself, as a method of deciding how to best respond to the Review. A response to activists on behalf of a persecuted Review, however, was not on the table.

Matters of principle demand of us that we take the other side’s concerns seriously as claims bearing upon us. Ultimately, it  is our values that are at stake. When we do wrong by other people, we incriminate ourselves. Politics does not ask for such introspection or, frankly, commitment. All we have to do in matters of politics is decide what would be most beneficial for the group. Questions of principle are secondary — a means to an end. Even when it heals or produces unity, a dialogue guided by politics remains a dialogue strategically deployed.

That’s not really dialogue.

I ask for dialogue in its truest form. A dialogue worthy of ourselves as a comunidad. One that impels us to critique those among us who would offer a dialogue of lesser value.

Zapata’s strategic deployment of dialogue is not atypical. Neither was our collective response to the Review. Both are symptoms of a larger failure within comunidad to commit to dialogue as a matter of principle.

Other groups on campus, such as the College Republicans and the Stanford Review, fail in the same way, and “dialogue,” for these other groups, often reads as cynical ploy. What sets comunidad apart is that the internal dialogue it has provided genuinely tries to be inclusive of all members, regardless of disagreements on who or what they value — just like in “The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes.”

I would like comunidad to exhibit the kind of dialogue modeled off of “Last Supper,” but for everyone on campus. Dialogue needs to be as visible and as accessible as that mural. Only then will this specter — that dialogue is not being defended as a matter of principle — finally disappear.

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Nuestras murales: Comunidad and the value of dialogue appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
1135755
Who is ethnic studies for? https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/13/who-is-ethnic-studies-for/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/13/who-is-ethnic-studies-for/#respond Mon, 13 Nov 2017 11:00:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1133259 I’m taking an introductory science course right now. Much to my chagrin, I am reaffirming that I have no interest in studying science for a living. And I have been able to learn this because the class brings in speakers from across the sciences who are each modeling how people frame questions and communicate answers […]

The post Who is ethnic studies for? appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
I’m taking an introductory science course right now. Much to my chagrin, I am reaffirming that I have no interest in studying science for a living. And I have been able to learn this because the class brings in speakers from across the sciences who are each modeling how people frame questions and communicate answers in their respective disciplines.

The WAYS requirements are working. I was pushed to step outside of my field, even if now what I want most is to turn around and run the other way, back to literature.

Now which way am I supposed to run when I dislike my introductory ethnic studies courses?

As I wrote in my last column, I think these courses do not consider literature in its proper light. This is partially because I wish more texts were discussed as if they were “Great Books,” but mostly because I want literature talked about as Literature, i.e. as literary critics would discuss it. I want to read studies employing the methodologies of my field — the whole gamut, ranging from close reading to “queering” the text to deconstruction and beyond — but instead, one or two studies are framed as representative of ethnic literary studies.

This is a problem. My cohort in the humanities lacks people interested in Chicanx literature, and I suspect this is part of the reason why. Literary studies, as a discipline and set of methodologies, is not being modeled in introductory ethnic studies classes. I imagine that the same holds true for the social sciences.

If ethnic studies truly were interdisciplinary, it would unsettle me and every other student regardless of discipline. Its promise is this: By juxtaposing a set of representative or foundational studies from various disciplines, ethnic studies reminds students of the hidden assumptions underlying the methods within any discipline.

Yet we are largely not being taught to be interdisciplinary thinkers. Ethnic studies has become extra-disciplinary. It has become a meeting space for many disciplines and a home to none.

Until ethnic studies can become a home — a lodging house where, say, literature and sociology, have each checked out a room — it should not be a department.

Ethnic studies has invited literature and other disciplines in, but it has left their baggage at the door. The baggage — histories of squabbling scholars, catalogs of all the times the discipline changed its collective mind, the meat-and-potatoes, back-to-the-basics take on a field — has been left outside the house of ethnic studies.

There is no literary criticism without context. There is no political science, sociology, anthropology or any other disciplinary approach without context either. But that is what packing these various disciplines into a single 10-week course proposes.

Instead of packing in material, why not curate? If the course structure cannot be helped, if we must take a couple of studies as representatives for a whole discipline, why not choose the right studies?

In the case of literature, say, Intro to Chicanx/Latinx Studies would have us reading excerpts from landmark works such as “Chicano Narrative,” “Chicano Poetry and “Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies.” (I leave it to those knowledgeable about the social sciences to draw the appropriate comparisons.)

The same would hold for other introductory ethnic studies courses. Why aren’t Henry Louis Gates, Jr. or Houston Baker, Jr.  on the syllabus for Intro to African and African-American Studies?

Ethnic studies is not curating. To put the problem simply: Who is ethnic studies ‘“for”?

Ethnic studies courses are not “for” students planning on graduate school. They are not “for” me. Last year I wavered between taking Intro to Chicanx/Latinx Studies or an introductory comparative literature course. I ultimately went with the latter because I knew it would survey the history of the field; perhaps Intro to Chicanx/Latinx Studies had a similar project. Perhaps if I had taken it, I would have learned how to study issues within the field from the perspective of scholars from different disciplines.

I now know that I would not have. After a year and a half spent reading Chicano/a literary criticism, I am convinced that spending a mere week studying literature is not enough time to learn a disciplinary approach. Criticism has a history to it. My favorite literary critics work within and are responding to the same trends affecting literary studies as a whole: the rise of deconstruction, the postcolonial turn, the recent shift to decolonial thought and practice and so on. I had to read across decades of studies to grasp this point.

Departments also have to contextualize their approaches, but they are much more successful.

While departments in the humanities are largely “for” those students planning on graduate school, there are also courses intended “for” students who might only take one course in the department. These courses are often cross-listed or offered as IntroSems. Often, and importantly for aspiring scholars like me, they meet expectations at odds with each other. In one of the few ethnic literature classes I have enjoyed, the professor held the attention of students taking their first college literature course. She did this while introducing us to concepts that had I not known, I would not have felt prepared applying to graduate school.

The resources for crafting strong interdisciplinary ethnic studies programs are already here. Since 2007, the Faculty Development Initiative was founded to fund the hiring of faculty members working on race. Usually, these faculty members, and others who study race, offer courses cross-listed in the Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity (CSRE) family of programs or African and African-American Studies (AAAS).

The issue we are facing for ethnic studies programs is the same as for the decline of the “Great Books” approach to ethnic literature. As noted above, we have the research and teaching talent. What we lack has almost everything to do with pedagogy, or what I would call a better curating practice.

Recent reporting leads me to believe that I am in the minority on this view. I am part of the dissenting 25 percent of Chicanx/Latinx Studies majors who do not want their program to become a department. I want arguments about the “symbolic” value of becoming a department left at home, unless we want to come off as being mostly talk and little substance. Ethnic studies programs at Stanford have not (yet) earned the right to call themselves departments, and won’t until they can become truly interdisciplinary again.

Can ethnic studies live up to its promise? The students taking its courses, not to mention majors such as myself, would benefit much more if it did.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Who is ethnic studies for? appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/13/who-is-ethnic-studies-for/feed/ 0 1133259
When will we start teaching ethnic texts as ‘great books’? https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/30/when-will-we-start-teaching-ethnic-texts-as-great-books/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/30/when-will-we-start-teaching-ethnic-texts-as-great-books/#respond Mon, 30 Oct 2017 08:00:06 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1132053 The debate over Western culture at Stanford did not start in the 1980s. It began in 1968 with the call for two curricula, Structured Liberal Education (SLE) and the program in African and African-American Studies (AAAS). Students have criticized SLE because it purports to study universal human questions while focusing primarily on European thinkers. Conversely, […]

The post When will we start teaching ethnic texts as ‘great books’? appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
The debate over Western culture at Stanford did not start in the 1980s. It began in 1968 with the call for two curricula, Structured Liberal Education (SLE) and the program in African and African-American Studies (AAAS). Students have criticized SLE because it purports to study universal human questions while focusing primarily on European thinkers. Conversely, they have praised AAAS and other ethnic studies programs for recognizing that cultural differences impact each of our lives. Simply put, their claim is that there can be no universal search for truth without investing in the particulars of human experience across time and culture.

The proponents of ethnic studies and, specifically, ethnic literature at Stanford readily recognize that their fields of study illumine the concerns of a people across time and place. Nonetheless, by discussing the same concerns that have preoccupied the Western mind in terms of ethnic writers, they have not yet fully understood the radical potential of their programs in reframing the debate over the canon. This is not a research problem; the numerous anthologies and critical studies folding ethnic literature into the canon attest to that. This is a communication problem that will not be resolved unless faculty and students begin discussing ethnic literary texts as “great books” — that is, as canonical texts.

The problem lies with the conflicting missions of humanities departments at a research university like Stanford. Mainly, the issue that the questions that lead to fruitful research projects are not always the same ones that inspire students. While researchers are rewarded for moving beyond existing knowledge about a text, each new generation of readers turns to the “great books” to rediscover what past readers already new.

As the conservative critic Damon Linker explains, progress under this ideal can only be “each individual’s advancement in coming to understand the perennial problems and puzzles of the human condition.”

Linker does not necessarily shutter what counts as canonical. In fact, his words echo those written by Black intellectual W.E.B. DuBois at Atlanta University, one of the first Black colleges: “The true college will ever have one goal — not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.”

My contention is that ethnic literature classes offered at Stanford have strayed from this goal. To examine but a few based on their syllabi: ENGLISH 12A: “Intro to African American Literature” has students consider some of the defining debates within the history of that literature. Included are “slavery and the literary imagination, the status of realist aesthetics in black writing … and the emergence of black internationalism.”

Nowhere does this syllabus hint that African-American literature is the type of writing that clarifies to students — and not just African-American students — who they really are or ought to be. Student reviews on Carta, even when they are positive, are lackluster. At best, students deploy words such as “interesting,” “engaging” and “thought-provoking.” What about “life-changing?”

In contrast consider how one freshman described SLE on Carta (or read my previous articles on the program): “Enter thinking that you know something. Exit knowing that you know nothing. It will haunt you, it will shape you.”

Even when students dislike SLE, they nonetheless continue to acknowledge that texts are discussed in a certain way and that others, those by ethnic writers, deserve to be discussed in those terms too. As one student wrote: “Consider whether you are prepared to listen to people, both students and teachers, talk about the ‘great books’ as if they were the best things ever written and as if ‘diverse’ thinkers could never produce something of a similar quality.”

Indeed, consider where we should go on campus to hear ethnic literary texts discussed in just that way, as if they were “the best things ever written.” Certainly not the two introductory courses for AAAS and Chicanx/Latinx Studies, both of which, despite covering, respectively, the long span of Black history and culture in America and the diversity of Latinx experiences, devote less than a week to literature. The Carta reviews for these courses lack the sense of urgency, of beauty, of true existential angst associated with SLE and other humanities courses about the “great books.”

Can Black and Brown be beautiful? If we believe they can, we ought to push for courses that teach about the experiences of Black and Brown people in ways that can only be described as beautiful. That’s not happening in the courses above; moreover, it’s not happening despite the University already having provided a rationale for talking about ethnic literature as “great books.”

According to the Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford (SUES), a course WAYS-certified as Engaging Diversity (formerly Engaging Difference) helps students “develop a rich appreciation for both human commonality and the diversity of the human experience.”

That’s not much different than the certification a typical course dealing with “great books” receives. Of the artifacts studied in those courses, the SUES report states “though infinitely various in conception, content and form, these enterprises all represent fundamental human efforts to understand ourselves, the world and our place within it.”

To clarify the challenge being broached here: If I truly believe that Black and Brown literary texts are beautiful, I want them to be beautiful for everyone. If someone asks me why I believe these literary texts are those of great beauty or importance, I owe them an account, and Stanford should teach me to give it. If I cannot defend the texts I read, what right do I have to insist that they belong in the canon?

