Miles Unterreiner – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Wed, 22 May 2013 02:41:56 +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 Miles Unterreiner – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Free Speech and the Academic Mission https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/21/free-speech-and-the-academic-mission/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/21/free-speech-and-the-academic-mission/#comments Tue, 21 May 2013 20:29:13 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1077338 Justifications for free speech hold true on University campuses as surely as they do elsewhere.

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On February 7th of this year, animal rights advocates from the Stanford chapter of activist group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) interrupted a panel discussion of the documentary “American Meat,” a critique of the American industrial meat production system in favor of kindlier and more local animal husbandry. Insisting that any kind of farming in which animals are killed – including the softer version promoted by the directors of “American Meat” – is morally unacceptable, the protesters spoke loudly over the panel and its moderator, temporarily derailing the event’s intended dialogue.

In April, a Florida Atlantic University professor held an in-class exercise during which a Mormon student was encouraged to write the word “Jesus” on a piece of paper and then stomp on it. Despite insisting that the very purpose of the exercise was to encourage students to grapple with why cultural symbols carried sacred or important value, the professor was placed on administrative leave after a firestorm of public controversy.

On May 4th, more than 100 student activists affiliated with environmental group Mountain Justice (MJ) stormed an open meeting of Swarthmore College’s Board of Managers. Rejecting the meeting’s existing format – under which the Board would have presented arguments for and against fossil fuel divestment, a campaign that has also taken off at Stanford – MJ members instead interrupted the Board’s first speaker and proceeded to set their own meeting agenda, preventing Board member and Swarthmore alum Chris Niemczewski from delivering a presentation about the fiscal consequences of divestment for the College endowment.

And on May 10th, immigration researcher Jason Richwine resigned from the conservative Heritage Foundation after the Washington Post discovered that his Harvard PhD dissertation asserted the existence of “deep-set differentials in intelligence between races.” Students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government penned an open letter arguing that “the Harvard Kennedy School cannot ethically stand by academic work advocating a national policy of exclusion.”

What do these four events have in common? They all reflect the idea that some topics can be so morally unacceptable as to be off-limits to discussion – that dialogue about those topics is itself intrinsically illegitimate and unsuited for an academic environment.

Is stonewalling ever superior to dialogue? Is refusing to discuss a contentious topic ever the right thing to do? And does the mission of the university to educate its students present a special set of circumstances that modify the general rules of free speech?

To the first two, I answer “very, very rarely,” and to the last, I answer “yes, but not in the way you’d think.”

The ideological architecture of free speech is supported by two formidable pillars: the inherent right of every human to self-expression and the utilitarian value produced by a free exchange of ideas. The first asserts that no person ought to have his conscience infringed by the government, and the second that the best ideas cannot achieve prominence, nor the worst be jettisoned, unless society allows them to compete freely with one another in the public mind.

British philosopher John Stuart Mill, the chief engineer of utilitarian free speech theory, asserted famously that opinion is either right or wrong, and that in both cases silencing speech harms society. “If the opinion is right,” argued Mill in On Liberty, “they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” In other words, silence the truth and you lose it; silence lies and you lose the chance to see clearly why you were right in the first place, or to be inspired to fight back in support of the right and good.

In March 2010, for example, members of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, infamous for picketing the funerals of American soldiers with hateful anti-LGBT placards, decided to bring their virulent message of bigotry to Stanford University. The University could legally have prohibited them from picketing; doing so would have been well within Stanford’s rights as a private property owner, and many groups insisted that the University exercise that right to bar WBC from campus.

Wisely, the University (led by philosopher-Provost John Etchemendy) did the opposite. And as Mill might have predicted, the positive effect was dramatic: campus came together in a huge and joyful counter-protest, an opportunity for unity that would have been lost had Stanford taken the easy route out.

One can imagine potential events with far more offensive and extreme participants than those scary organic farmers featured in American Meat or even the bigots of the WBC: “Should Homosexuals be Publicly Crucified or Merely Stoned to Death? A panel discussion featuring Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia,” for instance, or “Jefferson Davis debates Abraham Lincoln on the ethics of slavery” (brought to you by a collaboration between the Program in Ethics and Society and the Physics Department’s Michael Crichton Program in Trans-Millenial Time Travel).

Yet both events would present invaluable opportunities for campus unity and counter-organization; for pure, unadulterated learning (about the differences between Salafi and Shi’a Islamic law regarding sexuality, for instance, or about which pro-slavery arguments the Confederates believed in most strongly and how Lincoln might have refuted them); and for the essentials of the University mission. I personally would feel it a shame were either of these hypothetical events to be shut down by protesters (or administrators) refusing to allow the speakers to speak. (Indeed, Ahmadinejad was invited to speak, and did, at Columbia University in 2007. No such luck, sadly, with Davis and Lincoln.)

Ultimately, both rights-based and utilitarian justifications for free speech hold true on University campuses as surely as they do elsewhere. But within the walls of the ivory tower, free speech can serve a third, equally valuable purpose: educating students in the conduct and purpose of difficult dialogue, and in how to grapple with arguments with which we firmly disagree.

That’s why I read National Review every week. It’s why history courses assign Mein Kampf, or speeches by Stalin and Mao. It’s why you should keep challenging yourself to interact with controversial speakers and writers. And it’s why that tiny “free speech zone” in White Plaza, open during that tiny sliver from noon to 1pm, needs to get a whole lot bigger.

Exercise your free speech rights by emailing Miles at miles.unterreiner@gmail.com.

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A Brief Apology to the Stanford Review https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/16/a-brief-apology-to-the-stanford-review/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/16/a-brief-apology-to-the-stanford-review/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 06:05:17 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1077242 Occasionally we all fall short.

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A teacher once told me that small minds talk about people, everyday minds talk about things, and great minds talk about ideas.

He was right. I fell into the small minds category on Monday, when I published a faux-obituary for the longstanding conservative publication on campus, the Stanford Review. Part of growing as a public writer – and frankly as a normal human being – is learning to apologize when you’ve figured out you’re wrong. This is one of those times for me.

I stand by a few of the things I wrote: the assertion that the blog had not been updated regularly, for one, and my opinion that it is extremely valuable to have a thoughtful conservative publication on campus. Besides that, my piece descended to a level of discourse I typically try very hard to avoid: criticizing a writer or publication, rather than her or its ideas; a lack of substance in favor of style; and a shortage of empirical research that, had I conducted it, would have contradicted my thesis.

First, very few student papers – and none that I know of on this campus – run plagiarism checks on all of their writers’ work. Finding out suddenly that one of your writers has plagiarized could happen to anyone and to any editor; there is no uniquely sloppy anti-plagiarism work going on at the Review. Second, the disaster that was the election-night scandal over the SOCC piece is much more complex than it would appear to be on the surface. Without going into detail, I was wrong to poke fun at the Review without asking questions about what happened that night. Third, the Review still prints every other week, and circulation has not declined. Fourth, the Review doesn’t have a sports section, so the outdated appearance of the online sports section is due to an unwise decision to put the paper’s few sports stories on the front page of the web edition, not a sudden decline in the quantity of athletic output.

When I wrote my original piece, I intended it to be a fun and unorthodox jab at a paper I had once loved to read in the hopes of bringing it back to life. After meeting with a Review staffer and having a terrific conversation about everything from her paper to campus and world politics, and after rereading the piece several times, I’ve realized that it didn’t come off that way.

We are all Stanford students doing the best we can to juggle extracurriculars, academics, athletics, and more. Occasionally we all fall short; I certainly have. But one of the biggest failings we can commit is to capitalize on other people’s failings. I expect better than that from other writers, and so I should also expect it of myself.

Thanks for reading, and to the current staff at the Review: my apologies.

Contact Miles at miles.unterreiner@gmail.com.

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Obituary: The Stanford Review https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/13/quasi-obituary-the-stanford-review/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/13/quasi-obituary-the-stanford-review/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 08:27:05 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1077149 The formerly great Stanford Review entered total irrelevance recently after a long period of decline. It was 26.

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The following is a public plea for increased quality from a once-regular reader of the Review. This author feels that having a well-written, intellectually informed conservative newspaper on campus is extremely valuable, and that if the Review continues to decline in quality, Stanford will be the worse for it.

Campus was saddened Sunday night to learn of the demise of the formerly great Stanford Review, which entered total irrelevance recently after a long period of decline. It was 26.

Birthed in 1987 by PayPal founder and eventual Silicon Valley giant Peter Thiel, the Review grew up in a happily libertarian home, weaned on Capitalism and Freedom and Atlas Shrugged on tape. A startlingly precocious child, the Review spent its formative years leading the charge against increased faculty and student diversity, ultimately being forced to admit defeat with the advent of the 21st century.

Dark hints, however, emerged early in the tumultuous life of the paper, foreshadowing the outline of the long fall to follow. Childhood friends of the Review recall the paper’s difficulty working and playing well with other publications. “The Review sometimes seemed like it lived only to criticize other papers and entities on campus,” recalled one anonymous student. “Its content was basically written by finding something someone else had already said and saying the exact opposite, just to prove it could.”

Riding the annual wave of controversy created by student government elections, however, and under the guidance of a pantheon of hard-driving editors-in-chief, the Review eventually earned a position of relative campus prominence and respect. Providing a much-needed conservative counterpoint to everyday campus discourse and fostering pointed intellectual discussion on a biweekly basis, the Review showed every sign of having a bright future ahead – a bright future this writer, at least, welcomed with open arms.

Sometime over the last year, however, the paper began a dispiriting downward spiral from which it would never recover. Content level declined precipitously. The once-vibrant blog, Fiat Lux, ceased regular updating, occasionally jerking to life in fits and starts to offer sparse commentary on Stanford sporting events.

The Review’s website lapsed into a discouraging stasis. Its front page, as of its demise Sunday night, boasted keenly up-to-date coverage of Jordan Williamson’s performance at the Fiesta Bowl and a recap of Stanford Football’s matchup with USC in 2011. Its last five blog updates occurred on April 5th, March 6th, March 1st, February 14th, and January 28th. The most recently updated links appear to be advertisements: “Large and comfy bean bag sofas offered by The Soothing Company.” “A large selection of wall fireplaces offered by VentlessFireplacePros.com.” “Stanford students can buy Cheap Cell Phones and Makeup Brushes Products on DHgate.com.”

The final days of its fall were marked not by kind farewells and reminiscences but by discord and controversy. The end began auspiciously: A controversial opinions piece targeting SOCC was put up, taken down and put up again within hours, temporarily returning the Review to the mainstream of campus conversation and, for one glorious moment, providing the paper’s editors with something, anything, to talk about.

The revelation that a former columnist had plagiarized several articles nearly word-for-word, however, was the final straw for the Review. Thinking that a major news story was underway, the Daily ran breaking coverage of the plagiarism accusations, anticipating the start of a significant campus controversy.

None was forthcoming, because by this point, no one really cared much anymore. The Review’s last headline was a letter from its editor-in-chief emeritus apologizing for not checking his writer’s work. Tweets of the article: 0. Facebook shares: 0. Comments: 1.

Reports began to surface Monday morning, however, that reports of the Review’s death had been greatly exaggerated. Driven by a desire to lift the Review from the ashes of its irrelevance into the fires of a new rebirth, Stanford conservatives and libertarians banded together to improve the paper’s content, publish it more regularly, and craft a Review worthy of the intellectual caliber of the Stanford political right.

At least, one can always hope.

Bring back the Review! And email Miles at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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What I Wish I’d Known (or Known Earlier) https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/06/what-i-wish-id-known-or-known-earlier/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/05/06/what-i-wish-id-known-or-known-earlier/#comments Mon, 06 May 2013 23:37:01 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1076976 Time moves fast, and before you know it, your four years at Stanford will be over.

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Former Vice-Provost for Undergraduate Education John Bravman’s speech to my incoming freshman class, delivered to a Memorial Auditorium filled with kids who had no idea what they were getting into but couldn’t wait to start, seems like I heard it just yesterday. His message was simple: time moves fast, and before you know it, your four years at Stanford will be over. Make the most of it, he advised us. A few minutes later, his speech was over and we were back out in the warm Palo Alto dusk, waving our dorm flags and thinking we had all the time in the world ahead of us.

Turns out we didn’t. Time runs quick. And even though I managed to stretch four years into five, I’m leaving soon, wishing I had done a lot of things I never quite managed to do.

What follows is the advice I wish I could have given myself four-and-a-half years ago, sourced from the reflections of a guy who’s only now realizing what he’s losing. I don’t want to pretend that this advice applies to, or will have value for, everyone; I don’t want to pretend that it is any more valuable than the guidance you’ve already received, and will continue to receive, from friends, parents and teachers.  Take of it what you will and ignore the rest.

1. Go to more campus events. I’m not talking about the Al Gores and the Rachel Maddows, although you shouldn’t miss the big fish either. I’m talking about the countless chatlist event emails that somehow get ignored in favor of procrastination on Facebook, the posters on those concrete pillars in White Plaza you bike by without a second glance.