This is not to insist, as a recent Stanford Sphere article so readily does, that the texts of ethnic writers already belong in the canon simply because their authors draw on ideas from canonical thinkers. These authors are not mimics, and they are not even simply the inheritors of all the thought that came before. Instead, these authors give voice to the silences within the canon. They have something to say, but we have not yet been given the tools to listen — not the least of which because we don’t consider them as authors of “great books.”

We are not currently being taught to read ethnic literary texts as contributions to canonical thought. We are asking broad, meaningful-only-in-context, questions such as What is race? or What is modernity for writers of color? This is different than asking How does this ethnic writer offer us a different answer to a fundamental question of human experience? or How does this text being about a particular ethnic experience affect its response to the same question?

Once we recognize that the issue is one of communication or pedagogy rather than about ethnic literature itself, the solution is easily within our grasp. We must change how we discuss and teach ethnic literature.

We need to stop reducing ethnic literature to a series of sociological, political or even literary-critical questions. Once we do so, we can recognize how these texts beautifully achieve a balancing act between wonder and resonance: They lend themselves to an appreciation of the universal while remaining so self-consciously focused on the particulars of a time, place and people.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post When will we start teaching ethnic texts as ‘great books’? appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/30/when-will-we-start-teaching-ethnic-texts-as-great-books/feed/ 0 1132053
CAPS plans to expand space, staff, one-on-one therapy alternatives https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/02/caps-plans-to-expand-space-staff-one-on-one-therapy-alternatives/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/02/caps-plans-to-expand-space-staff-one-on-one-therapy-alternatives/#respond Fri, 02 Jun 2017 08:58:59 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1128833 As it enters a new school year, CAPS will increase its number of staff, satellite locations and alternatives to one-on-one therapy sessions, among many other initiatives.

The post CAPS plans to expand space, staff, one-on-one therapy alternatives appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
This article is the fourth and final piece in a mini-series examining Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) and how it has responded to increased community scrutiny.

A new director is not the only change on the horizon for Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS). As it enters a new school year, CAPS will increase its number of staff, satellite locations and alternatives to one-on-one therapy sessions, among other initiatives.

Previous criticism of CAPS has focused on long wait times and areas for growth in its services for certain subsets of students. The changes CAPS has planned for the fall will seek to address the concerns of particular student populations while increasing the mental health resource’s capacity to serve the student body as a whole.

CAPS plans to expand space, staff, one-on-one therapy alternatives
CAPS will expand into Kingscote Gardens this fall (HANNAH KNOWLES/The Stanford Daily).

CAPS will open a new satellite clinic at Kingscote Gardens, an area currently under renovation near the Faculty Club, in August. Other services addressing mental health and related issues that will be housed at Kingscote include the Confidential Support Team (CST), the Office of Sexual Assault & Relationship Abuse Education & Response (SARA), the Faculty Help Center, the Title IX Office and more. While mental health care for students needing more than just one or two visits will continue to be handled at Vaden Health Center, Director of Vaden James Jacobs foresees Kingscote addressing shorter-term aid in light of data showing most students only visit CAPS once.

CAPS’ number of employees has stayed roughly constant for the past two years, and according to Jacobs, the Kingscote expansion will address one of the primary constraints on CAPS’ ability to add staff: space. Accordingly, next academic year, CAPS will also add either two full-time psychologists or the equivalent of that in part-time positions. CAPS may increase its psychiatry capacity too, Jacobs said.

Outgoing CAPS director Ron Albucher, who will step down next fall, has also envisioned Kingscote alleviating the lack of intermediate-length care options for students. Since 81 percent of students who use CAPS attend fewer than five sessions, and CAPS has to refer students needing more than a dozen or so visits to local clinicians. Intermediate care would be tailored towards those students needing care for a period of up to three quarters. Due to funding constraints, however, intermediate care will not be offered at Kingscote in the following year.

Jacobs also suggested that CAPS will try to offer more group therapy the future. In the past, groups have addressed a variety of student needs such as acquiring mindfulness skills, managing anxiety and processing grief.

“Historically Stanford students have apparently not been completely receptive to groups,” Jacobs said. “But this quarter we’ve piloted … the RIO groups, and they’ve been enormously successful and popular.”

RIO Skills Groups are weekly workshops for both undergraduates and graduates coping with mood and anxiety symptoms.

However, one student who wished to remain anonymous disagreed about the efficacy of group therapy. When the student reached out to CAPS after the death of a grandfather, CAPS offered the options of waiting for an appointment or attending a grief group.

“After some really bad experience with group therapy in the past, I wasn’t really inclined to go,” the student said.

CAPS also offers support groups tailored towards the needs of graduate students. Along with student-initiated groups, these have focused on problems that graduate students may otherwise face alone, from family stresses to isolation induced by working in a lab all day.

A potential new group focused on the stresses associated with writing dissertations is currently under discussion, Jacobs said. Students have previously advocated for similar services addressing common challenges graduate students face, including acquiring research positions, obtaining funding and preparing for long-term projects.

“The other thing we worry about with grad students is their relationship with their advisors,” Jacobs added. “If they don’t approve their dissertation proposal, if they don’t let them work on the sexy project … there’s huge politics involved for grad students.”

Other existing group therapy initiatives address the needs of marginalized groups such as the Native American community.

“We’ll never be to the point where most students are doing [therapy] in group,” Jacobs said. “But … it decreases the wait time and decreases the demand on constantly trying to increase the size of the staff.”

Despite CAPS currently surpassing national standards for staff numbers, wait times remain as high as three weeks at busy times.

One reason for this is that national standards do not take into account increasing demands for outreach, Jacobs said. According to him, outreach may decrease CAPS staff’s ability to see students individually. Yet outreach, Jacob hopes, may also mitigate the need for one-on-one sessions if done effectively.

Besides creating support groups for specific communities, CAPS has also provided outreach through on-site counseling services. This year it expanded counseling to the Bechtel International Center and the Diversity and First-Gen Office (DGEN). These are in addition to services offered at other community centers including the Markaz, the Women’s Community Center and the LGBT Community Resource Center.

This year saw an increased demand for counseling among students from marginalized groups. In response, the Undergraduate Senate urged CAPS in March to offer more on-site counseling at community centers and housing front desks.

As CAPS considers expanding counseling in the next year, it will have to factor in constraints such as students’ desire for privacy and space needs. The former constraint ended counseling in the dorms last year.

“Our therapists were actually going to dinner with the dorm,” Albucher said. “People didn’t want that much closeness from our therapists so we stopped doing [counseling in the dorms].”

Looking ahead, CAPS will also join the rest of campus in submitting ideas to the University’s recently launched long-range planning process. Jacobs said the process provides an opportunity for CAPS to reevaluate, for example, what he called a Student Affairs approach that segregates its offerings for students from the University’s mental health programs for faculty and staff.

One option for moving beyond that Student Affairs focus that CAPS has considered proposing to long-range planning committees involves expanding BeWell, a faculty-staff wellness program, to incorporate students.

“Maybe if we thought more holistically … it might increase opportunities for students, “ Jacobs said.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post CAPS plans to expand space, staff, one-on-one therapy alternatives appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/02/caps-plans-to-expand-space-staff-one-on-one-therapy-alternatives/feed/ 0 1128833
Q&A with poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/09/qa-with-poet-laureate-juan-felipe-herrera/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/09/qa-with-poet-laureate-juan-felipe-herrera/#respond Thu, 09 Mar 2017 08:05:45 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1124626 As the first Chicano poet laureate of the United States. Juan Felipe Herrera M.A. ’80 says his art informs his activism.

The post Q&A with poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
As the first Chicano Poet Laureate of the United States, Juan Felipe Herrera M.A. ’80 says his art informs his activism. Born to migrant farmworker parents near Fresno, Herrera was active in the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and has been a longtime public advocate for the arts, founding multiple community theaters throughout California. Herrera served as the California poet laureate 2012-2015 and is currently serving his second term as U.S. Poet Laureate.

Q&A with poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera
Juan Felipe Herrera (CHRIS DELGADO/The Stanford Daily).

The Stanford Daily (TSD): What was the hardest poem you have ever written?

Juan Felipe Herrera (JH): One I didn’t have a feeling for. It’s like the hardest dance you’ve ever danced – the one you didn’t have a feeling for. So you’re just stuck up there dancing like a chicken. The hardest [poem for me] was way back in time, I remember taking almost like a year, it was very sad. I couldn’t get it together.

You know what happens when it turns hard? When you get to that point, move on. Leave it. It’s closed. As a matter of fact, get a pencil and write some Cubist-style poetry. Make the style talk and the words remain as simple as they are. Simple words, simple style. So now play with the power of lines, play with the spelling, play with the spacing. Have fun there and make the poem really come alive.

Sometimes you do step back, and you write a more quiet piece, perhaps more critical and philosophical, and you challenge yourself. It takes time.

 

TSD: During your reading, you invited the audience to read along with you for poems such as “Aztec Invasion,” which have lines in both Spanish and English. What advice do you have for bilingual artists – such as some Chicanos – hoping to explore their identity through art?

JH: Bilingual, trilingual, quadri-lingual – find as many ways of speaking [as you can]. What is the bilingual style? Get into it, and then add more elements. So much is available. Feel free to create a mariachi verbal orchestra.

When I’m traveling, I pick up The New York Times a lot. There was this report [on] the Women of Atenco. These are women who have been protesting in a small town. It’s the most dangerous thing you can do, like the Ayotzinapa protesters. The women got apprehended, arrested, thrown into a cell, abused. They lost a lot of strength they had. That’s a different kind of poem, documentary-style.

 

TSD: Did you end up writing a poem about that?

JH: Some subjects are just so deep and so big they are hard to write about. You can do it, but you really have to walk cautiously and with a lot of heart and reality. So I wrote something. I haven’t read it. You can have the voices come out in Spanish, you can have a conversation, you can have a pointillist Spanish, English, Spanish, English. I would definitely expand what’s been done.

 

TSD: Can art ever be successfully divorced from who we are?

JH: It cannot be done. Art is a social construct. And if you are the maker of it, how can it be divorced? You can say that tree is art and I’m over here. That’s kind of divorced, but your perception has already tagged it. A tag is the beginning of art.

Depends on the society we are in, too. In indigenous societies, there really is no word for art unless it’s a colonial word. Everything is one. Oh! That’s art. I love the textiles, I love the beads, I love the songs. I can’t believe the music and the dance. But they don’t call it art. So maybe that’s when it’s divorced, because there is no name for it. You don’t say poetry. You are just working within your cultural space, but to us it sounds like poetry.

 

TSD: Many of your poems, such as “Borderbus” and “America, Stop Deporting Us,” are politically engaged and resonate with the experiences of Latinos and Chicanos. As the first Chicano Poet Laureate, how do you view the relationship between your poetry and your activism?

JH: I see it as the same thing. It depends on how you define activism.

 

TSD: How do you define activism?

JH: Activism is our orientation of the world – seeing ourselves as a part of society. We can go around thinking that we’re divorced from society, but we’re not. And therefore we do things [such as] throwing a piece of paper on the ground, big deal. I used to do that, I used to think: What’s wrong with littering? And now it’s the last thing I want to do, because every act creates an outcome, and every outcome impacts the motion of society.

Poetry is a big part of my activism. You’re calling on history, you’re calling on voice, you’re bringing people into rhythm and it’s like you’re creating a microcosm of society for 15 minutes, and then it disbands. Imagine that.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X built a movement out of words – and look what happened.

 

TSD: What has been your proudest accomplishment during your tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate?

JH: Going around and seeing so many beautiful people and learning. It’s like getting on a train and going through different villages and towns and noticing everything and just being struck by it and being bowled over by it. Just throwing myself into everything, and having everybody throw themselves at me. Being present to everybody, listening, taking notes and transmitting the stories.

I also am proud of my online projects such as “Casa de Colores” and “Technicolor Adventures of Catalina Neon” for second and third graders. They’re building a book together nationally, and I assist in putting the stories together. An illustrator does the illustrations. I sewed some of their idea together, I worked the loom. And God, they’re fabulous. A lot of energy.

This transcript has been lightly edited and condensed.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu and Aparna Verma at averma2 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

 

The post Q&A with poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/09/qa-with-poet-laureate-juan-felipe-herrera/feed/ 0 1124626
GSC approves special fees https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/23/gsc-approves-special-fees/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/23/gsc-approves-special-fees/#respond Thu, 23 Feb 2017 08:09:48 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1123568 The Graduate Student Council (GSC) approved special fees at its last meetings. GSC members also discussed developing a housing affordability survey and set Mar. 1 as the date for their elections information session.

The post GSC approves special fees appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
The Graduate Student Council (GSC) approved special fees at its last meetings. GSC members also discussed developing a housing affordability survey and set March 1 as the date for their elections information session.

Six voluntary student organizations (VSOs) including the Viennese Ball and Club Sports received special fees from the GSC. Each graduate student will pay approximately $26.32 next year to cover fees.

The new system, in contrast to the previous joint fees process, involves each VSO requesting funding from undergraduate and graduate pools separately. The portion that the graduate pool contributes to the fees request is proportional to the number of graduate students who would benefit from the VSO.

This means that some groups, such as Stanford Energy Club, received no funding from the graduate pool, while others, such as the Speakers Bureau and Club Sports, will be mostly funded by graduate students.

To decide the funding split for each VSO, the GSC funding committee worked in tandem with the Undergraduate Senate’s appropriations committee.

Doctoral student in geophysics and Funding Committee Chair Tianze Liu explained that the portion from each pool was only roughly estimated for this fees cycle. Additionally, groups whom the committee felt could obtain outside funding received a smaller portion from the pool.

Jelani Munroe ʼ16, CEO of Stanford Student Enterprises, said that groups would receive clarification on how the funding split was decided. If a VSO decides to petition for more money, they will need 1,100 graduate signatures. However, low graduate voter turnout was one of the GSC’s main reasons for switching to the new fees process.

Third-year doctoral candidate in anthropology John Moran presented the results of a housing affordability survey conducted within his department. With a sample size of 32 graduates students, the survey found that 60 percent were spending more than half their annual income on housing. In contrast, the financial aid office recommends spending slightly less than half. The GSC will be developing its own survey for the entire graduate community.

Additionally, the GSC will be holding a public meeting with Provost Persis Drell at a future date.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post GSC approves special fees appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/23/gsc-approves-special-fees/feed/ 0 1123568
GSC hears updates on graduate student housing project https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/16/gsc-hears-updates-on-graduate-student-housing-project/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/16/gsc-hears-updates-on-graduate-student-housing-project/#respond Thu, 16 Feb 2017 08:06:43 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1123161 The Graduate Student Council (GSC) received an update on a project for new graduate housing in its latest meeting.

The post GSC hears updates on graduate student housing project appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
The Graduate Student Council (GSC) heard an update on a project for new graduate housing in its latest meeting.

The project, whose design was approved on Feb. 13, will allow 2,020 more graduate students to be housed on-campus. Administrators present at the meeting included University Architect David Lennox, Mark Bonino of the department of project management and Associate Director of Operations for Parking and Transportation Services (P&TS) Matthew Brown.

“Housing a larger proportion of our graduate students on campus will enhance the quality of their educational experiences, increase proximity to campus resources [and] promote a sense of belonging within the university community,” Vice Provost for Graduate Education Patricia Gumport M.A. ʼ82 M.A. ʼ86 Ph.D. ʼ87 told Stanford News.

New graduate student residences will be built where Escondido Village (EV) currently stands now. The residences, due to be completed in 2020, will be high rises of up to 10 stories. In addition to common spaces for each new residence hall, the cluster of dorms will share a two-story market pavilion and an expansive courtyard.

Parking for the new residences will include a garage under Manzanita field with over 900 spaces. Up to 400 additional spaces will be available above ground, with a predicted maximum distance of 10 minutes from vehicle to residence.

Brown said that around 800 spaces within the EV complex will be affected during construction. However, the University will provide residents with updates on parking closures and introduce services such as waived fees for Zipcar or credits for Uber and Lyft.

According to Bonino, the abatement process for the project will occur around Apr. 1, after which demolition will begin. Construction is not due to start until November at the earliest.

A meeting about the project for the graduate student community will be held this Thursday. In addition to Everett, Brown and Bonino, Ken Hsu of the Graduate Life Office and Shirley Everett, senior associate vice provost for Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE), will also be in attendance.

 

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post GSC hears updates on graduate student housing project appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/16/gsc-hears-updates-on-graduate-student-housing-project/feed/ 0 1123161
GSC approves resolution against travel ban, discusses changes to special fees process https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/08/gsc-approves-resolution-against-travel-ban-discusses-changes-to-special-fees-process/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/08/gsc-approves-resolution-against-travel-ban-discusses-changes-to-special-fees-process/#respond Thu, 09 Feb 2017 07:43:05 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1122704 The Graduate Student Council (GSC) approved a joint resolution against the Trump administration’s travel restrictions and discussed changes to the special fees application process. Director of Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) Ron Albucher also presented on expanded after-hours mental health coverage.

The post GSC approves resolution against travel ban, discusses changes to special fees process appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
The Graduate Student Council (GSC) approved a joint resolution against the Trump administration’s travel restrictions and discussed changes to the special fees application process. Director of Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) Ron Albucher also presented on expanded after-hours mental health coverage.

 

Resolution on travel ban

In the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s executive order, the University has released a series of statements on the impact it has had on the Stanford community. Both the Undergraduate Senate and the GSC unanimously passed the joint resolution, which calls on the University to make the repeal of the order “an active and visible priority.”

 

Joint fees for student groups

Voluntary student associations (VSOs) had the option in the past of applying for joint fees from both the graduate and undergraduate programming budgets. Under the joint fees process, each VSO needed to have its request for fees voted for by the undergraduate and graduate students. Acknowledging low graduate student turnout for elections, the new application process will have groups apply separately for undergraduate and graduate special fees.

The GSC will meet later in the week to finalize the process. Groups that currently receive joint fees have already been notified about potential changes.

 

CAPS expands coverage

CAPS will be collaborating with Protocol, a company providing after-hours coverage for 170 other colleges and universities, to provide 24/7 mental health services at Stanford. An overstretched 30-person staff and a lack of budget increases for the last nine years has made handling an increasing volume of after-hours calls difficult for CAPS. Albucher anticipates that the collaboration will free up more CAPS counselors during the day.

Education Ph.D. student Rosie Nelson asked about the diversity training that counselors working for Protocol have undergone. Training staff to be mindful of the needs of students from diverse backgrounds has been a challenge at Stanford in the last few years, Nelson added.    

Albucher commented that CAPS takes the issue of diversity seriously and has been communicating with Protocol about the culture and expectations of providing counseling at Stanford. As Protocol therapists are spread across three different call centers and may be licensed in several states, Albucher did not specify the kind of diversity training required for each Protocol therapist.

An open meeting with representatives from Protocol will be held on Feb. 13 at 5:15 p.m. at the Vaden Health Center.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post GSC approves resolution against travel ban, discusses changes to special fees process appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/08/gsc-approves-resolution-against-travel-ban-discusses-changes-to-special-fees-process/feed/ 0 1122704
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is optimistic on equality: “Will it happen? Yes. inevitably.” https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/07/ruth-bader-ginsburg-qa/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/07/ruth-bader-ginsburg-qa/#respond Tue, 07 Feb 2017 09:53:18 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1122575 Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has served on the Supreme Court for over two decades, where she has been an advocate for women’s rights and equality under the law. On her most recent visit to Stanford, Justice Ginsburg delivered the “Rathbun Lecture on a Meaningful Life” as the 2017 Rathbun Visiting Fellow, a yearly program coordinated by the Office for Religious Life. The Stanford Daily sat down with Justice Ginsburg for her thoughts on gender equality, the justice system, and societal progress shortly before her lecture.

The post Ruth Bader Ginsburg is optimistic on equality: “Will it happen? Yes. inevitably.” appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has served on the Supreme Court for over two decades, where she has been an advocate for women’s rights and equality under the law. On her most recent visit to Stanford, Justice Ginsburg delivered the Rathbun Lecture on a Meaningful Life as the 2017 Rathbun Visiting Fellow, a yearly program coordinated by the Office for Religious Life. The Stanford Daily sat down with Justice Ginsburg for her thoughts on gender equality, the justice system and societal progress shortly before her lecture.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is optimistic on equality: "Will it happen? Yes. inevitably."
Ginsburg talks gender equity (CHRIS DELGADO/The Stanford Daily)

The Stanford Daily (TSD): Why did you choose to come to Stanford and speak on what it means to lead a meaningful life?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RG): Stanford is a great university and a wonderful city with unusually fine weather. My husband and I and my son lived here from December of 1977 until June of 1978. I enjoyed the university and all its facilities then. And this is a good stopping place for me because I leave the day after tomorrow for Hawaii. I’ve been to Stanford many times since 1978, when my husband was teaching at the law school and I was at the [Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences].

TSD: You are a prominent pioneer in advocating gender equality. You have also said that there will be enough women on the Supreme Court when there are nine. What is the measure of gender equality in a society? At what point does a people know that its citizens exist on the same playing field, regardless of gender?

RG: When every boy and every girl in our land grows up thinking that he or she could be whatever his or her God-given talents enable that child to be and not be held back by any artificial barriers. We are much closer to that time now than when I was growing up. In grade school, there was Tom, who was active and building things, and there was Jane, the polite little girl who didn’t get to climb trees or play ball.

TSD: Some people would say that those dynamics and those inequalities still very much exist in society, especially among children. Do you think that people in the United States will ever get to equality and if so, when?

RG: I can’t predict when. Will it happen? Yes. Inevitably. I’ve seen such enormous progress in my own lifetime. I think of the opportunities available to me that were not available to my mother. I think of what life is like for my daughter and for my granddaughters. My mother accelerated to graduate from high school at 15 so that she could help the family survive although the eldest son was off at Cornell University. The idea was that the eldest sons would get the education and the rest of the children would not. What is the difference between a bookkeeper in the garment district and a Supreme Court justice? One generation: the difference between the opportunities open to my mother and those open to me.

I graduated from Columbia Law School. My daughter was then 4. There was only one nursery school in that area that would take a child from 9 a.m. to noon. or 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. My daughter, who teaches at Columbia Law School, when she came back to New York, she had a list of at least 25 full-day daycare centers. My granddaughter, who is now graduating from law school — no doors are closed to her. She has two very good clerkships that she will pursue after she graduates.

The progress I’ve seen in my long life makes me hopeful that we will continue in that direction. One sign of the change I saw in 2011 …  [Harvard], this law school that I attended with nine women in a class of over 500, now has a woman president, Drew Faust. I was getting an honorary degree and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman to be president of an African country, was the graduation speaker. That photograph is, for me, a sign of how much has changed. Of course we haven’t reached nirvana, but we’ve come a very long way.

TSD: What advice do you have for current young people hoping to perpetuate this trend of progression?

RG: Whatever paid work you pursue, do something outside of yourself that you really care about, that you are passionate about. Whether it’s the environment [or] discrimination. Do something that will make life a little better for people less fortunate than you.

I’ve said to young lawyers, “Look, all you do is get a good job. You’re like a plumber: You get a skill and then you practice that skill. But you’ll never be a professional unless you use your talent to help repair tears in the community in which you live.”