The number of lectures and free talks I now wish I’d attended is staggering. Outside Stanford’s sandstone arches lies a world in which top foreign dignitaries, Supreme Court litigators and prize-winning biomedical researchers don’t give free lectures on a daily basis within five minutes of your home. Do a better job than I did. Go listen to somebody brilliant, and do it as much as possible.

2. Don’t waste the free food! The meal plan here is among the best in the country. Use it. Don’t skip meals, and when you see a campus event offering free food, go for it. You won’t get the chance again after you graduate.

3. Scroll through ExploreCourses, find a class that looks interesting, and sit in on a lecture or two. The few times I’ve done this have been among my best experiences at Stanford. A 1L once invited me to listen to a ConLaw lecture; it was amazing. Rock, Sex, and Rebellion is the most fun you will ever have in a lecture hall, and Applebaum is like a much smarter version of Jack Black in School of Rock. Don’t miss out.

4. Stay in touch with old friends. It’s easy to let them go, and you’ll regret it. I sure do.

5. Sleep a little more. You’ll feel happier, perform better in school, and get through the year with a slightly lower chance of burning out. If you’re a varsity athlete, this one should read “sleep a LOT more.” (For more info, see #3 on this list and search for “Sleep and Dreams.” Drowsiness is Red Alert!)

6. Go to as many athletic events as you can. We have the best overall collegiate athletics program in the world, and all those tickets are free. You won’t get chances like this again after you leave; this is it. Go see women’s basketball at Maples. Watch some record-setting track and field performances at the world-class Payton Jordan Invitational (missed your chance this year; come back next April). And whatever you do, see at least one football game.

7. Take one or more of the following classes: Econ 1A and 1B (preferably with Marcelo or Tendall), History 106A/B/C with Martin Lewis (well, actually, anything in the History department!), and a foreign language you haven’t taken before. (Email me for a full list – just a few suggestions to get you started!)

8. Challenge a belief or opinion everyone around you appears to share. For your benefit and for the intellectual benefit of people around you, speak up and disrupt the paralyzing comfort of conformity. Don’t do it to be a jerk or grab attention; do it respectfully and after a lot of thought about what to say and how exactly to say it. If you run with the Occupy crowd, read some Milton Friedman and really engage with his arguments. If you’ve already memorized Friedman and have a poster of him hanging on your wall, go protest on behalf of Stanford Hospital workers. Having a debate in class about whether the full Islamic veil is oppressive or liberating for women in the West? Thoughtfully take the side no one else is taking.

It’ll expand your mind, and hopefully everyone else’s. And chances are, there are a lot of people out there who think the same way you do and are just afraid to say it.

9. Go abroad. I never had this chance (three-season varsity athlete), but NO ONE I know who’s gone abroad has EVER regretted it. See a bit of the world while you can do it with your fellow students, with some help from financial aid, and in an academic setting. Bon voyage and arrivederci.

10. Really get to know a professor. Professors here have spent a lifetime accumulating knowledge you can’t get anywhere else. They love to talk and to teach; it’s a big part of why they’re here. And they get lonely when no one comes up to talk to them after lecture or in office hours – they think no one enjoyed hearing them speak, when the reality is that most students are just plain scared, intimidated, or in a rush.

Don’t be afraid that you’re too dumb to have a conversation with a professor. Embrace your lack of knowledge, because every professor is going to know a whole lot more than you do. It’s supposed to be that way. That’s why they’re teaching and you’re learning. And don’t go into the conversation with a future letter of rec in mind, or even necessarily your own interests or goals. Start off by just asking them about themselves and their work; chances are, you’ll learn a lot and have fun doing it.

That’s not all I wish I’d heard my freshman year. But it’s a big part of it. Let me know what you think, and I hope it helps!

Give Miles some of your own advice at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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Cheers to Jason Collins https://stanforddaily.com/2013/04/30/cheers-to-jason-collins/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/04/30/cheers-to-jason-collins/#respond Tue, 30 Apr 2013 22:25:58 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1076847 Collins’s decision will provide a positive role model for young athletes struggling to come out to teammates, parents and friends.

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Much has already been written about former Stanford basketball star and current NBA free agent Jason Collins ‘01’s coming-out party – and justifiably so.

It’s a historic moment for the sporting world; with yesterday’s announcement, Collins becomes the first male athlete in a major American professional team sport to come out as gay while still an active player. Collins’s decision will provide a positive role model for young athletes struggling to come out to teammates, parents and friends; his aggressive, physical style of play should help debunk the malicious myth that homosexuality makes you weak and unathletic.

Observers from the sports world to the heights of the punditocracy have rushed the court of public opinion like fans after a major win. “We are proud he has assumed the leadership mantle on this very important issue,” wrote NBA commissioner David Stern. “The time has come. Maximum respect,” tweeted Steve Nash. And former President Bill Clinton, whose daughter Chelsea graduated from Stanford alongside Collins in 2001, issued a statement declaring that “Jason’s announcement today is an important moment for professional sports and in the history of the LGBT community.”

In short, this is a pretty big deal. But what most struck me about Collins’ story – a story that, it seems to me, mirrors the larger dynamics at work in the national struggle for marriage equality – is that he doesn’t think it should be.

Collins wants everyone to know that he’s a basketball player first, and everything else, including a gay African-American man, second. “I don’t let my race define me,” wrote Collins in his eloquent coming-out article in Sports Illustrated, “any more than I want my sexual orientation to. I don’t want to be labeled, and I can’t let someone else’s label define me.” When he looks in the mirror, he doesn’t see anybody else’s blinkered vision of what society thinks a gay man should be; he sees a “7-foot, 255-pound body” who led the NBA in personal fouls during the 2004-05 season, who’s “not afraid to take on any opponent,” who loves “playing against the best,” who “once fouled a player so hard that he had to leave the arena on a stretcher.” With wry understatement, Collins notes, “I go against the gay stereotype.” His is a world in which how much you score during the game matters a great deal more than who you score with after it. There is no gay basketball or straight basketball; there are only wins and losses. (Asked how they would react to the coming-out of a player on their favorite team, 73 percent of Sports Illustrated readers responded that it “would have no impact.”)

And Collins would be more than happy if he got none of the attention the press has given him for a coming-out he wishes weren’t necessary. “I wish I wasn’t the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, ‘I’m different.’ If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has,” he explains, “which is why I’m raising my hand.”

Collins’ inspirational story may grab the biggest headlines, and preoccupy the most talking heads, of any coming-out this year. It probably should.

But it many respects, it’s also the exact same story we’ve been hearing all year: a story played out in city halls across the country, at emotional demonstrations in front of the Supreme Court, in living rooms and at kitchen tables and in all the quiet places the cameras never capture and about which ink is rarely, if ever, spilled.

I’m straight, so I don’t pretend to fully understand the inner dynamics of a gay community of which I have never been a part. All I know is what I see, through a looking glass darkly. And what I see are people who want nothing more than to be treated as normal, to peacefully enter the mainstream of American life and to be recognized for what they do, not who they are born to be.

The fight against Prop 8 and DOMA is a fight for the greatest normalizing and stabilizing force in American life: a (hopefully) lifelong marriage between two people who care for each other. A victory for marriage equality doesn’t look like the Armageddon of conservative nightmare, with naked orgies rampaging through the streets while owners marry their dogs and children wander about parentless over the cursed terrain of a vast moral wasteland. It doesn’t look like special treatment, identity politics or the demise of traditional Christian ethics (“I take the teachings of Jesus seriously,” notes Collins, “particularly the ones that touch on tolerance and understanding.”)

It looks like wedding dresses and black tuxes. It looks like kids drinking orange juice and hurriedly spooning Golden Grahams before rushing off to school. It looks like a seven-foot-tall basketball player getting sent off the court for a brutal foul. It looks like nothing more, and nothing less, than the healthy expression of this American life.

Cheers to Jason Collins for taking one more step on the road to nowhere new and nothing special – a place we should have gotten to a long, long time ago.

Share your thoughts with Miles at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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Final Thoughts on Suites https://stanforddaily.com/2013/04/22/final-thoughts-on-suites/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/04/22/final-thoughts-on-suites/#comments Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:11:11 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1076636 Let’s keep Stanford special, and keep it free.

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This will be my final individual column on Suites Dining. (I may, however, co-author a short op-ed with Associate Dean of Residential Education Nate Boswell on the process of working together and the lessons we’ve learned.) After weeks of negotiation and discussions between Suites representatives, Boswell and ResEd Director of Operations Aaron Buzay, I am very happy to report, as The Daily did last week, that Suites Dining will remain student-run next year, as it has for the past 30 years.

In this column, I’d like to do a few things: first, clarify what exactly Suites is going to look like next year; second, outline what still has to be done before the final papers are signed; and third, offer a few thoughts on how the process has gone, and share a few brief reflections on why I think it has gone so well.

First, it is my pleasure to report that the governance structure of Suites Dining will look nearly identical to the form it has had since Suites Dining’s founding in 1982. This year’s CEO and CFO have already selected next year’s student leadership team. There will be, as there have been in past years, eight student managers (two per club) and one CFO and CEO pair to oversee all four clubs. That student leadership team will retain independent control over Suites Dining’s finances and operations to the same (or perhaps, as I’ll note later, even greater) extent that managers have exercised up to this point.

Suites Dining will also be able to rehire the current four chefs: Dennis, Caroline, Tony, and Frank. (This is something about which I am, and I think many Suites residents are, especially happy.) The chefs’ compensation levels have yet to be finalized, although they will likely be similar, and the current CEO and CFO of Suites are currently compiling next year’s projected budget. That budget, happily, will likely include the continued hiring of student hashers – another major component of Suites Dining culture. Furthermore, the budget is likely to eliminate the fiscal problems caused by ResEd’s over-allocation of student money to food by reducing the percentage of money that must be directed towards food purchases.

There will be one major change to Suites Dining’s current governance structure: the establishment of a long-term Board of Directors to oversee and provide advice to all eight managers, the CEO and CFO and the chefs. That Board of Directors will most likely include former student managers/CEOs/CFOs, current Suites residents, one or more ASSU representatives from the Senate or Exec and one University representative. (Who in particular that will be has not yet been determined.)

The Board will serve three crucial functions: first, providing a continuous body (with the same or similar membership composition each year) to be accountable for any major complaints that future Suites residents might have; second, serving as the body responsible for any major structural changes to Suites Dining’s structure or governing policies, in case those prove to be necessary; and third, serving as a communicative liaison between Suites residents and the University.

There are, to be fair, some relatively significant issues that still have to be worked out. Perhaps most seriously, there remain barriers to the efficient allocation of food and capital expenses between all four clubs. Prior to 2008, food and capital expenditures were almost entirely flexible; money could be freely moved between clubs as well as between food and non-food expenses almost at will, meaning that money was very rarely wasted or misallocated.

That flexibility is unlikely to return completely, given heightened (and often quite reasonable) University restrictions on the management of student money. But by working together with ResEd and other University offices over the next year, we hope that we can move in that direction by establishing and maintaining our own reserve accounts, rather than accounts held by the University; rendering the process of purchasing capital improvements easier and less cumbersome for student managers; and assuming greater responsibility for the training, payment and management of Suites staff and hashers.

Overall, however, I think I can honestly report that the campaign to save Suites has been almost entirely successful. I believe that there are a few big reasons for that, and I’d like to share them with you.

First, the tremendous amount of support Suites has received from the entire student body made an enormous difference. This campaign has awakened me to the remarkable solidarity that communities across campus can share when we really put in the effort – solidarity that proved essential to gaining over 2,500 signatures on a petition to save Suites, solidarity that earned a unanimous statement of support for Suites’ independence from the Undergraduate Senate, and solidarity that showed up in serious force at a protest in White Plaza. Thank you so much for the help, Stanford! We owe you one.

Second, when we speak up forcefully about things we as students really care about, the administration can and often will listen. That is a huge blessing and not one that should be taken lightly. Nate Boswell and Aaron Buzay, after enduring some pretty heated rhetoric from the student side, were happy and willing to sit down with us and work out a satisfactory solution. I’m very grateful for that, and I think they’ll be equally happy to listen the next time this type of situation rolls around. And I’d also like to sincerely thank whoever it was in the higher echelons of the Stanford hierarchy who changed his or her mind and decided to make the decision to keep Suites the way it is. Thank you so much.

And third, there is a lot of work left to be done across campus, and it will be hard work. One of the biggest lessons I took away from this whole experience is that the need for student freedom and independence reaches way beyond Suites. The last five years have brought, as I have mentioned before, a new institutional attitude toward the management of independent residences and kitchens – an attitude that tends to prioritize subcontracting, standardization and risk management over student autonomy, residential freedom and the interests of campus workers.

In some cases, that institutional attitude is entirely justified and warranted. In others, it isn’t.