TSD: How have your values informed your views on justice and the law? How have you navigated your life as a public figure in relation to your foundational personal and civic values?

RG: In my life, I was fantastically lucky that the climate had changed by the ’70s so women and men were feminists as well. The message that they were conveying goes way back to Abigail Adams. The message didn’t change but society’s readiness to listen did change. And to be a mother and a lawyer just at that time, in the 1970s, was a tremendous stroke of fortune for me.

This transcript has been lightly edited and condensed.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu and Courtney Douglas at ccd4 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Ruth Bader Ginsburg is optimistic on equality: “Will it happen? Yes. inevitably.” appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/07/ruth-bader-ginsburg-qa/feed/ 0 1122575
Graduate students pack activism meeting https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/22/graduate-students-pack-activism-meeting/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/22/graduate-students-pack-activism-meeting/#respond Mon, 23 Jan 2017 07:46:13 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1121798 A packed meeting of graduate student activists discussed admissions, diversity, and more.

The post Graduate students pack activism meeting appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
At a packed meeting, attendees learned about ways of joining a growing graduate student activist community, such as by advocating for increased diversity in graduate admissions and departments.

Sam Maull, a doctoral student in anthropology, organized the meeting. Speakers focused on issues of particular interest to graduate students, such as diversity in graduate admissions. Several larger movements such as Stanford Sanctuary Now and #AgainstHate were also represented.          

During a breakout session, attendees noted that undergraduates generally knew more about organizing.

“We are a sleeping giant on this campus,” Maull said. “There are 6 to 9,000 of us on this campus, and we don’t speak.”

Though an Inauguration Day protest, also organized by graduate students, occurred earlier that day, speakers stressed the importance of continued involvement.

“What good does protesting and marching do,” said Alan Ceaser, postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry and behavioral sciences, speaking for #AgainstHate. “We have to stay committed past the march and the rally.”

“We need to put in the work to create a body to hold the administration accountable for things they are doing and the things they are not doing,” added Alejandro Schuler, a third-year Ph.D. student in biomedical informatics.

Schuller has served on a committee that advises graduate admissions for the School of Medicine. He expressed frustration at what he views as a risk-averse administration and perceived that he was “chewed out” for changes he suggested to his advisory committee.

Isaac Sevier M.S. ʼ17, concurred with Schuller, emphasizing that the department-by-department nature of graduate admissions may not always prioritize the diversity of applicants.

Sevier, who spoke on behalf of the Science Action Committee, noted that STEM fields in particular are not as diverse, and suggested changing the admissions process to explicitly acknowledge diversity.

Beyond issues more specific to graduate life, the meeting also included speakers from a sexual assault activism group on campus and Stanford Sanctuary Now.

Students looking to join organizing efforts within the graduate student community may contact stanfordgradwalkout ‘at’ gmail.com for more information.

This article has been updated. In a previous version, Isaac Sevier’s last name was misspelled, and he was mis-identified as a Ph.D. student. A potential change to the admissions process, asking applicants to describe what “diversity” means to them, was misattributed to Sevier. The Stanford Daily regrets these errors.

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Graduate students pack activism meeting appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/22/graduate-students-pack-activism-meeting/feed/ 0 1121798
GSC plans housing info session, approves NomCom https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/12/gsc-plans-housing-info-session-approves-nomcom/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/12/gsc-plans-housing-info-session-approves-nomcom/#respond Thu, 12 Jan 2017 08:08:57 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1121344 The Graduate Student Council (GSC) announced dates for upcoming information sessions on finding off-campus graduate housing and approved the appointment of a new Nominations Commission (NomCom) at its first meeting of the quarter. The council also discussed if the NomCom had the authority to nominate graduate students’ spouses to the Graduate Housing Advisory Committee (GHAC).

The post GSC plans housing info session, approves NomCom appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
The Graduate Student Council (GSC) announced dates for upcoming information sessions on finding off-campus graduate housing and approved the appointment of a new Nominations Commission (NomCom) at its first meeting of the quarter. The council also discussed if the NomCom had the authority to nominate graduate students’ spouses to the Graduate Housing Advisory Committee (GHAC).

GSC Co-Chair and Ph.D. candidate in microbiology and immunology Terence Theisen announced that the council would be updated on parking and a project for new graduate housing on Feb. 1. On the same day, the GSC will also hold an information sessions for students searching for off-campus housing.

The GSC approved a bill to appoint a new NomCom, which will be tasked with nominating student representatives to University committees.

Outgoing NomCom co-chair and Ph.D. candidate in the civil and environmental engineering department Kate Gasparro informed the council that the GHAC has asked NomCom if it would consider nominating spouses who are not students to its committee. The GHAC is currently structured to include representatives from singles, couples and family housing on-campus and one representative for off-campus students.

Gasparro noted that she has heard spouses have their own distinct concerns about housing.

However, GSC member and Ph.D. candidate in Iberian and Latin American Cultures Gabriela Badica has noticed that, at open houses, housing staff will write down any feedback, including from spouses. Badica is also community associate, which is roughly equivalent to an undergraduate residential associate.

The GSC will consider allowing the Constitutional Council to deliberate on the NomCom’s authority to nominate non-students.

Due to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the GSC Funding Committee’s weekly meeting has been moved to Jan. 17 at 7 p.m.

The Thai Student Organization (TSA) and the Graduate Students of Applied Physics had funding for events approved. The latter group will be organizing a colloquium “Programming: Medium for Clarifying Ideas,” featuring MIT professor Gerry Sussman on Jan. 17, while the TSA will hold a welcome back party this upcoming Saturday.

Finally, Sean Means ’18 clarified for the council that open office hours with Stanford administrators are for graduate students as well. A schedule of office hours may be found at http://assu.stanford.edu/senate-business/.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post GSC plans housing info session, approves NomCom appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/12/gsc-plans-housing-info-session-approves-nomcom/feed/ 0 1121344
Q&A with Wall Street Journal management news editor Joann Lublin MA ’71 https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/13/qa-with-wall-street-journal-managing-editor-joann-lublin-ma-71/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/13/qa-with-wall-street-journal-managing-editor-joann-lublin-ma-71/#respond Mon, 14 Nov 2016 06:30:30 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1119805 The Daily interviewed journalist Joann Lublin about her new book on successful women business leaders.

The post Q&A with Wall Street Journal management news editor Joann Lublin MA ’71 appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
The Daily interviewed Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Joann Lublin MA ʼ71 to discuss her book “Earning It – Hard Won Lessons from Trailblazing Women at the Top of the Business World.” Lublin, who was one of The Wall Street Journal’s first female reporters and is its current management news editor, interviewed over 50 successful women in business about their careers for the book. She will be speaking later tonight at CEMEX Auditorium from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m.

The Stanford Daily (TSD): What are some of the key takeaways of your book?

Joann Lublin (JL): In my book, I interviewed 52 high ranking corporate executive women, of whom [nearly] two-thirds are experienced public company CEOs. One thing I observed looking back at what were their common leadership traits was that many of them exhibited tremendous resilience, and many also exhibited tremendous persistence. They were resilient in the face of setbacks, and they were very, very persistent in terms of achieving goals … To become a success, you not only have to deal with setbacks but you have to learn from them to make sure that you don’t repeat the same mistake twice – instead you layer one experience on another. Failure is actually more important than success in terms of what it can teach you.

TSD: Were there any experiences in your life that you’d like to point to as showcasing resilience and persistence?

JL: I chose to do a master’s thesis [in communication] even though one wasn’t required, because I was really interested – even back then – in investigating discrimination against women who work for newspapers. In order to graduate in June, I had to finish my master’s thesis and deliver it by a certain date. I had already, at that point, been offered and accepted a job to work at The Wall Street Journal, and I was having a real hard time getting [the thesis] done. I called up the bureau chief who had offered me a job and said, “I may not graduate on time if I don’t finish this master’s thesis. Will the job still be open if I graduate in August?” and he said, “No, I suggest you write faster.” So I did.

TSD: Many students on campus are concerned with the gender pay gap. How do you think that things are going to develop over the next several years when it comes to sexism in workplaces?

JL: I have an entire chapter in my book devoted to the gender pay gap. I cite a 2015 report that says based on current trends, women will not achieve pay equality until 2058. The same report also says that a typical working woman loses close to $530,000 over her lifetime due to the gender wage gap. What was even more depressing about that report was that the losses were even greater for those with high levels of education. I think that closing the gender pay gap is something that companies are paying more attention to, particularly within Silicon Valley.

TSD: Are there [any] best practices that people should take as they start in the workforce?

JL: There’s a chapter in the book called “Bloom Where You Are Planted,” and the whole point of that chapter is the notion that you may not always get your ideal promotion. But you’ve got to flex your muscles and try out your wings in a variety of roles. You’re not going to do that if you’re put into positions where you already know everything about how to do the work. You’re not going to attract attention to your ability unless you are willing to at least take a calculated risk and do something different. It’s a way to stand out and show you can achieve and excel.

This transcript has been edited and condensed.

Caleb Smith contributed to this report.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

Correction: The article originally incorrectly described Lublin’s title, and the portion of public company CEOs she interviewed. The article has been updated with correct information. The Daily regrets these errors.

The post Q&A with Wall Street Journal management news editor Joann Lublin MA ’71 appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/13/qa-with-wall-street-journal-managing-editor-joann-lublin-ma-71/feed/ 0 1119805
VPGE to fund projects promoting diversity https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/14/vpge-to-fund-projects-promoting-diversity/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/14/vpge-to-fund-projects-promoting-diversity/#respond Fri, 14 Oct 2016 17:33:06 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1117989 The Vice Provost of Graduate Education ‘s (VPGE) Diversity Innovation Funds (DIF) program is accepting applications until Thursday from graduate students interested in planning projects that advance the goal of increasing diversity in the graduate community.

The post VPGE to fund projects promoting diversity appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
The Vice Provost of Graduate Education’s (VPGE) Diversity Innovation Funds (DIF) program is accepting applications until Thursday from graduate students interested in planning projects that advance the goal of increasing diversity in the graduate community.

Last year, the program funded projects ranging from a symposium for underrepresented minorities in STEM to mentoring programs for groups such as first-generation graduate students and Bay Area Black youth.

DIF recipients also noted the sense of community that the program fostered among them, a cohort scattered across Stanford’s graduate programs united by their commitment to diversity.

“We want to develop projects that will enhance diversity and increase a sense of belonging,” said Anika Green, assistant vice provost for graduate education.

The DIF program, which is in its second year, follows up on the success of Student Projects for Intellectual Community Enhancement (SPICE), a fellowship for students looking to promote intellectual community. Green noted that applications for DIF would need to be similarly academically focused, but that recipients would benefit from VPGE assistance in implementing their projects.

“Stanford’s ethos is ‘how do we get to yes?’” Green said. “How do we make [the project] happen?”

Natalie Chavez, who successfully defended her dissertation in biology last week, organized a one-day symposium for undergraduates from local colleges interested in STEM. The event, which addressed diversity in the STEM fields, joined faculty, postdocs and graduate students from diverse backgrounds together with the undergraduates for workshops, presentations and networking.

“A lot of students came up to us afterwards and were appreciative,” Chavez said. “Many said they didn’t have these opportunities offered at their home institutions.”

“[Planning the event] was a lot of work,” she added. “But ultimately, I felt like I was well-supported by VPGE in terms of connecting me with other [DIF recipients], seeking guidance and ensuring that I had all the resources available in order to properly organize and launch this project.”

Civil and environmental engineering doctoral student Jeff Ho Ph.D. ’17 received DIF funds to establish a mentorship program between senior and junior first-generation and/or low-income (FLI) graduate students. Ho, who is a member of the Graduate FLI Partnership (Grad FLIP), noted that although there are relatively few FLI graduates compared to undergraduates, 60 students benefitted from the program.

The Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA) has similarly used DIF funds to tackle the scarcity of underrepresented minorities, specifically Black-identified people, in academia.

BGSA president and fourth-year chemical engineering Ph.D. candidate Michael Reddick applied for DIF to fund “Challenge Accepted,” a mentoring program for local Black high schoolers focused on inspiring them to attend college and eventually, graduate school. Volunteers from across Stanford’s professional and graduate programs participated.

“Being at Stanford, we have a platform and influence,” Reddick said of the program’s potential to change students’ life trajectories.

Ho, Chavez and Reddick all plan on continuing to commit themselves to improving diversity in future years.

“[My DIF project] definitely left a lasting impression on me to want to do projects like this in the future. I am very grateful that the Diversity Innovation Fund exists,” Chavez said.

Application guidelines, examples of past projects and further details on DIF are available online on the VPGE website.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

The post VPGE to fund projects promoting diversity appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/14/vpge-to-fund-projects-promoting-diversity/feed/ 0 1117989
Glam Grads: Q&A with education Ph.D. student Nidia Ruedas-Gracia https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/12/glam-grads-qa-with-education-ph-d-student-nidia-ruedas-gracia/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/12/glam-grads-qa-with-education-ph-d-student-nidia-ruedas-gracia/#respond Thu, 13 Oct 2016 06:54:59 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1117913 The Daily sits down with Education graduate student Nidia Ruedas-Gracia in the Glamorous Grad profile series.

The post Glam Grads: Q&A with education Ph.D. student Nidia Ruedas-Gracia appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
In this edition of Glam Grads, The Daily talked with third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Education Nidia Ruedas-Gracia about her research and identity as a first-generation low-income (FLI, pronounced “fly”) graduate student. Nidia is the president of the Graduate First-Generation and/or Low-Income Partnership (Grad FLIP) and is a teaching assistant for the Leland Scholars program. She received her B.A. in psychology and sociology from UCLA and her M.A. in human development and social intervention from NYU.

The Stanford Daily (TSD): Tell me about your research.

(Courtesy of Nidia Ruedas-Gracia)
Nidia Ruedas-Gracia studies college students who come from historically-marginalized communities (Courtesy of Nidia Ruedas-Gracia).

Nidia Ruedas-Gracia (NRG): I am studying the experience of belonging among college students from historically-marginalized groups. So, for example, first-generation low-income students. Do they feel like they belong in college? If not, what’s the college experience like for them?

TSD: Has your research topic been informed by your own experience as a FLI student?

NRG: Yes, definitely. I sometimes refer to it as “me-search.” I am a first-gen college student from a low-income background. I grew up in Baldwin Park, which is in East LA , a majority Latino and low-income city. I was raised in a single parent household. My mom went to community college where she got her associate’s degree in physical education (P.E.) to become a teacher.  My dad only made it to third grade. My mom grew up in the border towns of Mexicali and Calexico. My dad is from Zacatecas. In college, I had this thing where I was like, “I don’t understand things, I don’t understand this culture, and I don’t know if I am asking the right questions.” When I started my first year of college, I did not know what a major was. It took me a long time to figure out that I was first-gen and that that is totally okay. I’m not supposed to know all the answers.

TSD: How have you found community here at Stanford?

NRG: Through a lot of organizations that focus on people of color or first-gen students. This year, I am president of Grad FLIP which is the graduate version of the first-gen low-income partnership, and that’s all about building community among the graduate students who are FLI. I’m also part of the Leland Scholars program. I am the teaching assistant, and I get to live with [incoming freshmen] for a month in the summer. I’ve found community there, too. I’ve just made cool friends here through Grad FLIP and the School of Education. Oh and El Centro too. One of the things I remembered from my undergrad at UCLA, it was a 10-15 minute walk from my dorm to campus, so if you went to class, you were going to be there for the whole day. There was no coming back and forth. I’d always be lonely because I didn’t know where to go during off-times. I never found that space where I could just chill. When I came here, during week one, a friend told me about El Centro. I saw couches and just a space to chill out. I won’t be uncomfortable or lonely here at Stanford [I thought]. This is a space where I can hang out.

TSD: What work have you done with Grad FLIP?

NRG: It had started a few years ago but it didn’t really catch traction because the people that ran it had to graduate. So then, two years ago, it was started up again in my first year here. I went to meetings and I shadowed their president. It feels nice to have been there from the beginning. We focus a lot around community. We’ve had social events with each other, to hang out and get to know each other. Last year, I put up an event for Diversity Week, which is now Diversity Month. I put on an event, “A Discussion & Dinner with FLI faculty.” We had four faculty who were also first-gen or low-income tell their stories about going to college. We went up to the roof, and we had dinner with them. People didn’t even know these professors were FLI. People got to talk about their stories together. They talked about where they grew up, what happened when they went to college, how lost they were. The FLI identity is pretty invisible. Especially for FLI students, it is important to know there are FLI faculty on campus whom you can reach out to. There is someone that you can relate to.

TSD: What advice would you give to FLI undergraduates unsure of going to graduate school?

NRG: A lot of Ph.D. programs pay for you to go to school. They pay your tuition and they will give you money to live. Master’s programs sometimes don’t have much funding attached to them but it is common for  Ph.D. programs to be fully paid for. I am not taking any loans. Get your feet wet in research and you might really love it, like I did. It’s totally fine to admit that you are new at research, that you do not know everything but that you are there to learn. Sometimes students shy away from research, but labs are all about training. You don’t need experience. It can also be ‘me-research.” I see myself in my research all the time. I see first-gen students who are struggling and who are really excited about stuff. I see how proud their families are. When I do the data analysis it all comes together for me. You can research what you are passionate about, something that you see in the real world. Nobody told me that I should study first-gen students. I chose that. You can be an academic and do the things you like to do. Sometimes we think of moving up and doing more school as selling out, as losing the connection with home. It has not been like that for me. I still chill with my cousins and my friends. You can be an academic, and you can be FLI.

TSD: Looking back, what would you have told yourself as an undergraduate?

NRG: Ask questions. When I was an undergraduate, I felt too stupid to ask questions. I thought people would see me as inadequate, that they would think I’m just some little Latina from the ‘hood. I knew that I liked research, but I would stay quiet and just do my work. If there were ideas that I did not agree with, I would stay quiet. Ask questions, and if you do not understand something, go to office hours. If you don’t know what to do to go to graduate school, ask questions. If we stay quiet, sometimes we don’t even know what we don’t know. That’s what I would tell myself. Trust your intuition. FLI students have so much real and actual experience that researchers crave, and we do not know it. I was a fourth-year student doing research and the professor leading the research would ask me about the results — why did you think that these Latinos felt this way? I would use my experience to explain. If you think that this is how you solve an issue or a problem, or that this is your interpretation from a book, say it. That’s a perspective that’s not often heard on college campuses.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu

The post Glam Grads: Q&A with education Ph.D. student Nidia Ruedas-Gracia appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/12/glam-grads-qa-with-education-ph-d-student-nidia-ruedas-gracia/feed/ 0 1117913
GSB announces fellowship focused on Midwest https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/05/gsb-announces-fellowship-focused-on-midwest/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/05/gsb-announces-fellowship-focused-on-midwest/#respond Thu, 06 Oct 2016 05:16:43 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1117670 The Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) announced a new fellowship program targeting applicants with strong ties to the Midwest.

The post GSB announces fellowship focused on Midwest appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
The Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) announced a new fellowship program targeting applicants with strong ties to the Midwest. The program will fund tuition for three fellows in its inaugural year, contingent on those fellows contributing to the economic development of the region two years after graduation.

The program, officially titled the Stanford USA MBA Fellowship, is part of a broader GSB effort to increase enrollment from underrepresented areas. In future years, prospective students from other regions, such as the Southeast, will also be able to apply for financial aid under the fellowship program.

“We wanted to create this fellowship to increase the number of students that we are getting from different parts of the country,” said associate director of MBA admissions Simone Hill MA/MBA ʼ14.

Hill noted that the largest group of domestic applicants to the MBA program comes from the coasts, and she predicts that the program will increase applications from elsewhere in the country, starting with the Midwest, while also stimulating economic growth.

The GSB chose to focus on the Midwest, which it defines as llinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin, due to existing partnerships in the region with companies like General Motors and Eli Lilly. Though the program will expand to cover more fellows and regions in the future, Hill emphasized that the direction it grows in is, among many factors, dependent on alumni giving.

Recognizing the myriad ways in which alumni can put a Stanford MBA degree to use, the program does not stipulate what “economic development” means exactly.

“We know from experience with our alums that impact comes in a lot of different forms,” Hill said. As examples, Hill mentioned investing capital, starting businesses, working for the government and founding nonprofits.

The fellowship program will begin accepting applications in January of next year.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post GSB announces fellowship focused on Midwest appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/05/gsb-announces-fellowship-focused-on-midwest/feed/ 0 1117670
Graduate Council discusses county sales tax, funds student groups https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/29/graduate-council-discusses-county-sales-tax-funds-student-groups/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/29/graduate-council-discusses-county-sales-tax-funds-student-groups/#respond Thu, 29 Sep 2016 07:24:08 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1117385 In their first meeting of the academic year, the Graduate Student Council (GSC) discussed several issues affecting the graduate student body, as well as endorsing a ballot initiative to raise the sales tax in Santa Clara County. The council also heard funding requests from several student groups.

The post Graduate Council discusses county sales tax, funds student groups appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
In their first meeting of the academic year, the Graduate Student Council (GSC) discussed several issues affecting the graduate student body, as well as endorsing a ballot initiative to raise the sales tax in Santa Clara County. The council also heard funding requests from several student groups.

Funding approved across the board

The council approved funding for parties and kick-off events to be held in the following week, all of which are posted on the GSC’s online calendar. Additionally, the GSC approved yearly funding for groups involved in science education.

Several groups representing international students and students of color, such as the Black Graduate Student Association and the Stanford German Association, are holding events in the following weeks. The GSC itself has planned a welcome-back party for next week, which it anticipates to be the biggest off-campus party of the year.

The Science Bus and Stanford Science Penpals, both science outreach organizations, were approved for funding. Both groups organize mentoring opportunities for graduates interested in assisting K-12 students, but the Penpals are also seeking undergraduate participation.

Graduate community affected by construction, Title IX holds

The council noted that construction around the Escondido Village area may initially reduce the number of parking spaces available to students with families or couples living together, but will likely also impact the larger population of ES parking permit holders.

Council members have already begun conversations with Residential and Dining Enterprises (R&DE) and Parking and Transportation Services (P&TS) over the issue, and will seek input from students impacted by the construction.

Additionally, the council deliberated over informing students of an un-advertised 30-day hold on class enrollment that will be placed on anyone who fails to complete mandatory Title IX training. The council will consider working with the Office of the Registrar to give students notice of the hold before registration opens for winter quarter on Oct. 30. Some members, such as GSC secretary and sixth-year PhD candidate in electrical engineering David Hsu, who represents the school of engineering, will also send out email reminders about the hold.

Measure B

In a non-binding poll, the council expressed that it would likely not endorse Measure B, an initiative to fund sustainability-minded transportation improvements in Santa Clara County by raising the sales tax 0.5 percent. The council members reasoned that it was not the GSC’s role to weigh in on the measure.

Undergraduate Senate Deputy Chair Mylan Gray ʼ19 reported that the sponsors of the bill are seeking endorsements from college student governments in hopes of encouraging students to vote. GSC co-chair and fourth-year PhD candidate in Iberian and Latin American cultures Pau Guinart noted that since the body represents the whole graduate community, the GSC should not be in the business of sponsoring political initiatives.