I won’t be here next year – a moving-on I couldn’t regret more, as I have loved this place since the day I arrived – but I hope that, if our campaign this year did anything, it inspired future students to push back against that trend in ways that are reasonable, informed and enriched by the memory of what Stanford used to be.

This is a pretty special campus. It’s weird, quirky, and thrives on the little things – the little things that can all-too-often get ground up in the gears of administrative machinery.

Let’s keep Stanford special, and keep it free.

Miles would like to thank everyone who helped keep Suites free (that’s a lot of you!). Email him anytime at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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ASSU Elections Recap https://stanforddaily.com/2013/04/15/assu-elections-recap/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/04/15/assu-elections-recap/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 06:23:45 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1076486 The staff at SSFP is tremendously encouraged to see so many (we believe) capable candidates elected to office

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This year’s elections results are in – and they look promising for the cause of student freedom.

As I mentioned in my column two weeks ago, a group of concerned students and alums recently got together and founded the Stanford Student Freedom Project (SSFP) – an organization dedicated to preserving student residential independence and protecting campus workers. We endorsed candidates for this year’s ASSU elections who we felt would best exemplify SSFP’s core mission: improving the quality, frequency and transparency of communication between ResEd/R&DE administrators and students; strengthening student voices in decisions that concern residential life; protecting the jobs and wages of the residential and dining workers who make students’ experience here what it is; and defending student residential independence. By endorsing these candidates, we hoped that we could help avoid future catastrophes like this year’s battle over Suites Dining.

While the numbers aren’t by any means definitive and the chains of causation are difficult to tease out, I think I can say with reasonable confidence that the cause of student freedom made a positive (if small) difference in this year’s election. Here are the numbers; I’m interested to see if my readers agree.

All six Undergraduate Senate candidates endorsed by SSFP – Natasha Patel, Ilya Mouzykantskii, Ben Holston, Ryan Matsumoto, Abby Dow and Hisham Al-Falih – won election, and SSFP-endorsed candidates took four of the top six spots. The Junior and Senior Class President Slates endorsed by SSFP – Take15 and SenYOUR Time – were also elected. And while SSFP endorsed both serious Executive slates in this year’s race – believing firmly that both sets of candidates would do an excellent job representing student interests and concerns – the Ashton-Gallagher victory brings especial encouragement to a coalition energized by Billy’s fiery writing in the service of student independence.

It’s more than possible, of course, that these results were determined by factors far beyond, and more important than, SSFP. Four of SSFP’s six Senate endorsees, for instance, also received the powerful SOCC stamp of approval. And our endorsement panel felt deeply that the candidates we endorsed were capable and effective leaders in their own right; in other words, that they would have succeeded in their campaigns for office whether or not they received the SSFP endorsement (or any endorsements!).

Nonetheless, two of SSFP’s Senate candidates – Ilya, a major force behind the Suites protest in White Plaza, and Ben, a sophomore currently living in Suites whose campaign was inspired by the potential end of Suites Dining (and who came in sixth among all Senate candidates) – were elected without the SOCC endorsement. And Ilya, in fact, received no other endorsements at all.

Whatever the reasons for this year’s results, though, the staff at SSFP is tremendously encouraged to see so many (we believe) capable candidates elected to office. As the conclusion of a negotiated compromise with ResEd nears – and looks very positive – the ASSU election results lend added confidence to our belief that next year will be a banner year for the defense of the little things on campus. Little things like running your own eating environment, fostering close connections with chefs and workers, managing a piece of your own board bill payment, continuing the weird and quirky traditions that set Stanford apart and having a say in the decisions that affect you as students. I’m only sad that I won’t be here to see it.

Thanks for voting, Stanford!

Share your election thoughts and reflections with Miles at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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A few thoughts on the New Yorker piece https://stanforddaily.com/2013/04/10/blog-a-few-thoughts-on-the-new-yorker-piece/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/04/10/blog-a-few-thoughts-on-the-new-yorker-piece/#comments Wed, 10 Apr 2013 22:55:34 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1076327 The "Get Rich U." stereotype simply doesn’t hold up under closer empirical scrutiny.

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East Egg has never quite understood West Egg, and the ancien régime has never quite understood revolution. As with America, so also with Stanford.

As the United States developed into an industrial and economic powerhouse over the course of the 19th century, European intellectual circles responded with a condescending derision born of the fear that the Old World would be overtaken and rendered irrelevant. American scientific and civilizational advance was met with accusations that Americans were uncultured, unduly focused on technological development at the expense of refinement and propriety, and coarsely thumbed their dirty peasant noses at art and literature while heedlessly pursuing monetary gain.

“The American knows nothing,” wrote German poet Nikolaus Lenau in 1833; “he seeks nothing but money.” Heinrich Heine lamented the very existence of America, “that pig-pen of Freedom/Inhabited by boors living in equality.” Heidegger lambasted the U.S. in 1935 as a land of “dreary technological frenzy.” And the American spirit of commerce, fretted Nietzsche, was “spreading a spiritual emptiness over the continent.”

But America, of course, had its Mark Twains and F. Scott Fitzgeralds as surely as it did its Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, celebrated its Thoreaus and Emersons as surely as its Remingtons and Carnegies. Industry, though perhaps the engine of American prosperity, was never this country’s only or highest calling – and those who asserted otherwise undoubtedly missed the bigger picture.

So heads-up, Stanford: Lenau, Heine, Heidegger, and Nietzsche are back in town, and they’re writing for the New Yorker. But this time it’s not America being questioned, it’s our University. And this time, it’s not the dusty old scribblers of Europe secretly wishing they were on the other side of the Atlantic; it’s the East Coast cultural establishment that’s missed the train out West.

In a widely debated April 8th post on the New Yorker blog, Nicholas Thompson argues that Stanford isn’t even really a University; it’s “a giant tech incubator with a football team” where students feel pressured to “drop out in an effort to get rich fast.” Building on the premise established in fellow New Yorker writer Ken Auletta’s controversial portrayal of Stanford as “Get Rich U.,” Mr. Thompson (perhaps unwittingly) joins a venerable intellectual tradition of old money fretting about the energetic nouveau riche, of the archaic guardians of hidebound privilege worrying about the perils of creative destruction. Some snobby New Yorker commenters even jumped on the anti-Stanford bandwagon: “When one lacks personality, charisma, looks and charm,” sniffed one aristocrat who has obviously never had the good fortune to catch a glimpse of PoliSci professor Rob Reich, “a pile of money can be that soft place for them to fall.”

I don’t want to be too hard on Mr. Thompson. “The End of Stanford?” is a short blog piece, not a print article, and having written my own fair share of pieces I now fervently wish had never gone to print, I know that writers can occasionally churn something out to meet deadline that isn’t representative of their outlook as a whole. As a Stanford alum, I’m sure Mr. Thompson means well (I corresponded with him about Mr. Auletta’s piece last year and believe him to be a good guy and loyal alum), and I don’t think his piece quite deserves the level of outrage it’s sparked on campus. I also think he’s driving at a seriously important point: what is, and what should be, the purpose of a Stanford education? Is career success enough? (Hint: it isn’t.) Where and to which departments should greater funding be allocated? Do the majority of startups create meaningful social value, or just diversionary flashes of light on iPhone screens and piles of wasted programming talent?

But despite all this, I think Mr. Thompson’s piece deserves deeper examination, and that it largely misses the mark at which it aims.

First and most basically, the “Get Rich U.” stereotype simply doesn’t hold up under closer empirical scrutiny. Stanford’s Humanities disciplines were ranked #1 in the world by the London Times’ Higher Education Supplement, and as Kristi over at The Unofficial Stanford Blog pointed out, our individual social science/humanities departments (among them Psychology, English, Economics, Political Science, Sociology, and my very own History department) regularly receive top U.S. News and World Report rankings. We just built an elegant $50 million-dollar concert hall, enjoy an absolutely gorgeous (and free to the public) art museum, and Professor of English Ramón Saldívar won the National Humanities Medal last year. I can list Stanford’s MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipients (including a well-deserved win by History professor Richard White), Nobel Prize winners, and former Council of Economic Advisers chairmen off the top of my head. The d.school (and Stanford’s countless interdisciplinary majors) interweave the rigor of technical study with the élan of the social sciences and humanities, all in the service of solving tough problems that defy narrow specialization. (Professor White, for instance, leads a project called the Spatial History Lab that connects “data analysis and complex visualization graphical algorithms with traditional historical sources” in order to examine “historic perceptions of space in the newly settled American West.”) And as for Mr. Thompson’s slight on the intelligence of Stanford student-athletes – well, let’s just not go there.

So it’s clear from the numbers that we’re a lot more than just a “a giant tech incubator with a football team.” But I think there’s a larger, more important problem here: the New Yorker appears to mistake Stanford’s focus on high-return economic ventures for the fundamental core of its strength, rather than one of many results of that strength. That is an immensely reductive error, and Mr. Thompson, as a Stanford alum, must know better. Startups and entrepreneurialism are quite clearly symptoms, rather than the sole cause, of the unique ethos that makes Stanford what it is.

Here are the ingredients of that special sauce that, at least in my experience, makes Stanford singular:

People here tend to be (at least compared to students at other top schools) unorthodox yet hardworking, irreverent but driven, not afraid to make mistakes, adaptable, creative, interdisciplinary, and happier than most to define themselves by alternative metrics of success. (You also, of course, get the pre-med and pre-law kids who plow themselves into a set career path from day one, but a) every major research university has those and b) society needs zealous doctors and lawyers, so more power to you!). Combine that uniquely flexible esprit de corps with brilliant intellects from all over the world and an encompassing economic framework that rewards disruptive innovation, and sure, you often get explosive Silicon Valley success.

But you also get playwrights, hippies, politicians who dream big and think outside the box; you get Band Run; you get the friend of mine who wrote a hilarious senior thesis on the ethics of satire, is now at Yale Law School, and will probably end up a Supreme Court Justice; you get the John Nash-esque math genius who also designs puzzles for the weekly campus humor paper. Our students come from all walks of life and throw themselves into all sorts of tasks, from activism (take a look at any STATIC post) to politics to engineering to computer science (and sometimes everything at once).

All this is part of why I believe so strongly that Stanford’s many oddities and quirks, from student-run dining to runs through the library, need protection. Because Stanford’s success is inextricably entangled with the little things that help keep us weird.

By Ivy standards, Stanford is a young and unfettered school, much as by European standards, America is a young and unfettered nation. Youth brings strength. It disdains outdated traditions, breaks barriers, doesn’t write letters like this one, dreams and is dreamed of, draws the envy of the old and worn. Sure, all that can mean Clinkle; it can also mean Cory Booker.

Stanford is often grouped with the Ivies on the basis of average entering test scores, endowments, influential alumni, research funding. Well, I don’t agree. Stanford moves too fast for encrusting tendrils of ivy to creep over its walls and ensnarl the engines of progress that hum eternally beneath the sandstone. The “College of the West,” wrote David Starr Jordan in 1904, is home to no “dewy-eyed monk,” no “stoop-shouldered grammarian.” The true Stanford scholar, he predicted, would be the “leader of enterprise, the builder of states.”

And in the end, with national unemployment hovering at 7.6% and budget deficits looming ominously, what’s wrong with celebrating ties to industry, technology, progress? What’s intrinsically wrong with pioneering high-caliber online education for those who can’t afford a college degree? We raised a billion dollars last year – more than any university in history, largely thanks to our alumni network’s financial success, much of it sourced from startups and Silicon Valley – and a great deal of that is going to fund medical research and innovation at Stanford Hospitals and Clinics. Money may not be everything, but it sure helps when you’re trying to cure cancer.

So I’d urge you, New Yorker editors, to spend some time rethinking your position. Stanford may not look or act like the traditional university – but no matter what happens, this school will still be here, forging the future. And I’ll be here in the sun, thankful to be a part of this place and forever proud to call myself a member of the Stanford community.

Cheers.

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ASSU Elections and the Stanford Student Freedom Project https://stanforddaily.com/2013/04/01/assu-elections-and-the-stanford-student-freedom-project/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/04/01/assu-elections-and-the-stanford-student-freedom-project/#comments Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:19:14 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1076069 We hope that we as students can help make a constructive case for the educational and formative value of student freedom on campus.

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As ASSU elections season gears up for action over the next two weeks, the coalition of students concerned about this year’s Suites decision has formed into a new student group: the Stanford Student Freedom Project (SSFP).

SSFP will be endorsing candidates for ASSU office this year who share the group’s core mission: improving the quality, frequency and transparency of communication between Residential Education (ResEd) and Residential and Dining Enterprises (R&DE) administrators and students; strengthening student voices in decisions that concern residential life; protecting the jobs and wages of the residential and dining workers who make students’ experience here what it is; and preserving student residential independence. We hope that by establishing clear, substantive and continuous lines of communication between students and residential administration, we can help avoid future catastrophes like this year’s battle over Suites Dining.