Council Member Hsu doubted whether the measure would impact students.

“This [measure] is not really going to affect students”, said Hsu. “Or if it is, a lot of us won’t really have a say in it.”

Unlike with the undergraduate student population, large proportions of graduates are international students and cannot vote.

Gray articulated some Senators’ reasoning that the ASSU constitution would permit the GSC to endorse Measure B, since it directly affects students. Council Member Yiren Shen, a second-year law student, argued that even if the measure were constitutional, it still seemed inappropriate to rule on the issue, which many members considered at least semi-political. Co-chair Guinart concurred that choosing to endorse the measure may not set good precedent for future GSCs.

Council Member and fifth-year PhD candidate in sociology Jennifer Hill argued that if the council were to consider offering an endorsement, it would need to hear arguments from opponents of the measure as well as its original sponsors, which would likely not happen before elections in November.

“I am concerned about only getting one side,” said co-chair and PhD candidate in microbiology and immunology Terence Theisen.

The Council concluded by discussing updates to their website, a topic they will revisit at their next meeting.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

The post Graduate Council discusses county sales tax, funds student groups appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/29/graduate-council-discusses-county-sales-tax-funds-student-groups/feed/ 0 1117385
M.D./Ph.D. student Maria Birukova dies in climbing accident https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/22/m-d-ph-d-student-maria-birukova-dies-in-climbing-accident/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/22/m-d-ph-d-student-maria-birukova-dies-in-climbing-accident/#respond Thu, 22 Sep 2016 20:02:34 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1117188 Maria Birukova, a fourth-year graduate student in the M.D./Ph.D. program at the Stanford School of Medicine, died on Sept. 18 in a climbing accident.

The post M.D./Ph.D. student Maria Birukova dies in climbing accident appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Maria Birukova, a fourth-year graduate student in the M.D./Ph.D. program at the Stanford School of Medicine, died on Sept. 18 in a climbing accident near Bear Creek Spire in the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Birukova was an avid mountaineer and a researcher focused on developing therapies for patients with chronic and often deadly wounds. Earlier this year she earned the prestigious Bio-X Bowes graduate student fellowship for her interdisciplinary research into antibiotic-resistant wounds at the laboratory of immunologist Paul Bollyky.

“Maria was a very dynamic, interested and interesting person,” said Bollyky. “ She was an outstanding scientist [whose] loss leaves a hole in her graduate class, as well as in my lab.”

In addition to her research, Birukova was a consulting project manager for the Stanford Healthcare Consulting Group, a non-profit volunteer-run organization dedicated to improving patient care. She was also a Graduate Voice and Influence Program Fellow at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

“The medical school community has suffered a tremendous loss,” said Lloyd Minor, dean of the School of Medicine. “Maria’s interdisciplinary approach to the treatment of antibiotic-resistant [biofilm-coated wounds] brought to bear insights from both chemistry and immunology in an attempt to devise new treatments for patients with few other options. She will be greatly missed, both professionally and personally.”

Birukova earned her bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering at Yale. She was born on May 31, 1990 in Moscow, Russia and is survived by her parents Konstantin Birukov and Anna Birukova who are both faculty members at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago.

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post M.D./Ph.D. student Maria Birukova dies in climbing accident appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/22/m-d-ph-d-student-maria-birukova-dies-in-climbing-accident/feed/ 0 1117188
Glam Grads Q&A: Jonathan Leal on the intersection of musicology, minority literatures https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/18/glam-grads-qa-jonathan-leal-on-the-intersection-of-musicology-minority-literatures/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/18/glam-grads-qa-jonathan-leal-on-the-intersection-of-musicology-minority-literatures/#respond Sun, 18 Sep 2016 22:57:54 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1117119 In this edition of Glam Grads, The Daily talked with third-year Ph.D. candidate in modern thought and literature (MTL) Jonathan Leal about his work at the intersection of minority literatures and popular music, with a focus on African American and Chicana/o aesthetic practices.

The post Glam Grads Q&A: Jonathan Leal on the intersection of musicology, minority literatures appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
In this edition of Glam Grads, The Daily talked with third-year Ph.D. candidate in modern thought and literature (MTL) Jonathan Leal about his work at the intersection of minority literatures and popular music, with a focus on African American and Chicana/o aesthetic practices. Hailing from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, Leal earned a B.A. and M.A in English at the University of Northern Texas while working as a composer, music educator and percussionist. In addition to his scholarly work, he is also an essayist who has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Huizache.

(Courtesy of Jonathan Leal)
(Courtesy of Jonathan Leal)

 

The Stanford Daily (TSD): As a native of the Rio Grande Valley working with Chicana/o literature, how have your life experiences informed your scholarly work?

Jonathan Leal (JD): It’s hard to even know where to begin because it is all intertwined. A lot of what I try to do with my creative writing is a riff for exploration of things I am reading about in scholarship and all of that is tied to experiences I have had growing up at the [US/Mexico] border. I grew up in the Valley and I went to a music school. I was studying percussion, philosophy and literature and had lots of questions that I wanted to find answers to, some of which you could find in writing and literature. I am ultimately trying to find ways to bring [music and literature] together.

TSD: How did you come to focus on Chicana/o literature and African American aesthetics and intellectual thought?

JD: Originally I was reading a lot of British and Irish modernism. I thought it was cool, but I had certain experiences growing up in the Valley. The experiences I had were not always reflected in the writing I was reading, even though I enjoyed the form and technique of the writing. I picked up a book called “Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference” by Ramon Saldivar and was exposed to writers that I had not been exposed to before. I started reading folks such as Tomas Rivera and [Americo] Paredes, and I fell in love with [Chicana/o literature]. I was hooked ever since then, and have not been able to get my mind on anything else. As for African American aesthetics, that entirely comes out of a love of jazz and being a musician my whole life. The music that I listen to by most metrics would be considered “Black music.” That’s something that I find interesting: What conditions exist for labeling something Black or Brown?

TSD: What is your dissertation about?

JD: I’m essentially looking at connections between music, literature and race in the United States from about the 1940s to the present. And to do that, I’m looking at Chicana/o literary figures, African American writers and musicians, Asian American writers and musicians. I am trying to build a history that pulls as much from literature as from music.

TSD: Something that really interested me about your work is how you link together jazz with Chicana/o poetry. Can you explicate that connection?

JD: That’s one of the questions that I am going to end up grappling with in my dissertation. One of my favorite examples is a Chicano poet named Raul Salinas, who I’ve written about to some degree. There has been a tradition of Chicana/o engagement with jazz music. It’s something that I have felt in my own life. I started reading his work after a conversation I had with an ethnomusicologist in Texas, Catherine Ragland, who suggested I check out the poet. I started reading, and I discovered he had spent his youth in prison and was simultaneously working on Chicana/o poetry, figuring out what that might even mean. He was listening to his favorite records, which happened to be jazzers. Not only the jazz musicians you would think of on a national scale of popularity but also locals. The division between something being Chicana/o poetry and falling into a certain history, and then something being jazz music and immediately falling into an African American tradition — those are things that have been developed at universities for particular reasons. Now it is time to figure out how these things developed independently in the ways we talk about them, but not necessarily in how they were actually experienced.

TSD: How did you first hear about modern thought and literature at Stanford, and how did you decide that program was right for you?

JD: I was in this amazing coffee shop in a little town called Denton, Texas and was meeting with Masood Raja, who is a professor of postcolonial studies at the University of North-Texas. I was writing a paper and he used those words [MTL]. I went online and started reading everything I possibly could from people who had been associated with the program. I worked really hard, the stars aligned and I ended up getting in. It has been a blast ever since.

TSD: How do you approach writing your essays?

JD: The framework that helps me conceptualize it is similar to improvisation, at least in terms of finding topics. To be a good improviser in a musical setting and especially in jazz, you have to listen. You have to be sensitive about what is going on around you. Sitting down to write stuff feels like that sometimes. In the beginning it can be hard to distinguish the scholarly from the creative since it all comes from the same place but you draw different things out. The other part is refining the expression: revising and revising until you figure out what you actually want to say.

TSD: Besides writing and music, what are your other passions?

JD: I like hanging out with family. Most of my family is still living in the Valley. I love talking to people, hearing their stories and asking questions. And reading as much as I can. I love learning, in whatever kind of way that ends up unfolding.

 

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited.

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Glam Grads Q&A: Jonathan Leal on the intersection of musicology, minority literatures appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/18/glam-grads-qa-jonathan-leal-on-the-intersection-of-musicology-minority-literatures/feed/ 0 1117119
Obituary: Joseph Keller, professor emeritus of mathematics and mechanical engineering, dies at 93 https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/12/obituary-joseph-keller-professor-emeritus-of-mathematics-and-mechanical-engineering-dies-at-93/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/12/obituary-joseph-keller-professor-emeritus-of-mathematics-and-mechanical-engineering-dies-at-93/#respond Mon, 12 Sep 2016 08:00:44 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1116999 Joseph Keller, professor emeritus of mathematics and mechanical engineering, died at his home in Palo Alto from kidney cancer on Sept. 7 at 93 years old. Best known for his Geometrical Theory of Diffraction, Keller devised solutions to problems in the sciences and engineering.

The post Obituary: Joseph Keller, professor emeritus of mathematics and mechanical engineering, dies at 93 appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
joseph-keller
(Courtesy of Stanford University)

Joseph Keller, professor emeritus of mathematics and mechanical engineering, died at his home in Palo Alto from kidney cancer on Sept. 7 at 93 years old. Best known for his geometrical theory of diffraction, Keller devised solutions to science and engineering problems.

Praised by admirers for his intellectual curiosity and playful approach to mathematics, Keller studied a diverse array of issues ranging from oscillations in runners’ ponytails to atomic explosions.

Keller’s “asymptotic analysis,” which allowed him to approximate answers to problems with no exact solutions, earned him renown in the mathematics world. Upon awarding him the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1997, the Wolf Foundation noted that he “brought a deep understanding of physics and a superb skill… to an astonishing range of problems,” calling him “the model of what a mathematician interested in a wide variety of physical phenomena can and should be.”

His life’s work earned him many more of his field’s highest honors. In addition to the aforementioned Wolf Prize in Mathematics (1997), he received the Frederick E. Nemmers Prize (1996), the National Academy of Sciences Award in Applied Mathematics and Numerical Analysis (1995), the National Medal of Science (1988), the Timoshenko Medal (1984), the Eringen Medal (1981), the von Karman Prize (1979) and eight honorary doctorates. Keller was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, among other prestigious academic groups.

Interested in mathematics since his youth, Keller was born in Paterson, New Jersey to Isaac Keiles and Sarah Bishop. He graduated from East Side High School in Paterson, where he competed on the math team. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1948 from New York University, where he remained as a professor until 1979.

After moving to Stanford, he earned emeritus status in 1993. He was also a member of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics summer program at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Keller is survived by Alice Whittemore, his wife and professor of health research and policy and of biomedical data science at the School of Medicine. The Stanford Faculty Club will host a memorial from 4:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 29. Another memorial will take place next summer in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Obituary: Joseph Keller, professor emeritus of mathematics and mechanical engineering, dies at 93 appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/12/obituary-joseph-keller-professor-emeritus-of-mathematics-and-mechanical-engineering-dies-at-93/feed/ 0 1116999
Former Stanford football player files lawsuit against University, NCAA, Pac-12 https://stanforddaily.com/2016/08/11/former-stanford-football-player-files-lawsuit-against-university-ncaa-and-pac-12/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/08/11/former-stanford-football-player-files-lawsuit-against-university-ncaa-and-pac-12/#respond Thu, 11 Aug 2016 08:00:38 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1116664 The suit names the University, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the Pacific-12 Conference (Pac-12) as defendants and covers Stanford football players active between 1959 and 2010.