As negotiations continue (and look very promising) about the future of Suites Dining, it’s become clear that ResEd administrators aren’t bad people bent on the utter destruction of student life. They are simply people like you and me, doing their jobs as best they can but operating within a larger, Stanford-wide institutional framework, largely put into place over the last five years, whose key values tend to run counter to many students’ wishes.

This larger administrative framework prioritizes risk management over the educational value of letting students make mistakes and learn from them; emphasizes cost-efficiency and economies of scale over student autonomy and small-scale food production; tends to standardize the University experience at the expense of the weird and unusual places that make Stanford student life unique; fears potential lawsuits more than it does the gradual erosion of student-run enterprises and residences; and worries about what could go wrong more than it celebrates what is already going right. ResEd acts as the public voice, but not the architect, of this framework, and Suites is far from the only instance of decisions made according to its metrics.

The members of the newly formed SSFP understand that. We simply hope that as this great University moves forward into a new era of all-time-high fundraising records and all-time-low admissions percentages, we as students can help make a constructive case for the educational and formative value of student freedom on campus.

Stanford – in the classroom, on the athletic field, in the lab or workshop – aims to create individuals who stand out, who lead their fields, who break new ground. The University aims to shape minds whose research pushes back boundaries, who refuse to accept the adequacy of the status quo, who speak up when injustices affect the people around us and who take the hard path of leadership rather than blend quietly into the crowd – and, as Leland and Jane Stanford put it, “grapple successfully with the practicalities of life.”

In short, Stanford, apparently in every area except residential life, is all about taking big risks that might not pay off, thinking outside the existing box and not being afraid to fail. This University was founded by a man who invested with no guarantee of success and risked everything to build a school that looked and acted differently from any other.

The members of SSFP think that this admirable mission can be furthered and enhanced by a residential experience that lets students take the lead in managing their own lives; gives them the latitude to explore modes of living outside traditional dorm life; acquaints them with the practical difficulties of managing a budget, filing paperwork and scrubbing floors; asks students practical ethical questions like “Are you willing to pay a little more on your board bill if it means your chefs have the opportunity to keep their jobs and earn a higher wage?”; and allows students a voice in the decisions that affect them.

We are hopeful that students can work with, rather than against, ResEd and R&DE in fulfilling this mission and that these can be goals we all share. If this last month’s negotiations are any indication, we should be hopeful about that.

I’ll have more specifics for you about SSFP’s platform and policy positions in next Monday’s paper. Until then, we’ll be working hard to endorse candidates for next week’s ASSU elections: one President/Vice-President Executive slate, a maximum of 10 Senate candidates and one class president slate per class that best demonstrate the ability to keep student life independent and our workers treated well. We look forward to working with those candidates!

Contact Miles with any questions or comments at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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Suites Dining Week 3: The Row https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/13/suites-dining-week-3-the-row/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/13/suites-dining-week-3-the-row/#comments Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:40:18 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075876 As Suites continues to move forward in negotiations, let’s remember that the Row is facing similar challenges and difficulties.

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Suites residents and managers are now in their second week of negotiations with ResEd, and while nothing is final yet and there are many details left to be worked out, signs are positive that an agreeable solution can be reached that can both address the concerns of the University and protect Suites chefs and traditions.

As of this writing, there are no longer any outside contractors, including SOS, being considered to run Suites Dining; Suites staff are drafting a revised business model to present to the University that preserves the current chefs and student managerial independence while also establishing a Board of Directors to address University concerns about accountability and continuity; ResEd administrators Aaron Buzay and Nate Boswell have been very helpful in working with students; and negotiations are on a clear timetable for solution by the time the Draw rolls around. More updates to follow in the coming weeks.

As negotiations continue, however, it’s crucial to remember that this isn’t just about Suites. The Suites Dining case is merely one symptom of a much broader set of problems that has ramifications for this entire campus.

First and most narrowly, residents on the Row are not receiving a quality and volume of dining services commensurate with the board bill they pay. For the same board bill cost Suites residents pay for 17 meals per week – as I and others have noted multiple times – students on the Row get 10.

That is, first of all, a very basic equity issue. Absent a compelling reason why students on the Row should receive fewer meals for the same price, this is simply unfair.

This inefficiency is no fault of the chefs and kitchen staff on the Row, who (from personal conversations with both chefs and students) enjoy close relationships with Row residents and do the best they can with the resources (and most likely lower wages) they’ve been given. It is the fault of the larger financial model the University has put into place on the Row – a for-profit model, run by SOS, that appears unable to deliver the same volume of food service provided by a nonprofit, student-run Suites organization without high overhead or a profit margin to sustain.

It is the Suites financial model – a nonprofit model that allows each House (in consultation with ResEd and R&DE) direct ownership over its students’ money – that should be exported to the Row, not the other way around. Experience and data show that with competent management in place, a nonprofit model can deliver more food for the same price, as well as pay professional kitchen staff higher wages.

And from a purely moral, rather than economic, perspective, it seems wrong to force student money – much of which comes from University financial aid and parents’ contributions – to go toward paying a for-profit third-party company. Students should, of course, be free to spend their discretionary funds at dining companies like Subway and Panda Express. But requiring them to pay into an inefficient corporate-run dining model, with no ability to opt out, is both an ineffective and immoral decision.

As Suites continues to move forward in negotiations, let’s remember that the Row – and other areas of campus I’ll talk about in the coming weeks – are facing similar challenges and difficulties. We’re all in this together.

Contact Miles at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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Suites Dining, Week Two https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/04/suites-dining-week-two/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/03/04/suites-dining-week-two/#comments Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:06:01 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075518 We need to fundamentally change the ways in which students and ResEd/R&DE administrators communicate on this campus.

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In the last week, there has been a colossal campus and alumni response to ResEd’s proposed takeover of Suites Dining. After reading through the literally hundreds of emails and Facebook messages I’ve received – from Chi Theta Chi residents, from the co-ops, from students living on the Row, from old Suites alumni who remember the way things used to be – we’ve begun to form a coalition.

A coalition of students who know that Suites needs to be kept independent and its four loyal chefs rehired. A coalition of students who know ResEd needs long-term structural reform, not a short-term patch. And a coalition of students ready to fundamentally change the ways in which students and ResEd/R&DE administrators communicate on this campus.

We’ve split into two working groups: a group focused on Suites Dining for the short term, and a group focused on campus-wide solutions for the long term. I’ll start with Suites.

This Tuesday, Suites managers (and, for the first time ever, actual Suites residents) will begin discussions with ResEd administrators Aaron Buzay and Nate Boswell about the future of Suites Dining. We welcome the opportunity to talk, and our group has some clear goals with which we’ll go into tomorrow’s discussions. Here they are:

1) Rehiring the current four chefs – Tony, Frank, Dennis, and Caroline – at their current compensation level.

2) Maintaining complete student ownership and leadership of finances, hiring and hashing  – including the preservation of a permanent student CEO and CFO.

3) Refusing to compromise the quality and quantity of food provided and continuing to serve 17 high-quality meals per week to Suites residents.

4) Ending inefficient and costly ResEd restrictions on the way that Suites student managers can spend their own money. Most notably, we’d like to see an end to ResEd’s practice of earmarking an excessively high percentage of the Suites Dining budget for food purchases only. Since Suites chefs tend to utilize food efficiently and effectively, every Suites eating club currently has a huge budget surplus – currently a total of about $35,000 – sitting unused, restricted for use on food Suites doesn’t need to purchase.

That unused surplus is money wasted; at the end of the year, ResEd will sweep those accounts dry. That money could be used much more efficiently – for higher chef pay, for club improvements, or simply as an end-of-year refund to Suites residents. Let’s free it up.

5) Reducing the high cost of housing maintenance charged by R&DE and administrative overhead charged by ResEd. From the 2011-2012 to 2012-2013 academic year alone, Housing (a division of R&DE) raised its portion of the Suites board bill by $300 per student per year. If, as Boswell diplomatically suggested in ResEd’s official response last week, Suites residents are going to have to “ask beloved chefs difficult questions about their compensation packages,” we feel it’s only fair that R&DE and ResEd administrators start asking themselves those same difficult questions about their budgets.

We understand that the University has interests in maintaining oversight and ensuring that food service operations are conducted according to University policy. We have several specific solutions that we think would benefit both Suites Dining and ResEd administrators.

1) Longer training periods for student managers, a clear and consistent training manual for student staff and contracts with chefs and GCDS that last longer than the current one-year term. We understand that the high rate of turnover in student leadership has been a concern for ResEd, and establishing firmer lines of continuity from year to year should allay those concerns.

2) More sustained and reliable oversight from a strengthened Suites Dining Board of Directors, composed of former managers, CEOs, CFOs and students.

3) A clear delineation between the tasks for which ResEd is responsible and those for which GCDS is responsible in order to permanently clear up the confusion that has plagued relations between GCDS and ResEd for the past several years.

We hope that, as discussions begin, these are goals we can work with ResEd to help meet.

But our coalition also knows that, without broader structural reforms to the way ResEd and students interact on this campus, saving Suites Dining will merely be a surface-level fix to a deeper underlying problem. That’s where our long-term campus-wide working group comes in, and here are a few of our goals.

1) Establish a central online repository of information for use by future students. One of the main problems facing unhappy students has been a lack of institutional memory; students move on and graduate, the new freshmen never know Chi Theta Chi and Suites and the old Toyon Eating Clubs even used to be independent, and each year brings with it a gradual erosion of student freedom. We want to build a site where students can look back and see that their current problem – whatever it may be – is part of a broader interlocking system of past parallels and patterns.

2) Build an online performance review system for administrators and student managers, similar to Courserank in appearance and function. We have student reviews for professors, TAs and classes – why not have one for administrators, student Financial Managers and student Kitchen Managers?

Much as Courserank helps excellent professors stand out with five-star rankings and approving student comments, a new online performance review system could help top-notch administrators – of which Stanford is lucky to have many – stand out from the crowd, while administrators who communicate poorly or attempt to fire long-standing chefs are held accountable. Ranking criteria, from one though five stars: Clarity, Responsiveness, and Transparency.

3) Establish a student advisory panel within ResEd that has real power and represents student interests as a permanent nexus point between students and ResEd.

We have more long-term goals in the works, and I’ll share them with you in the weeks to come. Until then, thanks for reading, and keep up the fight!

Contact Miles at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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A Response to Nate Boswell and ResEd https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/27/a-response-to-nate-boswell-and-resed/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/27/a-response-to-nate-boswell-and-resed/#comments Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:11:27 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075369 Boswell’s response in yesterday’s Daily provided few additional answers to students’ questions. I’d like to respectfully set the record straight.

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Note: To view Boswell’s original statement, to which this piece is a reply, click here.

Effective now, and until Suites officially remains independent, this weekly column will now be an update on the situation at Suites Dining.

Before I continue, I would like to formally apologize for some of the fliers distributed at the Save Suites protest two days ago. I’ll be very specific: I apologize for the Zac Sargeant/Nick Peters “brothers-in-crime” flier that was distributed. It was over-the-top and justifiably received negative feedback from attendees. As the de facto organizer of the event, I take full responsibility for not personally screening all the fliers beforehand to check them for appropriateness and respect. It will not happen again.

Second, a big thank-you to those of you who showed up – including ResEd Associate Dean Nate Boswell, who courageously stepped up and took a lot of flak from an angry crowd (and from me marching around with a megaphone). That takes a certain willingness to engage with student discontent, and I (and others present at the protest) appreciated that very much.

Boswell’s response in yesterday’s Daily, unfortunately, provided few additional answers to students’ questions, and the answers we did get were misleading. I’d like to respectfully set the record straight.

First, Mr. Boswell claimed that Suites is “more expensive by $600-per-student-per-year than what students in most residences pay for board.” That claim is misleading because it compares apples to oranges; the cheaper residences to which Boswell referred are conventional freshman-style dorms, which have always been cheaper but do not afford their residents the autonomy, managerial experience and living environment that are the reasons Stanford developed independent living in the first place. Suites board bill costs are actually, as I pointed out in my original article, nearly identical to those of other similarly independent student-run houses on campus, and we provide more food for the same price ($5,999 per student per year for 17 meals per week in Suites, $5,992 for 10 meals per week on the corporate-managed Row.)

Second, Mr. Boswell claimed that there are three lawsuits pending against Suites’ Governor’s Corner Dining Societies (GCDS) and the University. That claim is also misleading and rhetorically inflates the volume of legal actions actually ongoing; all three lawsuits were filed by the same person at the same time for the same set of reasons. And as his letter to the editor today demonstrates, that one person unequivocally opposes ResEd’s decision to use his lawsuit as leverage against Suites Dining student management.

Furthermore, eliminating any entity which has a lawsuit filed against it, regardless of the lawsuit’s merit (about which I am legally forbidden from commenting), seems to make little sense. I can talk about lawsuits against the many third-party entities that operate on this campus all day long. Why is it only Suites Dining, the long-standing student nonprofit with an otherwise clean record, to whom the “a lawsuit has been filed, therefore we’re automatically getting rid of you” standard is applied?

Third, Boswell did not mention that, as I documented in my original article, ResEd’s ostensible health and safety concerns are unsupported by the actual data.

Other than that, Boswell didn’t give me any other substantive points to refute, so I’m done defending Suites’ record – a record that doesn’t seem to need any more defending. But besides the absence of factual data to justify the Suites takeover, there’s something else missing from Boswell’s reply: an apology.

There has been no apology for regularly delaying payments to vendors for weeks, causing them to complain to Suites student managers.

There has been no apology for forgetting to pay Bollard’s water bill in September and only reimbursing Frank for paying that bill four months later, in January.

There has been no apology for delaying the reimbursement of a club manager for his stereo purchase for over a month and a half.

There has been no apology from R&DE for failing to fix the infrastructure for which they are responsible – a well-documented list of failures about which I could go into great detail (email me).

There has been no apology for failing to pay Suites hashers for over two months – many of whom, from personal experience and conversation, needed the money very much and very quickly.

There has been no apology from ResEd Assistant Director Zac Sargeant for barging into and shutting down, in blatant violation of Stanford’s own Living Wage Policy, a private meeting of workers trying to organize for higher wages from his brother-in-law’s company.

There has been no apology for completely failing to notify Suites residents of ResEd’s decision to end student management, for failing to consult them in any way about the dismissal of their long-serving chefs before making that decision, or for attempting to make that decision behind closed doors and only discussing it at all after a newspaper exposé, 2,500 petition signatures, and a 120-person mass march.

There has been no apology for telling a reporter false information – that there were multiple fires at Suites, for example, when there were not.

There has been no apology for failing to send Student Affairs Officer Tiffany Taylor, who is supposed to supervise Suites regularly, to visit all year.

There has been no apology for emptying the Suites Eating Clubs carryover fund, used to pay for emergency chef health benefits and capital expenditures, without any explanation or warning, causing managers’ summer checks to bounce.

We as students deserve at least some semblance of an apology from ResEd, because these are not the high professional standards we as Stanford students have come to expect and enjoy from our excellent Stanford administrators, the vast majority of whom do wonderful, high-quality work on the job every day.

But instead of an apology from ResEd, we got an attempt at a cover-up – an attempt to make it seem as though ResEd’s mistakes had never happened. The manager who purchased the stereo in December finally got his reimbursement check this weekend – with no apology for the delay. Tiffany Taylor was finally spotted at Suites after a year’s near-complete absence. And Suites managers have suddenly begun receiving helpful emails from R&DE – with overly friendly emoticons in them, no less.

It isn’t Suites’ residents turn to explain our actions anymore. It’s your turn now, ResEd and R&DE, to explain your actions to the student body.

Suites residents and managers know we have responsibilities as students who want to live and work independently – responsibilities to keep a clean living environment, to pay our chefs a living wage, to deliver high-quality food. Suites managers have – as any look at the specific data will tell you – met those responsibilities.

You have responsibilities too, ResEd. Responsibilities to pay your bills on time, to tell the truth, to adhere to Stanford policy and to communicate clearly with students.

We hope that as we move forward toward a solution with which all parties can be happy – a solution we all want and can agree upon – ResEd keeps those responsibilities in mind too.

Contact Miles at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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The end of an era at Suites Dining https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/21/1075160/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/21/1075160/#comments Thu, 21 Feb 2013 12:00:36 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075160 Stanford's decision to end Suites Dining's student management has prompted anger and disbelief from Suites residents and alumni.

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The end of an era at Suites Dining
Chef Frank Hassan, shown here cooking in his beloved Bollard Eating Club, is set to lose his job at the end of this academic year. (MEHMET INONU/The Stanford Daily)

This is the first part of a long-form article on the University’s decision to end student management at the Suites Eating Clubs. Click here to view parts two, three, and four.

Frank Hassan has been head chef in Suites’ Bollard Eating Club for seven years, and he specializes in making two things: an incredible breakfast and memories.

It’s the former you’ll get if you walk into Bollard between 7:30 and 9:15 a.m. weekday mornings, where dozens of students chatter under an enormous banner – erected by unknown admirers at some point over the past decade – featuring Frank’s beaming face and the club’s informal title: “The Bollard Empire.”

But it’s the memories that last, and over the three years I’ve eaten and worked at Suites, I’ve picked up quite a few: Frank volunteering to wake up two hours early to have breakfast ready for the track team by 5:30 a.m. the days we left early for out-of-state meets; Frank and I watching the Mubarak regime fall on the Bollard TV while he offered keen political observations on his native Egypt; the way he enthusiastically greets every male student with a heavily accented “my main man!” and every female with a “good morning, beautiful”; Frank giving my mom a big hug when I brought her to Bollard to visit during my junior year.

I’ll take those memories with me when I finally leave Stanford this spring. It’s hard enough knowing I may never come back, but this year is an especially difficult one in which to say goodbye. That’s because next fall – for the first time in eight years – Frank Hassan may not be coming back either.

***

Residential Education (ResEd) has four offices and 39 professional employees, and the ResEd Central Office is located on the second floor of Tresidder Union, in Suite 9.

Ever since ResEd first assumed responsibility for paying Suites Dining’s student workers in the fall of 2010, I’d been visiting the Central Office every few weeks to pick up my paycheck for cleaning the kitchens. I needed the money and I kept on coming back, so when I walk up the spiral staircase and through the clear glass door, I smile and wave to Alyssa Ray, the Central Office’s friendly and familiar administrative assistant.

This time, however, I’m not here to pick up a paycheck. I’m here to meet with Dean of ResEd Deborah Golder, ResEd Associate Dean Nate Boswell ’99 M.A. ’09 and ResEd Director of Operations Aaron Buzay.

On Jan. 30, Boswell and Buzay sent an email to ResEd’s Suites student email list informing all residents that next year – for the first time since Suites Dining was founded in 1982 – students will no longer run Suites’ four eating clubs. They will be replaced, due to what the email described as “health and safety concerns” and “a pressing desire to lower the board rate,” with an outside corporation.

Avanti, Beefeaters, Bollard and Middle Earth have served food to Suites residents six days a week for the past 30 years under student management, which is currently provided by the student-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit Governor’s Corner Dining Societies (GCDS). One chef runs each eating club and is assisted by a student CEO and CFO who oversee all four clubs, eight student managers (two per eating club) and a team of paid student “hashers” (that’s me) who clean the kitchens before and after meals.

Frank has cooked in Bollard for seven years. Dennis has been head chef in Beefeaters for 22. Tony has led Avanti for 18 years. And Caroline is new to Middle Earth this year, having recently moved to the area with her husband and two kids.

As part of the move to corporate management, the chefs’ contracts are not being renewed.

I want to know why, and it’s the chefs I’m thinking about as I shake hands and sit down with Boswell, Buzay and Golder.

The conversation begins pleasantly enough, although they tend to use a lot of bureaucratically vague sentences with the words “moving forward,” “sustainable” and “conversation” thrown in. But something Golder says about the selection process for the new, non-student contractor rubs me the wrong way.

“We always involve students in decision-making,” she says.

This is news to me. In fact, the first time ResEd notified all Suites residents that they were considering replacing student leadership with a corporate contractor was when Boswell and Buzay sent the email informing residents that the decision had already been made. I decide to point this out.

“How have you involved students in decision-making up to this point? I mean, besides the managers, have you gotten feedback from students at Suites on this?”

Buzay looks confused.

“You mean have we run, like, a… a survey?”

“No, I mean what have you done? I know you haven’t run a formal survey, but have you talked to students at Suites about this change?”

“So we sent out… we sent out the email to the Suites community…”

“Right. So up until the point you sent the email, though, you hadn’t talked to any students in Suites besides the CEO and CFO?”

There’s more talk of “moving forward” and “sustainable business,” from which I conclude that the answer to my initial question is “no.”

Fortunately, a survey that asked Suites residents if they approved or disapproved of the proposed change had been sent out to the Suites email list – just not by ResEd. I know, because I created it. It took me approximately five minutes to draft.

149 Suites residents answered the poll, and 143 of them – 95.97 percent – disapproved of ResEd’s decision to contract food services to an outside vendor and not to renew the current chefs’ contracts.

The end of an era at Suites Dining
(LORENA RINCON-CRUZ/The Stanford Daily)

I had made a comments section available on the survey form, and I’m interested to know what Boswell, Buzay and Golder think of the student opinions they never solicited. I decide to read a few representative student responses aloud.

“Number one: ‘I am very disappointed with the decision from ResEd to take over contracting and management of Suites Dining. I do not like that our chefs are being treated in this manner. They have put years of dedication and service into their jobs and Stanford.’

“Number two: ‘As far as I know, this decision from ResEd was reached with no consultation from the general student community in Suites, which is undemocratic, unaccountable and unacceptable.’

“Number three: ‘The students who run Beefeaters and Dennis provide the best dining service found on campus. All the outside corporations that I have seen on campus come in sub-par to the standards at the Eating Clubs, and I think this is a bureaucratic and stupid decision.’

“What would you say to that?” I prompt the ResEd administrators.

There’s a very, very long silence.

Continue to part 2

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The end of an era at Suites Dining, part II https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/21/1075163/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/21/1075163/#comments Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:59:35 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075163 The rationales put forward by Residential Education as grounds for ending Suites Dining's student management appear questionable and incomplete.

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This is the second part of a long-form article on the University’s decision to end student management at the Suites Eating Clubs. Click here to view parts one, three, and four.

When I finally walk out of Tresidder Union Suite 9 an hour later, the first thing I do is drive home, sit down at my computer and start writing. I separate my document into three headings: board bill costs, health and safety, and financial mismanagement.

Board bill costs

In more than an hour of conversation, the trio of ResEd administrators had repeatedly cited Suites’ high board bill as a pressing reason to seek a less expensive corporate vendor to provide food. But a closer inspection of University financial records indicates that this justification makes little sense.

To begin with, the Suites board bill is no higher than that of the Row houses, which are currently managed by private contractor Student Organized Services, Inc. (SOS) – making it difficult to see how changing to a private contractor will lower the board rate.

The problem, however, goes deeper: the University, not GCDS, is itself responsible for creating the problem it now insists upon stepping in to fix.

Prior to 2007, the quarterly Suites board bill was among the lowest on campus at, according to former GCDS CEO Leah Sawyer ’07, approximately $1,200 per student per quarter. Suites Dining also provided more meals per week – 17 – than the more expensive Row houses, which typically provided 10.

In 2008, however, the University combined the Suites Dining Society bill – which covers food – with the University Housing bill, which covers housing maintenance costs.

Since then, Student Housing – a division of Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE) – has dramatically raised its prices, forcing up the total costs that appear on the Suites board bill. From the 2011-12 academic year to the 2012-13 academic year alone, Housing raised its prices by 25 percent. Housing maintenance now takes up just under a quarter of Suites residents’ room and board expenses at approximately $500 per resident per quarter.

ResEd’s attempt to fix Suites’ rising board rate made matters even worse. According to former GCDS CEO J.T. Sullivan ’11, ResEd responded to Housing-driven Suites board bill inflation by setting an overall room and board price cap of $2,000 per student per quarter. Since ResEd has little to no power to limit the price charged by R&DE, however, the Housing portion of the board bill kept climbing – resulting in smaller and smaller percentages of student money going to GCDS for food and a budget crunch for GCDS managers.

The budgetary strains caused by ResEd and R&DE were exacerbated, moreover, by additional overhead costs imposed by the University. In 2009 – a year after the Housing bill was merged with the Suites Dining bill – ResEd began auditing and regulating GCDS financial operations. With ResEd’s heightened involvement came two additional categories on Suites students’ board bill: “Admin” and “Overhead.”

Prior to the beginning of ResEd’s takeover in 2009, Suites was run entirely by students – they collected students’ board bills, paid chefs and hashers and even distributed room keys. But ever since ResEd stepped in in 2009, students have been paying ResEd administrators to reread Suites financial documents, incurring overhead costs that further drive up the board bill total.

Those total costs were $161.57 per student in 2011-12. Multiplied by the roughly 260 students who live in Suites, the total amount of overhead paid last year to ResEd administrators to do the work student financial managers formerly did themselves is about $42,000 – more student money, as a 2011-12 Suites financial manager (FM) I interviewed put it, “disappearing down the black hole that is Residential Education.”

According to Avanti chef Anton “Tony” Dietz, who has 19 years of experience in food services administration, any outside contractor is likely to levy additional administrative fees amounting to between eight and 11 percent of Suites’ total budget. Suites’ budget in 2011-12 totaled approximately $1.1 million. Assuming administrative charges at the typical corporate rate, Suites residents next year will be shelling out an additional $100,000 in surcharges.