The post Former Stanford football player files lawsuit against University, NCAA, Pac-12 appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Former Stanford football player David Burns ʼ76 has filed a class action lawsuit seeking damages for the alleged disregard of the health and safety of former Stanford football players.

The suit names the University, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the Pacific-12 Conference (Pac-12) as defendants and covers Stanford football players active between 1959 and 2010. Stewart Pollock of the law firm Edelson Professional Corporation will be lead-counsel for the suit, which joins 12 others filed by former college football players since mid-May. The suits allege that private universities, the NCAA and regional athletic conferences knew or should have known of the danger concussions and other traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) pose, but neglected to either inform student-athletes or adopt adequate concussion management protocols.

According to the lawsuit implicating Stanford, some concussed players, such as Burns, were prematurely returned to games or practices and now suffer from chronic injuries ranging from impulse control to early onset Parkinson’s disease.

Burns, who was not available to comment, seeks redress for these injuries, which he alleges Stanford knowingly failed to prevent.

“We talked to a client recently who recalled playing in games where his ears were bleeding,” said Chris Dore, a partner at Edelson. “[Student-athletes] are looking at these [athletic and educational] institutions to protect them.”

In a statement to CBS San Francisco, Stanford spokeswoman Lisa Lapin maintained that the University prioritizes protecting student-athletes.

“Stanford was surprised to see this lawsuit purporting to be a class action on behalf of football players from 1959 to 2010 as Stanford had not previously heard anything from the plaintiff or his counsel about the allegations being made,” the statement read. “Stanford has always acted in the best interests of its student athletes.”

The complaint has been assigned to Judge Kandis Westmore of the U.S. District Court of Northern California, San Francisco Division.

Protecting Students

Edelson’s string of lawsuits followed another settlement between the NCAA and a class of former football players led by Adrian Arrington, wide receiver for the University of Michigan from 2004-07.  The settlement provided for medical monitoring such as doctor’s appointments but not monetary compensation for an injured player, and it stipulated that future class actions against the NCAA, such as Burns’ complaint, must proceed on a college-by-college basis.

“The [NCAA settlement] didn’t account for anything that would occur if the test showed that there was something wrong with you,” Dore said. “You’d have players who were already experiencing injury, and the doctor’s appointment would be useless to them because they had already been to the doctor a thousand times.”

Dore stressed that the neurological injuries Edelson’s clients face have ruined their abilities to hold jobs and maintain social relationships. The former students represented in Burns’ suit, he explained, did not know the long-term dangers of repeated head injuries. College students and their parents now have access to information that was not in the public eye as recently as 10 years ago, according to Dore.

“When people look at these players in a lot of these suits, they are seeing them as men, middle-aged men,” Dore said. “People forget that they were 18 to 22-year-olds who were more or less under the guardianship of these schools and of these programs.”

While football players implicitly agree to take on some risk by participating in games, Osborne argued in one of the earliest law articles on sports-related head injuries that trainers and team physicians have a duty to protect athletes.

“Tremendous pressure may be placed on the athletic trainer to return the athlete to play as soon as possible by the coaching staff, administrators, other team members, alumnae and fans, and the athlete,” the article stated. “The athletic trainer cannot be influenced by the team’s need for the player or even by the athlete’s desire to play.”

According to Burns’ complaint, the NCAA, Pac-12 and Stanford “knew for decades of the harmful effects of TBI on student-athletes, [but] ignored these facts and failed to institute any meaningful method of warning or protecting the student-athletes.”

The NCAA first mandated concussion protocols in 2010. Due to Burns’ pending litigation, Stanford has not disclosed when the Cardinal first adopted a concussion protocol. However, former head coach Jim Harbaugh’s comments to The New York Times indicate Stanford has had a concussion protocol since at least 2007.

Law experts weigh in

Experts unaffiliated with either Burns’ or the defendants’ legal teams said the lawsuit may have a difficult time proving that Stanford and others were negligent.

“Even though [Stanford] has a duty to protect [students], anyone who plays any kind of sport knows that they could get hurt,” said Barbara Osborne, professor of sports medicine and law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). “Failing to adopt a safety standard is not the same thing as active concealment [of information].”

In Osborne’s opinion, the NCAA and athletic conferences do not have a duty to protect students, but rather a duty to not increase risks to the health and safety of student-athletes. Osborne believes that the actions and regulations of the NCAA and the Pac-12 should be evaluated under the norms for football during the time period covered in the suit, not current standards.

Though the suit alleges that “study after study published in medical journals” warned of the dangers of concussions, Osborne noted that there was no strong consensus in the sports medicine community when Burns played for the Cardinal. Medical experts disagreed on the dangers of concussions and other TBIs in football until relatively recently.

“If the standard is to be reasonably prudent, it looks like committees [within the NCAA] had been doing what they were expected to do, and did create policy when there was consensus,” Osborne said.

Though research on head injuries dated back to the 1920s, consensus on concussions specifically within football were not reached until Kevin Guskiewicz, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC and member of the NCAA’s Concussion Safety Protocol Committee,  conducted a series of large-scale epidemiological studies identifying the effects of multiple concussions in the late 1990s. Guskiewicz’s research, which earned him a MacArthur fellowship, helped shift the field of sports medicine away from reliance on athletes’ self-reporting symptoms and towards more objective measures of athletes’ health.

“Coaches and trainers can’t make decisions on someone else’s safety if they are not getting honest information from the person,” Osborne said.

Burns’ recent complaint does not specify whether subjective self-reporting of symptoms was the norm when Burns played football from 1972-74.

According to a survey that then-student Richard Eagleston ʼ71 MA ʼ76 distributed to football players at Stanford and Santa Clara University in the 1975 season, however, players reported only slightly over half of the injuries they sustained, but were most likely to report head injuries. Most of the players surveyed reported receiving encouragement from their coaches or trainers to report injuries.

If evidence at trial demonstrates that Stanford football acted within the accepted coaching standards at the time, Osborne explained, there would be no breach of duty to players on Stanford’s part.

But Dore disagreed. He clarified that, per the conditions of NCAA’s settlement with Arrington, the firm must sue individual colleges even though the negligent behavior alleged in the complaint was typical of most college football programs from 1959-2010.

Burns’ case is “a matter of [the defendant’s] knowledge and their ability to control these players, to control the policies and limit the harm of [head injuries],” Dore said.

Deborah Hensler, Judge John W. Ford Professor of Dispute Resolution at the Stanford Law School, who specializes in class action litigation and procedure, suspects that the plaintiff’s definition of the class may cover too many people, but has withheld definitive judgement on the issue until more facts pertaining to the case are discovered.

“A court, at least at first blush, would think of it as being a very large amorphous class and judges are frequently uncomfortable allowing such class actions,” Hensler said.

A recent settlement with the NFL, Hensler noted, featured a narrower class of retired football players suffering from certain neurological diseases, while Burns’ suit limits the class solely by time period.

However, Hensler agreed with Dore that Stanford could be held responsible even if its practices were similar to peer institutions’.

“If there is some period where the plaintiffs show that Stanford and the other defendants knew and should have been doing other things and weren’t telling the players, then the plaintiffs would still have a strong case in that regard,” she said.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

The post Former Stanford football player files lawsuit against University, NCAA, Pac-12 appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/08/11/former-stanford-football-player-files-lawsuit-against-university-ncaa-and-pac-12/feed/ 0 1116664
SIG and Stanford NAACP host panel discussion on racial justice policies https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/24/sig-and-stanford-naacp-host-panel-discussion-on-racial-justice-policies/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/24/sig-and-stanford-naacp-host-panel-discussion-on-racial-justice-policies/#comments Wed, 25 May 2016 06:53:42 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1115676 On May 24, over 50 attendees participated in “Policy and the Path to Justice,” a discussion held by the Stanford NAACP and Stanford in Government (SIG), focusing on policies within the United States affecting black lives.

The post SIG and Stanford NAACP host panel discussion on racial justice policies appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
On May 24, over 50 attendees participated in “Policy and the Path to Justice,” a discussion held by the Stanford NAACP and Stanford in Government (SIG), focusing on policies within the United States affecting black lives.

The event was put on by the Stanford NAACP in collaboration with Stanford in Government’s Diversity and Outreach Committee and featured a panel discussion moderated by Jasmine Hill, a sociology doctoral student. The panel of speakers that consisted of  Ben Jealous, former president and CEO of the NAACP; Charlene Carruthers, the national director of the Black Youth Project 100; and DeRay McKesson, who launched Campaign Zero, a policy platform to end police violence.

Throughout the discussion, Jealous recounted leading the NAACP to achieve policy goals by partnering with allies across the political spectrum, mentioning a campaign against the death penalty, a march against stop-and-frisk policies and a partnership with gay rights activists as notable examples.

On the topic of building partnerships, Jealous emphasized openness to different viewpoints.

“Leadership is figuring out what you do agree with people [on] and focusing on that,” Jealous said. Partnering with Tea Party Republicans, for example, the NAACP worked to push bills against mass incarceration in Texas despite disagreements on other issues. As a result, the NAACP helped pave the path for the first prison closure in Texas state history.

Carruthers drew upon her experience as a black queer feminist community organizer to add to the panel discussion. She explained how black liberation requires addressing how black people can be oppressed for their intersecting identities, such as gender, sexual orientation, class and able-bodiness.

“What black queer feminism means…is that none of us are free until all of us are free,” Carruthers said. “We have to tell a much bigger story [than that of cis-gender black men].”

In discussing policy and violence, the panelists agreed that violence resulting in death pivots media attention toward black men and boys. Expanding to the topic of marginalization, Carruthers noted the commonality among all marginalized people. Latinos, immigrants, women, indigenous people and black people, she explained, are all in the middle of a sizzling pan and need to break out together. For Carruthers, breaking the cast-iron skillet of the state requires big policy changes.

“Reparations can look like free college education and loan forgiveness for folks,” Carruthers said. “Reparations can also look like land…for indigenous folk, too…What’s important is to have values and principles, and to be committed to collective struggle with people.”

McKesson, in addition to echoing the sentiments of Carruthers and Jealous, highlighted smaller-scale policies affecting individual communities, focusing on literacy rates in his hometown of Baltimore. Low literacy rates among the poor, he said, can be partially attributed to a lack of libraries. McKesson proposed increasing access to libraries for all children, regardless of age. He also highlighted social media as an important tool for activists to get the attention of the media for an ultimately greater impact. McKesson concluded the event by directing students to never compromise their integrity and to prioritize building skills when engaged in relatively small-scale campus activism.

“Policy and the Path to Justice” will likely be the first of many collaborations between the SIG Diversity and Outreach Committee and other student groups.

“SIG is very happy and looking forward to working with other student groups,” said Sam Feineh ʼ19, a member of SIG’s Diversity and Outreach Committee and co-organizer of the event.

“[If it weren’t for SIG] events like this wouldn’t happen,” added Trevor Caldwell ʼ17, a member of the Stanford NAACP and event co-organizer. “People headed into public policy and other powerful realms wouldn’t have heard that conversation, and I think that was an extremely rich conversation. Our organization is looking at ways policy is impacting all communities.”

Biola Macaulay ʼ16 recounted what she took away from the event.

As a senior who is going off to law school next year, I asked the panelists how not to become complicit in the systems of power they are trying to change from within and I found their answers really helpful. They all more or less talked about being very intentional about what you’re willing to compromise on and what you’re not.