Health and Safety

During that interview in Suite 9, Boswell, Buzay and Golder repeatedly advanced student health and safety as a “considerable concern” but failed to mention almost any specific instances of health and safety violations. The only specific evidence Golder offered was a claim that multiple fires had recently broken out at Suites.

“If we weren’t fixing all the fires that come,” exclaimed Golder at one point, “they [GCDS] wouldn’t be getting by.”

There was, in fact, only one fire at Suites recently, not “all the fires that come,” and it was caused by two inexperienced Suites residents – not student managers – using the Avanti kitchen to boil a large pot of hot oil on a Saturday evening in May 2012 in a disastrous attempt to fry empanadas for Cinco de Mayo. Fortunately, a chef was hosting a free movie-and-food night for residents on his day off in a neighboring club – the kind of thing Suites chefs tend to do. He and a student manager immediately rushed in and put out the blaze with the club’s fire extinguisher, which GCDS had properly placed according to fire code.

No outside contractor, short of completely barring student access to the kitchen, could have prevented that fire, and switching to a corporate vendor will do nothing to prevent the possibility of similar fires in the future.

Suites has a similar record in other areas of health and safety. I was hashing in Beefeaters on Jan. 15 when the Santa Clara County public health inspector came to visit this quarter. She left just as I finished cleaning, having found zero health violations. The other three clubs were also inspected that day, with two violations found in Avanti, two in Bollard and four in Middle Earth (one of which was caused by Housing’s failure to repair the salad bar). Suites’ average number of violations was two per kitchen, and none were classified as “major.”

The average number of food inspection violations for Row houses – which are run by exactly the sort of contractor that will be moving into Suites next year – is 3.83 per house. Ten locations on campus, including Row houses managed by corporate contractor SOS, were found responsible for “major” violations.

Records of documented Suites health violations in the past support this year’s results. After health inspectors visited Suites in the spring of 2012, GCDS’ then-CEO Sullivan met with Boswell and Buzay to determine who was responsible for the 26 reported violations. Almost all of the violations were minor – among the worst appears to have been some mold in an ice machine. Other violations included a broken paper towel dispenser, the ice scooper not being in its plastic cup and the cleaning solution being too strong.

Boswell, Buzay and Sullivan collectively assigned responsibility for each violation to one of three groups: University Housing, GCDS, and ResEd and/or its student manager employees (ResEd now pays student managers, while GCDS’ pay to chefs and its CEO and CFO remains an entirely separate category). Of the 26 total violations, Housing was found responsible for 10 – including the mold in the ice machine – and ResEd and/or its student manager employees were found to have committed 16.

GCDS – the student nonprofit that ResEd now wants to eliminate – was held responsible for zero.

Financial Mismanagement

In our interview, Golder had been especially emphatic about student mismanagement of money. Arguing that students had “run [Suites] into the ground” amid “years of mismanagement,” she claimed that “the only reason they [GCDS] are getting by is because we’re supporting them, frankly. And if we weren’t, they wouldn’t be getting by.”

According to two financial managers who worked in Suites prior to ResEd’s takeover in 2009, GCDS had never gone over budget or had to borrow money from the University. When I pressed her, Golder offered only one piece of evidence to support her assertion.

According to Golder, ResEd had advanced GCDS “tens of thousands of dollars” from ResEd’s own budget that has to be paid back at the end of the 2012-13 academic year. But this – the only evidence ResEd has provided thus far of student financial mismanagement – is, according to student managers, flat-out wrong.

Suites managers say ResEd allowed GCDS advance access to money from its own budget this year – in other words, Suites spent some of its own money ahead of schedule. No money needs to be paid back to ResEd at the end of the year. There is no loan for students to pay off.

Boswell and Buzay also noted that, prior to ResEd involvement, GCDS lacked a recognized tax ID number and liability insurance. That much is true. But former GCDS CEO Sullivan oversaw the 2011 purchase of a liability policy valued at $2 million and incorporated GCDS as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, meeting ResEd’s requirements.

Moreover, several student managers reported that ResEd officials have argued that the four Suites chefs are overpaid. But last year’s chef contract reveals that an academic year’s pay for a chef at Suites in 2011-12 was $51,182. That’s hardly a gold mine in the Bay Area – let alone Palo Alto – especially since ResEd, according to Avanti chef Tony, already mandated a wage freeze for Suites chefs three years ago, eliminating the annual cost-of-living increase formerly granted by GCDS.

In any case, Suites chefs deserve compensation appropriate for their skill level and experience. Tony was born in Germany in 1946

Tony Dietz, at home in the Avanti Kitchen.
Tony Dietz, at home in the Avanti Kitchen. (MEHMET INONU/The Stanford Daily)

and began his apprenticeship to a baker at age 14. Since then, he has catered White House functions on the top floor of Washington Hospital Center with President Jimmy Carter in attendance, personally overseen food production for the 1977 Hollywood release party of the original “Star Wars,” crafted all the food for the set of “The Love Boat” and worked at elite San Francisco hotels from the Hilton to the Fairmont to the Stanford Court Renaissance.

He was hired as an executive chef for the Saga Corporation by Ernie Arbuckle ’33 MBA ’36 – after whom the Graduate School of Business’ Arbuckle Dining Pavilion is named – and taught at the California Culinary Academy. He shook hands with Princess Grace of Monaco and Charlton Heston and catered parties for Ronald Reagan’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Michael Boskin, who is currently a Stanford economics professor.

That’s Tony. He’s been working in Avanti for 18 years, and ResEd is not going to renew his contract. And don’t even get me started on Caroline, Dennis and Frank.

If there’s anything else that GCDS has done wrong, ResEd wouldn’t tell me. The three administrators didn’t even seem to know how changing to corporate management would theoretically solve the nonexistent problems they think they’ve identified. When I pressed Golder on how exactly ResEd knows switching to an outside contractor will lower the board rate, improve health and safety or enhance the quality of management, her response was simple: “We don’t.”

***

When I walk in to see Frank right after breakfast, he’s already busy preparing lunch, and I already know what he’s going to say.

“Miles, my main man, how we doin’?”

As we chat, I notice that he’s posted Renée Donovan ’15’s recent Stanford Daily profile of him to the kitchen’s refrigerator door. Someone has drawn little stars around it. During our conversation, two students drop in to cheerfully give Frank more copies. He adds them to a stack he’s gradually accumulating on the table.

Frank has been told nothing by ResEd officials other than that his contract will not be renewed at the end of the year. When I ask how he feels about the possibility of losing his job, he abruptly stops chopping vegetables and looks directly at me.

“Listen to this. I enjoy when I come here in the morning and I cook for everybody. I feel more happy than… Listen, they are happy with me.”

“Everybody loves you, Frank.”

“And I love them more than what they love me. Believe me. I swear to God. You know, that’s why I come so early in the morning.”

Frank seems to care only about his students, and he doesn’t want to talk about himself or his problems. I have to ask several times before he finally opens up about how hard this will be for him.

“I’m now going to be 59 years old. How I save money for my retirement? Do you understand me?”

I did. Frank had started his retirement planning a ways back, and every time I came in for breakfast, I would ask which new place he had in mind. Hawaii and the South Seas were the dream, or maybe the California coast. But on $51,182 a year, Arizona made more sense, and it was Arizona we had talked about the most.

“This make my life…” He searches for the right word. “Worried. Now they come over here, they cut my salary, and they ask me, ‘Be smiling.’ How can I be smiling when I am worried about my rent?”

I don’t know how to answer that one. While I’m busy thinking of something to say, Frank shuffles over to the chef’s closet. “Let me show you something, Miles.”

He unfolds a single sheet of white paper and hands it to me.

“Dear Mr. Hassan,” the paper reads, “Because of the increased cost of maintenance, taxes, insurance, utilities, we must reluctantly inform you that your rent is being increased by $100.00 per month. Effective 01/01/2013 your new monthly rent will be $1,800.00.”

Frank shrugs. “The landlord, he wants his money.”

Overpaid. Right.

But Frank only truly begins to look worried when he starts, hesitantly, to talk about Student Organized Services.

Continue to part 3

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The end of an era at Suites Dining, part III https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/21/1075165/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/21/1075165/#comments Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:58:03 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075165 Prospective outside vendor Student Organized Services has extensive personal and professional ties to Residential Education.

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This is the third part of a long-form article on the University’s decision to end student management at the Suites Eating Clubs. Click here to view parts one, two, and four.

Student Organized Services, Inc. (SOS), contrary to its name and friendly-looking website, is not, and never has been, run by students. The for-profit, privately held company, headquartered in Redwood City, currently operates food-related labor services for the entire Row – a job contracted to it by ResEd.

SOS’s CEO is Nick Peters ’94, who worked for ResEd before founding SOS in September of 1994. In 1995, Peters became CEO of another company: Stanford Eating Clubs (SEC), which took over management of the old student-run Toyon Eating Clubs while SOS began to expand, house by house, onto the Row.

In 2005, Zac Sargeant took the helm at SEC as its CEO and managing director. He was its last CEO – the formerly student-run Toyon Eating Clubs, founded in 1892, shut down in 2009 after 117 years of continuous operation.

In 2008 – according to his résumé, while still serving as CEO of SEC – Sargeant was hired as Assistant Director of ResEd, where he works to this day. His office is just down the hallway from the boardroom in Tresidder Union where I had my interview with Boswell, Buzay and Golder.

For one year, Sargeant simultaneously worked for a company that receives University dining contracts and for the Stanford office responsible for selecting dining contractors.

Sargeant is also Peters’ brother-in-law.

SOS' old website, since deleted, shows Peters and Sargeant side by side. Sargeant now works for ResEd.
SOS’ old website, since deleted, shows Peters and Sargeant side by side. Sargeant now works for ResEd.

 

According to Tony, SOS has repeatedly bid to administer Suites Dining since 1995, the year Peters assumed control at SEC and Tony’s first year as head chef in Avanti. GCDS student leadership felt comfortable running things on their own, according to Tony, and refused to contract their own jobs out to SOS.

Sawyer, the former student manager and GCDS CEO who worked at Suites from 2005 to 2007, remembered Peters as a shadowy figure whose precise source of authority was unclear but who frequently attempted to wield that authority as a bludgeon against student independence.

“I don’t even remember why Nick Peters was an authority to us, but he was,” she recalled. “Mostly he was just trying to tell us ‘no.’ Special dinners we were going to put on, what we could and couldn’t do with our money… but he wasn’t our boss, so I don’t think we really took him all that seriously.”

According to Sawyer, Peters clearly disliked Suites’ tradition of student freedom but lacked the power to do anything about it.

“We just always knew him as some guy who was clearly uncomfortable with us having authority as students,” she remembered. “But at that time, he didn’t have the authority to actually tell us what to do, so we were always just kind of annoyed by him.”

Colin Wessells ’08 M.S. ’12 Ph.D. ’12 – who said the business experience he gained as financial manager in Avanti from 2006 to 2008 eventually helped him become CEO of his own Silicon Valley startup – has a clear memory of Peters: as a businessman who repeatedly offered the clubs a bad deal.

“Every year or so he would come over to Suites and see if, now that there was new student management there, they would be interested in partnering with SOS,” Wessells recalled.

Student managers, however, weren’t buying it.

“They would look over the materials and documents that SOS would present, and usually it wouldn’t be a good deal,” Wessells noted. “Typically, the terms that [Peters] would be offering would be, ‘Okay, you guys are going to keep managing the clubs, but we’re going to provide oversight – and a fee.’”

According to Wessells, that proposed administrative fee typically amounted to between $100 and $200 per resident per quarter, on top of the existing board bill. Multiplied by the roughly 260 students in Suites, SOS’s bid for service, if successful, would have netted Peters’ firm between $78,000 and $156,000 in student money every year.

“For a long, long time,” Wessells concluded, “SOS and the University were interested in taking over Governor’s Corner.”

But a long tradition of student independence, and a lack of concrete administrative power over Suites Dining, stood in their way.

Then Peters’ brother-in-law joined ResEd, and the balance of power began to shift.

Conflict of interest?

It was not until 2009 – the year after ResEd hired Sargeant as its assistant director – that, according to chefs and former student managers, the threat of an SOS takeover became realistic.

First ResEd began regulating Suites’ financial operations. Administrators then assumed control of paying student hashers – and began paying them less. Then ResEd cut a managerial position from each club, reducing the total number of student managers from 12 to the current eight.

When chefs and managers, fearful of a complete SOS takeover, finally discovered the relationship between Sargeant and Peters in the spring of 2011, ResEd denied the existence of any conflict of interest.

But oddly for a situation in which ResEd claimed that there was no conflict of interest, Sargeant – who had initially served as GCDS’s primary contact in ResEd – suddenly stopped showing up to meetings with GCDS managers, and the websites connecting Sargeant to Peters were erased (but, with a little effort, can still be resurrected via archive.org.)

ResEd eventually abandoned its attempt to replace student leadership with an outside contractor, and Boswell admitted that Suites managers had “worked diligently over the course of the summer to meet all relevant, upgraded University requirements.” Captained by Sullivan, then the GCDS CEO, Suites managers won their right to remain independent. Or so they thought.

In our interview, Golder denied that SOS had ever been involved, in any capacity, with Suites Dining during her tenure.

“They were not involved,” she said emphatically when I asked. “At all.”

Opaque, overbearing and indifferent

Frank used to work for SOS. He left in 2007 when, a few weeks into the school year, he was recruited away by then-GCDS CEO Sawyer to work in Bollard instead.

“The students here, they came, they took me away from them,” Frank remembered fondly. “They pay me more.”

“Better benefits?”

“Better everything! You understand? I wasn’t happy with [SOS].”

Sawyer puts it more bluntly.

“Basically, he was abused,” she recalled. “He would come in, his kitchen would be a disaster, there would be no one for him to go to… he was incredibly unhappy.”

“If you don’t treat your employees well,” she reflected with thinly veiled anger about Frank’s mistreatment under SOS, “they’re going to find another job.”

Frank, in typical fashion, only expresses concerns about his students, and especially about what might happen to them after an SOS takeover at Suites next year.

“One thing I know for sure,” he said, “is they [SOS] don’t care about the students.”

“Not at all?”

“At all. Just money.”

Suites Dining is the largest remaining student-run, independent eating location on campus, with approximately 260 residents and an annual operating budget of over $1.1 million. Whichever company wins that contract next year will be flush with cash – cash ResEd requires students to pay, and cash from which any for-profit corporation will skim significant fees.

If the past is any indication of the future, that corporation will likely be SOS.

The entanglement between Stanford’s Office of Residential Education and SOS is complex and runs deep. When I contacted Peters to request a personal interview for this story, he declined to speak with me and referred me instead to Buzay in ResEd, who handles all of SOS’s media inquiries.

Boswell mentioned in our interview that he himself was “connected” to SOS, but doesn’t specify how. Sargeant, the onetime General Manager of SEC and Peters’ brother-in-law, was still reluctant to talk.

“I believe that Aaron and Nate can provide you with all the information requested,” he wrote in response to my emailed request for an interview.

When Avanti chef Tony said there’s “something insidious about this whole thing,” these are the kind of connections that support his suspicion. Wessells, the former Avanti financial manager, speculated that money might be changing hands somewhere.

“What it smells of to me is basically that there are people in the University that have their own motives,” Wessells mused. “And whether they stand to profit from taking over the clubs… maybe that could be the case.”

Despite Golder’s assertion that a “University-required” bidding process governs the selection of contracted vendors for student residences, SOS did not have to competitively bid to manage the Row for over 15 years.

The first year for which ResEd held a bidding process for Row management was 2011-12. In the year after receiving that bid – according to members of the Stanford Labor Action Coalition (SLAC), a student-led workers’ advocacy group – SOS slashed Row workers’ health benefits by half and reduced their bonuses from $1,000 to a maximum of $40.

Stanford’s Living Wage Policy states clearly that workers on campus shall have “the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively… and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.”

But when SLAC held a Worker-Student Council meeting on Jan. 16, 2012, to provide a “safe space” for workers seeking relief from SOS benefit cuts – advertised in both Spanish and English – Sargeant, a ResEd employee, barged in without introducing himself a few minutes into the meeting, accused the workers of organizing a strike (which SLAC had never discussed) and “intimidated” the workers into silence.

“They seemed to know who he was,” recalled SLAC member Laurel Fish ’14. “His accusations were very aggressive.”

“We tried to have a conversation with [the workers],” Fish remembered, “but it was clear that they weren’t expressing their concerns and didn’t feel like they could talk openly.”

The end of an era at Suites Dining, part III

The end of an era at Suites Dining, part III

It remains unclear why a ResEd administrator interfered in a private meeting of workers contracted by a third-party corporation, and why ResEd paid so little attention to the Living Wage Policy’s protection of “the right to self-organization.”

SOS’s financial operations for the Row are almost completely opaque to house residents. When I met with a Row financial manager to go over his house’s finances, he was surprised to learn that Suites residents have full and transparent access to their entire board bill. ResEd, he said, takes all the money from his residents’ room and board payment, gives him about $850 per resident per quarter to spend on either food or social dues and doesn’t tell him what they do with the rest.

“Even as a financial manager, I don’t see where half the student money goes,” he said.

I end up having to go directly to Buzay for that information. The numbers, which Row financial managers never see, are clear.

Total board bill costs in Suites and on the Row are almost exactly the same – $5,999 per year for Suites residents and $5,992 for residents on the Row. But there’s one major difference: Governor’s Corner Dining Societies deliver seven more meals per week than Row houses for almost exactly the same price.

Row residents receive 10 meals a week, typically lunch and dinner Monday through Friday. Suites residents, by contrast, get 17: everything the Row provides, including open kitchen and snacks, plus a custom-cooked Frank breakfast extravaganza every morning and brunch and dinner on Sundays.

Suites student managers provide those seven extra meals, moreover, on a lower food budget. GCDS spends about $50 less per quarter per student on food than SOS (an average of $726 for GCDS and $775 for SOS). And they provide those meals – as any student who has had Dennis’ lobster, Frank’s filet mignon sandwiches, Caroline’s Mexican or Tony’s chocolate mousse can tell you – without compromising quality, a feat Tony says he accomplishes by buying only “what’s seasonal and freshly available” and “minimizing or eliminating waste.” That’s not even including the quarterly Gala Dinners and Special Dinners every Suites eating club delivers or the spring quarter Suites-wide Special Party, for which student managers bring in live music, ice sculptures and entertainment.

And as a student-run nonprofit, all the money Suites saves on food goes to better pay for student hashers and their chefs, rather than the bank account of a for-profit company.

Frank made $900 per week for 33 weeks of work – about $29,700 annually – when he first started at SOS. He makes $20,000 more than that at Suites, plus 100 percent coverage of his (and his dependents’) healthcare and dental costs.

In “Hiring a Chef,” the sample advertisement SOS CEO Peters encourages student managers on the Row to post when searching for new chefs, Peters suggests pay of “$800/week DOE [depending on experience] + negotiable benefits.” That’s $26,400 per year – about half what Suites chefs make.

Part-time student hashers at Suites make $15 an hour, and used to make even more before ResEd-enforced pay cuts took their toll. Even after the ResEd pay cuts, Suites hashers still make more than the Stanford-mandated living wage. Buzay, however, said that Peters – the CEO of the organization responsible for food-service labor operations for the entire Row – “didn’t know” that Stanford’s Living Wage Policy, enacted in 2007, “even existed” until four years after it came into effect. In 2011, SOS was finally forced to conform to the policy, which mandates that all campus workers, including those hired by third-party contractors, be paid at least $12.40 an hour when also provided with benefits.

But there’s no better way to compare the performance of SOS and GCDS than to talk to someone who’s experienced both. When I finally sat down with a former Suites hasher who currently lives on the Row, his answer is clear: GCDS outperforms SOS in every area of food service.

“The food is better, the open kitchen is better – everything is way better,” he said of Suites Dining. He thinks it’s “stupid” of ResEd to consider contracting management of Suites to any outside company, much less SOS.

When I told him one of ResEd’s ostensible justifications for eliminating GCDS is health and safety concerns, he laughed in disbelief.

“We have so many health violations,” he said of the SOS-managed Row house in which he currently lives. “The number of violations we have…” He trailed off, shaking his head. When I asked him to list some of the specific health violations in his house, he demurred, afraid that his kitchen staff might lose their jobs.

For the 2011-12 bidding process for the Row – the first it had ever held – ResEd conducted a closed bid in which, according to Buzay, four vendors submitted offers: Aramark, CollegeChefs, Sodexo and SOS.

Sodexo is a French multinational corporation with 16 billion euros in annual consolidated revenue. It employs 413,000 people worldwide in 80 countries and serves 50 million consumers daily. Aramark operates in 22 countries, had revenues of $12.5 billion last year and is the 23rd-largest employer on the Fortune 500. Both companies have come under intense criticism for unethical business and labor practices. And the first hit on a Google search for “CollegeChefs reviews” is an entry in the Ripoff Report detailing the company’s practice of “profiteering from students and their parents.”

When I ask Buzay which criteria ResEd uses to select vendors, he says they choose “a vendor that can come in and abide by the student-management model. Working closely with students, work closely with the community… so we’re not mass producing food.”

First of all, that description sounds an awful lot like GCDS, which is entirely made up of students from their own living community.

And second, in a closed bidding process in which SOS’s only three competitors were two multinationals that have no experience working closely with students on Stanford’s campus and a third company with a terrible reputation for its work on college campuses, SOS’s selection to manage the Row was likely a foregone conclusion.

Boswell, Buzay and Golder claimed not to know who will be selected as the bidders for next year’s Suites contract. But given ResEd’s past bidding practices on the Row, there’s little reason to believe the bidding process for Suites will go any differently.

Continue to part 4

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The end of an era at Suites Dining, part IV https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/21/1075166/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/21/1075166/#comments Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:57:46 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1075166 Increased ResEd interference has already hindered the effective management of Suites Dining.

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This is the fourth and final part of a long-form article on the University’s decision to end student management at the Suites Eating Clubs. Click here to view parts one, two, and three.

Growing burden of ResEd oversight

When I asked her about ResEd’s heightened oversight of GCDS since administrators first intervened in 2009, Dean Golder insisted that ResEd’s involvement has been productive and beneficial.

“We’ve done our best to help them be successful,” she declared. “And that’s just factually accurate.”

But according to everyone who isn’t a ResEd administrator, increased ResEd interference has been actively detrimental to the effective student management of Suites Dining. Not a single manager I interviewed could think of even one way in which increased ResEd oversight had made their job easier.

The number of ways managers say it has made their jobs harder, however, is remarkable. According to several different managers, all of whom wished to remain anonymous, ResEd meddling has made club management dramatically less efficient, more expensive and less effective.

One of the most frustrating changes for managers has been ResEd’s enforced separation of club expenditures into food – which student managers are allowed to purchase themselves using the GCDS account – and capital items like cups, plates and club improvements, which must be either approved and paid for by ResEd (using GCDS money) or purchased using personal student funds and submitted for reimbursement.

According to one student manager, the most significant problem with ResEd’s new policy – before which student managers were free to allocate funds as they saw fit – has been the delayed payment of vendors who provide both food and capital items. Student managers will pay for the food portion of the invoice immediately, but ResEd will take several weeks to pay for the capital items, leaving vendors complaining that they’ve been underpaid.

Reimbursement – the other ResEd-enforced way for student managers to purchase capital items – has proven even more inconvenient, mostly because ResEd appears to consistently run weeks behind schedule. One manager purchased a new stereo for his club in early December using personal funds and still hasn’t received a ResEd reimbursement check. In September, ResEd administrators forgot to pay Bollard’s water bill, and Frank had to pay the cost out of pocket. He finally got a reimbursement check for $248.73 – on Jan. 24.

In Middle Earth, student managers keep a running list of things R&DE – to whom, according to the board bill, Suites residents pay total annual maintenance fees of over $380,000 – has promised to fix but hasn’t. There are currently 12 items on that list, ranging from the salad bar to the stove tap to the mop rack.

When multiple fix-it requests went unanswered, managers had to resort to personal emails and phone calls. Many of the requests for maintenance have gone unanswered since fall quarter. As one current Suites manager I interviewed fumed, “Housing does absolutely nothing.”

Last year, R&DE installed a shiny new dishwasher in Middle Earth. Unlike the other three clubs’ dishwashers, which despite being old and timeworn work perfectly fine, the R&DE-installed Middle Earth dishwasher immediately broke, and Housing still hasn’t successfully fixed it. The symbolism is astonishing.

Student-managed since 1982, the Suites Dining Societies are set to be run by an outside corporation starting next year.
Student-managed since 1982, the Suites Dining Societies are set to be run by an outside corporation starting next year. (MEHMET INONU/The Stanford Daily)

In Fall 2010, ResEd decided to assume control of paying student hashers – traditionally a responsibility of individual club managers, who would write hashers checks directly from their eating club account. Before the takeover, I remember a student manager depositing my hashing check every two weeks, like clockwork, in the furthest left-hand drawer in the Avanti kitchen, beneath the cupboard.

When ResEd took over, they failed to pay student hashers for the next two months. Administrators only resumed payment after students pointed out that not paying your workers is a violation of California labor law.

“It’s amazing how incompetent the so-called ‘professionals’ can be,” grumbled a particularly displeased Suites manager.

ResEd has even taken GCDS money outright, without any warning or explanation. According to a 2011-12 club financial manager, each eating club used to maintain a $4,000 “carryover account” – money saved up “just in case a chef got sick or we had to have some big capital expenditure – as like a buffer.”