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post SIG and Stanford NAACP host panel discussion on racial justice policies appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/24/sig-and-stanford-naacp-host-panel-discussion-on-racial-justice-policies/feed/ 1 1115676
Art classes and exhibitions face limited space, resources https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/15/exclusivity-in-art-classes-and-exhibitions/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/15/exclusivity-in-art-classes-and-exhibitions/#respond Mon, 16 May 2016 05:54:59 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1115117 Despite the relocation of Stanford’s Art and Art History Department to the McMurtry Building in 2015, access to popular art courses and exhibition spaces remains limited for students. In response, the department plans to increase course offerings, but must continue to prioritize exhibition spaces for students within the department.

The post Art classes and exhibitions face limited space, resources appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Despite the relocation of Stanford’s art and art history department to the McMurtry Building in 2015, access to popular art courses and exhibition spaces remains limited for students. In response, the department plans to increase course offerings, but must continue to prioritize exhibition spaces for students within the department.

Limited space within art courses

In-demand art courses, such as ARTSTUDI 160: Intro to Digital/Physical Design and ARTSTUDI 170: Introduction to Photography, attract more students than space allows, meaning that some students struggle to enroll in required classes. In response, the department uses a waitlist system, in which professors review student applications for over-enrolled courses. Overflow students are placed on the waitlist and gain priority for enrollment the next time the course is offered.

Many courses are capped at 15 students, but the most popular attract more than 30 students.

Instructors prioritize students within the art practice program for the few spaces available in courses. Art practice majors and minors get top priority, followed by graduate art practice students and lastly all other undergraduates and graduates.

Art students are not the only ones seeking classes to fulfill major requirements, however. Students within the human-computer interaction (HCI) and graphics tracks of the computer science major or in product design may fulfill elective requirements with art classes.

But according to Elis Imboden, department manager for art and art history, instructors are not expected to grant priority to students enrolling in art courses to fulfill elective requirements.

For co-terminal computer science student Lucas Throckmorton ʼ16, art practice courses were the only option that fit his schedule and degree requirements. As a non-art practice graduate student, he had low priority and could not enroll. Throckmorton brought his concern to the department’s administration.

“The art department said they could not let me in the course,” Throckmorton said. “[Administrators] said [it was] on the CS department for not having coordinated to make exceptions.”

As a consequence, Throckmorton has had to restructure his degree program.

The push for more course offerings

Relocation to the McMurtry Building and increased funding have prompted the department to offer more art courses. The building has painting storage, allowing the department to offer as many courses as there are time slots and instructors available in a day – the department has also already tripled the number of painting classes on offer. Imboden anticipates that course offerings will increase by 37 percent within the next two years.

The department has also begun hiring more instructors for popular course offerings, increasing the number of sections for ARTSTUDI 170: Introduction to Photography. Imboden noted the introduction of the Creative Expression WAYS general education requirement as a contributor to more offerings.

Historically, classes have also been stymied by space problems: The Cummings Art Building, previously home to the department, had no available storage. According to Imboden, students left paintings on easels in classrooms, rendering those rooms unusable for other classes.

The department has correspondingly expanded to offer plein air painting and drawing, cellphone photography and filmmaking classes, all of which require either no space within the building or no storage of technology.

“Space has always been a problem and will remain a problem,” said Imboden.

Department exhibition spaces: high demand, low supply

Exhibition spaces, available in the McMurtry building and Stanford Art Gallery, uses a system that prioritizes art graduate students, art practice majors and minors and lastly all other students. Since undergraduates have lower priority, students within the department may not receive their ideal locations. Students outside the department cannot usually acquire space except for an open studio period at the end of some art courses.

Even amongst students within the program, acquiring a preferred space is not always certain.

“The honors program guarantees you first pick for exhibition spaces among the undergrads,” said Maia Paroginog ՚16. “I had to wait a while [to receive a space] because there are so many exhibitions going up that the turnover in the department is really short. By a stroke of luck, it worked out that I got the space.”

As exhibitions manager Gabriel Harrison points out, spaces are in a perpetual cycle of installation, de-installation and preparation. Seemingly unclaimed spaces are actually undergoing preparation for the next student. Limited spaces, therefore, continue to be the main deterrent to student exhibitions.

Imboden stressed that the department has to prioritize its own students. Resources are insufficient to support all student artists, with the exception of a few opportunities: At the end of each quarter, for instance, the department opens art practice classrooms in an open studio period showcasing art from any student enrolled in art courses.

Any currently enrolled undergraduate may also submit artworks for the Annual Undergraduate Juried Art Exhibition, which is held in the Stanford Art Gallery. The department has emphasized the value of having work displayed in such a lucrative location, especially for students outside of art practice.

“We do recognize that exhibition spaces are attractive and a scarce resource,” Harrison said. “We don’t want students to feel shut out.”

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano@stanford.edu.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the order of priority for art classes. Art practice majors and minors are prioritized after waitlisted students, not art practice graduate students. Exhibition spaces prioritize art practice graduate students after waitlisted students, not art practice majors and minors. The Daily regrets these errors.

The post Art classes and exhibitions face limited space, resources appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/15/exclusivity-in-art-classes-and-exhibitions/feed/ 0 1115117
Classy Classes: COMPMED 80N explores niches in animal behavior https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/08/classy-classes-compmed-80n-explores-niches-in-animal-behavior/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/08/classy-classes-compmed-80n-explores-niches-in-animal-behavior/#respond Mon, 09 May 2016 06:14:17 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1114799 COMPMED 80N: “Introduction to Animal Behavior” offers students the opportunity to participate in a student-led interactive discussion while thinking critically about how each animal’s niche, or place in the world, is a function of its behavior.

The post Classy Classes: COMPMED 80N explores niches in animal behavior appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
COMPMED 80N: “Introduction to Animal Behavior” offers students the opportunity to participate in a student-led interactive discussion while thinking critically about how each animal’s niche, or place in the world, is a function of its behavior.

The introductory seminar fulfills the Scientific Method and Analysis (SMA) WAYS general education requirement. Students seek to understand the causes of behavior through four different approaches which act as the organizing principles of the course.

Students prepare group presentations on animals of their choice, investigating general behavior and function, underlying mechanisms, development and phylogeny. These “niche reports” argue, on the basis of behavior, that an animal fulfills a niche to be successful. Students peer-grade presentations in comparison to their own.

Joseph Garner, the instructor and an associate professor of comparative medicine, and by courtesy, of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford Medical Center, encourages students to critically examine claims and to be proactive in asking for more in-depth coverage of information.

“Rather than just describing everything I see, I want people to think — the pattern [of behavior] sure is interesting — but the process [behind it] is biology,” Garner said. “What is the process that made this pattern? What are the principles that design animals in this way? I want the students to be able to put an intellectual framework around their love for animals.”

For each topic, the class watches a documentary on animal behavior and engages in a discussion of the class readings. Students learn to not take any statement for granted, including claims made by documentaries and even by Garner.

“One of the things that Joe makes us do is that during class when he talks … you are required to have your laptop open,” said Raleigh Browne ՚19. “You are supposed to fact check everything he says, every claim he makes, and you are supposed to post discoveries on a forum online.”

The course’s focus on active inquiry in turn encourages students to support their own intuitions about animal behavior. According to Noah Bennett ʼ19, not many people come to the class with previous exposure to the material. Garner challenges each student to find proof of anecdotes or claims and post them to the online class forum.

Garner also offers each year’s cohort of students support both inside and outside of class.

“When you have a conversation with him outside of class, it’s not just based on intellectual material or animal behavior content,” Browne said. “He is very much interested in you as a person and your wellbeing and helping you understand how you can fit into the community.”

For Garner, teaching is both a privilege and a joy, so he builds the course — which is in its third year — to be a rigorous but engaging introduction to the science of animal behavior.

“You can be funny, and be silly, and you can have a fun relationship with your students,” Garner said. “And that’s another thing that I want them to see. Professors are human and we are here to help. We are here to […] help you guys figure out what it is that you want to do. And show you that it can be fun doing it.”

 

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated Raleigh Browne’s last name as Brown, and referred to Garner as assistant rather than associate professor. The Daily regrets these errors.

The post Classy Classes: COMPMED 80N explores niches in animal behavior appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/08/classy-classes-compmed-80n-explores-niches-in-animal-behavior/feed/ 0 1114799
Classy Classes: EARTHSYS 200 gives out eco-friendly advice https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/25/classy-classes-earthsys-200-gives-out-eco-friendly-advice/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/25/classy-classes-earthsys-200-gives-out-eco-friendly-advice/#respond Tue, 26 Apr 2016 03:46:49 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1114162 EARTHSYS 200: “Sustaining Action: Research, Analysis, and Writing for the Public” provides a unique writing opportunity for students, publishing their work in Sound Advice for a Green Earth (SAGE), an eco-advice column published in the Stanford Alumni Magazine.

The course fulfills the Writing in the Major (WIM) requirement for the Earth Systems major. Students choose two questions submitted to SAGE and parse through research in search of answers, but the focus of the course is on conveying scientific information to a public audience. Class sessions feature lectures and workshops on writing skills, peer-review of writing assignments and occasional visits from guest speakers skilled in science journalism.

The post Classy Classes: EARTHSYS 200 gives out eco-friendly advice appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
EARTHSYS 200: “Sustaining Action: Research, Analysis, and Writing for the Public” provides a unique writing opportunity for students, publishing their work in Sound Advice for a Green Earth (SAGE), an eco-advice column in the Stanford Alumni Magazine.

The course fulfills the Writing in the Major (WIM) requirement for the Earth Systems major. Students choose two questions submitted to SAGE and parse through research in search of answers, but the focus of the course is on conveying scientific information to a public audience. Class sessions feature lectures and workshops on writing skills, peer review of writing assignments and occasional visits from guest speakers skilled in science journalism.

Students learn to offer advice to the public in a way that is understandable, engaging and likely to move people to take action.

“In studying environmental science there’s a lot of doom-and-gloom because we are learning about all the problems,” said Katie Phillips, the instructor of the class and a lecturer in the Earth Systems Program. “There’s a really big focus on trying to find positive stories, trying to find reasons for hope… we want people reading [students’ answers] to feel empowered.”

Readers can submit questions for the class online through SAGE.

The questions submitted cover a range of technical issues, such as whether the carbon footprint of producing an electric car exceeds that of a gas car to the more relatable of how to build an effective composter. Students choose the questions that interest them most, conduct research and deliver answers to their non-technical audience.

Riya Mehta ’18 researched the carbon footprint of the average American wedding and ways to make weddings more eco-friendly.  

“[I try] to make sure I emphasize that planning an eco-friendly wedding does not mean that the wedding is not going to be as fun or as beautiful, and it’s probably going to be cheaper and more unique and more creative,” Mehta said.

Students learn techniques such as incorporating narratives, framing issues to emphasize solutions and incorporating and conducting interviews.  According to Phillips, guest speakers including Thomas Hayden, professor of practice in Earth Systems Communication, science journalist, and previous instructor for the course, provide their expertise. Other speakers have included Emily Polk, lecturer in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric, and Miles Traer Ph.D. ’14, lecturer in Earth Systems.  

The take-away from the course for students is improving their communication with the public.

“I am really interested in environmental communication and education so I’m figuring out how to put complex ideas that require calculations and research into simpler terms,” said Lauren Gibson ’17. “Trying to figure out how to do that is helpful not only in writing, but also in talking to people about big environmental issues that are harder to understand.”

According to Phillips, each student enrolled is interested in environmental communication and bridging the gap between scientists and the public.

“I’m passionate about having more people exist at the intersection between science and policy, science communities and non-science communities, because I think there is often a disconnect between the two,” Mehta said. “This class is really helping me learn how to communicate science to people who aren’t scientists, so I’m really grateful for that.”

Contact Miguel Samano at msamano ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Classy Classes: EARTHSYS 200 gives out eco-friendly advice appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/25/classy-classes-earthsys-200-gives-out-eco-friendly-advice/feed/ 0 1114162