“We had that money saved up,” the financial manager said. “I sent out some checks at the end of the year to pay off summer bills and stuff like that… and then I ended up coming back to school and getting invoices saying I had unpaid bills from the summer, and I found out that the checks I had sent had bounced because the University had swept our accounts and taken out all the money that we had saved for carryover, and [they] just never gave it back. It was just gone.”

ResEd has also restricted the number of hashers who can be on GCDS’s payroll, drastically limiting the flexibility of students’ work schedules. Two club managers complained that finding replacement hashers when their current one has a midterm or an athletic event has become much more difficult since the pool of available hashers is now much smaller.

Even ResEd’s own student employees express frustration with the apparent incompetence and questionable work ethic of their superiors. One current Suites Resident Assistant (RA) complained that ResEd Student Affairs Officer Tiffany Taylor, who is supposed to make regular supervisory visits to Suites, has been conspicuously absent all year.

“She’s supposed to come over,” said the RA, “but she never actually does.”

If there is any mismanagement and incompetence going on at Suites, it’s not on the part of students. It’s by ResEd and R&DE.

It is only when I began investigating its chronic underperformance that ResEd finally began to grind, slowly, into gear. Two days after I sent an email to Boswell, Buzay and Golder requesting an interview about Suites, all four club managers suddenly got an unprecedentedly friendly, but characteristically vague, email from ResEd administrator Jo Jaffe ‘09.

“I just wanted to check in and see how everything was going for you all,” Jaffe wrote. “Please let me know if there’s anything you have questions on or need help with.”

Student managers weren’t fooled.

“It was definitely related to the takeover,” said one club manager.

And only in the last month has Keith Santiago, head of Governor’s Corner Housing, finally become more responsive to student requests for help.

“We are skeptical as to his motives,” said another student manager.

***

Frank keeps his letters in a Macy’s sale bag in the back of his old blue Lincoln. There are 66 of them. Most are thank-you cards: cards from students, cards from employers, Christmas cards from generations of Suites managers, cards in neatly written Spanish I wish I could understand. Some are invitations to long-ago Stanford graduations from former students who’ve left Frank’s beloved kitchen and moved on.

When Frank puts the tattered old Macy’s bag in my hands, he does so with a care I’ve never seen before. He tells me that if I open a card, I must make sure to put it back in the exact same envelope, undamaged and in order.

“Be very careful, Miles,” he says.

I smile. “I’ve got it, Frank.”

“No,” he says, with a fierce urgency. “These letters are the most important things to me.”

These letters really are the most important things to him. And so I take great care as I look slowly through the letters, kept as pristine as you could possibly keep 66 letters in an old Macy’s bag.

Certain phrases stand out from the flow of thanks from Frank’s former students.

“You’re like an uncle to me.”

“I’m so touched beyond words that you remembered my birthday.”

“To the man who is always right, who gives the best advice and who makes my stomach content.”

Frank never lets his letters go. Next year, this University won’t be able to say the same about Frank.

***

“Residential Education,” states the office’s website, “is about the people it serves… We are concerned with the experience of indvidual [sic] residents and how to best serve each of them.”

As I speak with Suites resident after Suites resident, I can’t help but think that ResEd has forgotten that central mission. Almost unanimously, the residents I talk to are shocked and appalled to discover that their four chefs’ contracts are not being renewed – a decision about which students were not consulted – and that students will no longer lead Suites’ dining clubs next year.

“It makes me really mad,” says one current resident, with simple honesty.

For others, the loss of a student job at Suites threatens to produce financial hardship.

“Without hashing,” says a student in Suites who is currently on financial aid, “I would have no income at all… I’d be getting deeper and deeper into the hole with my student loans.” (Boswell, Buzay and Golder say that some kind of student management will be allowed under the new contractor – but any student managers that remain will work for the new company, not a student-run nonprofit, and there will be, according to current student managers, no paid student hashing next year.)

I’m reminded that 95.97 percent of Suites residents opposed a change about which they were never consulted and only recently informed.

When I reach out to Suites alumni, the reaction is, if anything, even more pained. They’re dismayed to learn that the place they loved has changed so much.

“I always thought it was the greatest food on the planet,” a 2005-07 resident remembers wistfully.

“The quality of the food, and the cheapness of it, was better than anything the University was able to offer,” a student who lived and worked in Suites from 2006-08, before ResEd began its expensive and debilitating takeover, recalls.

I’m also reminded about the importance of community, and how that word means much more than simply a group of students. Our community is made up of everyone who makes Stanford so quintessentially Stanford – from President Hennessy down to the last kitchen worker, from star athletic coaches and tenured professors to the four chefs who, as one saddened survey respondent put it, “make Suites what it is.”

When I ask Golder whether she considers it important to bring Caroline, Dennis, Frank and Tony back next year, she says, “If it works out, I think that’s great.” She suggests that if students wanted to help, we should write a letter of recommendation for the chefs to the new corporate contractor.

Between Boswell, Buzay and Golder, no one offers to do anything at all to help the chefs keep their jobs.

“I can’t tell a vendor who they have to hire,” Golder says.

And that was it.

That’s not the spirit of the Stanford I know. The Stanford I know doesn’t corporatize student life at the expense of longstanding community members; it encourages and fosters student leadership, student initiative and student independence. The Stanford I know is about standing up for the little guy, being accountable and doing the best we can for every member of our community.

As I reflect on the end of an era, I’m deeply disturbed by something I remember from the beginning of my interview in that ResEd boardroom.

“My general directive from the president, provost and [Vice-Provost for Student Affairs] Greg Boardman when I was brought in four years ago was: ‘Clean up,’” Golder declared.

Suites Dining, she said, was just “one of hundreds” of places under ResEd consideration – “one of hundreds” of places “where we’re looking at ourselves and saying, ‘Are we doing the best we can by students? Are we doing the best we can by Stanford?’”

If firing four loyal community members beloved by their students; outsourcing student jobs and responsibility to a for-profit corporation with a suspicious workers’ rights record and dubious ties to the Stanford office responsible for its current contract; and refusing to solicit any student opinion before making crucial decisions about student welfare is what “doing the best we can by students” looks like – and if there truly are hundreds of places left on ResEd’s ominous list – then the end of Suites Dining might be merely the beginning of a new and darker era in our collective campus life.

If ResEd gets its way at Suites, it will be a victory for bureaucracy, for incompetence and probably for the coffers of SOS, with its hundreds of thousands of dollars in administrative fees. But it will be a tremendous loss for everyone else: for students, for four veteran chefs who will be forced out of the community they love and for this great university we all call home.

It can be hard to stand up for ourselves. We’re all students; we hold down jobs; we’re athletes and scientists and writers with tremendous time commitments on our hands.

ResEd knows that, and they take full advantage of it. As Sullivan, the former GCDS CEO who spent an entire exhausting year trying to hold off the ResEd juggernaut, puts it, “It’s an entire office of Stanford University against a few students who don’t have the time or the energy to fight.”

ResEd and SOS move quietly, inexorably and patiently towards a shared goal that is ultimately detrimental and destructive to the Stanford community.

We cannot – we must not – let them go unchallenged. It’s time to take a stand.

Miles Unterreiner ’12 M.A. ’13 was a two-year Suites resident and is currently employed as a hasher in Suites’ dining clubs.

Contact Miles at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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The humanities don’t need defending, but I’m defending them anyway https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/11/the-humanities-dont-need-defending-but-im-defending-them-anyway/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/11/the-humanities-dont-need-defending-but-im-defending-them-anyway/#comments Mon, 11 Feb 2013 16:33:07 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074816 The humanities are the wellspring of our higher life.

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Alex Bayer wrote a wonderful series of columns on the worth of the humanities in this paper a few weeks back.  What she said got me thinking – but what really got me thinking is why she felt she had to say it in the first place.

Read through the online comments section of nearly any article on the study of the humanities, and you’re almost guaranteed to find ideologically committed naysayers: those who say the humanities produce nothing of economic value, make no one richer or better off or more technologically advanced.

What perplexes me is why this is a line of attack that anyone feels sufficiently compelling to be worth taking up a defense against.

Attacks on the humanities often take the following form:

1) A humanities degree doesn’t produce money, either in the form of a job for yourself or something that produces economic value for someone else.

2) Therefore, you shouldn’t major in the humanities.

But this argument makes a colossal assumption that people seem to miss. This argument assumes that the guiding factor in choosing a major should be how much economic value it produces.

For some people – people with families to support after college, for instance – that consideration may indeed be the proper guiding light.

But for many others, that argument is laughable on its face.

Money isn’t morally good in and of itself. Money is good because it produces happiness and increased human welfare; a pile of dollar bills on a deserted, inaccessible island does no one any good. Generally speaking, the better off we are, the happier we tend to be; hence the value of modern medicine, antibiotics, warm clothes, durable housing and all the other accoutrements of modernity that come with the increased prosperity enabled by technological and economic advance.

But if those subjects’ value – the value of engineering, of medicine, of economics – lies not in their own intrinsic qualities but in the amount of happiness they produce, then surely subjects that produce equal amounts of happiness are equally valuable?

I feel a great deal of happiness while watching a great film, reading a great novel or listening to a great song. Those items are products of minds schooled not in facts and figures but in the human experience, in the feelings and drives that make us tick and give our lives meaning.

Sure, that film is shown on a screen that an engineer built, that book was printed from a machine an engineer designed, that song plays on the iPod an engineer crafted.

But what value is there in blank screens, in presses churning out empty pages, in iPods playing hours upon hours of everlasting static?

Better to say that our lives are worth living because we all have skills and interests that can work in tandem to improve and better the world. Better to say that if we do not encourage the flourishing of both technical and nontechnical disciplines, we risk missing out on essential facets of the reason we are here on Earth.

“Some of the most valuable work needed by civilization,” declared Theodore Roosevelt in 1910, “is essentially non-remunerative in its character.” The president knew that what made his nation a nation worth leading were not merely its bellows and smokestacks, its factories and railcars, its steamships and telegraph lines. It was the higher lives those things had enabled his citizens to lead.

“While not merely acknowledging but insisting,” continued Roosevelt, “upon the fact that there must be a basis of material well-being for the individual as for the nation, let us with equal emphasis insist that this material well-being represents nothing but the foundation, and that the foundation, though indispensable, is worthless unless upon it is raised the superstructure of a higher life.”

The humanities are the wellspring of that higher life. They are what we do once the scientists have kept us safe from disease, the engineers have kept us safe from natural disasters and the police officers and lawyers have kept us safe from each other and from our government.

They are the reason we tend to read “Harry Potter” to make us happy and not investment statistics, watch “Casablanca” instead of the stock ticker, measure the worth of our days in smiles and laughs rather than dollars accumulated (although dollars well spent can certainly produce smiles and laughs).

The humanities don’t need defending. They are just as intrinsically valuable as any other subject that makes human life better and that empowers us to reach the higher planes of understanding toward which this University reaches.

Make Miles happy and email him at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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ResEd moves ahead with plan to contract Suites Dining to an outside vendor https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/08/resed-moves-ahead-with-contract-suites-dining-to-an-outside-vendor/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/08/resed-moves-ahead-with-contract-suites-dining-to-an-outside-vendor/#respond Fri, 08 Feb 2013 10:17:48 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074752 Residential Education officials have decided to move forward with their plan to contract operations of Suites Dining to an outside vendor, effective next fall.

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MEHMET INONU/The Stanford Daily
MEHMET INONU/The Stanford Daily

Residential Education officials have decided to move forward with their plan to contract operations of Suites Dining to an outside vendor, effective next fall. The move will replace the student-run nonprofit Governor’s Corner Dining Societies for the first time since Suites Dining opened in 1982.

Citing “years of mismanagement” and an inability to “stay in good standing to meet the food needs” of Suites residents, Dean of Residential Education Deborah Golder argued that the goal of transitioning to an outside contractor is to “protect that community and what that community thinks is important.”

ResEd has yet to begin the bidding process to select a new vendor. Officials say a “university-required process” will govern the selection of the vendor, with at least three or four vendors invited to bid for the contract to operate dining services at Suites.

The current chefs’ contracts are set to expire at the conclusion of this academic year, and they will be unable to reapply to work for the new vendor until the vendor selection process is complete.

Current students in Suites expressed discontent with the planned transition.

“I think it runs perfectly fine the way it is now,” said Elizabeth Stier ‘14, who added that, compared to other dining options on campus, “the food is awesome…the quality is far superior.”

Another Suites resident expressed frustration at the loss of student leadership, saying that the student-run dining gives residents a sense of responsibility.

Discussions about the role of students with regard to the new vendor arrangement are currently ongoing.

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The First Annual Stanford List of Banished Words https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/04/the-first-annual-stanford-list-of-banished-words/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/02/04/the-first-annual-stanford-list-of-banished-words/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2013 09:38:12 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074607 Each and every New Year’s Day since 1976, Lake Superior State University has released its humorous “List of Words to be Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness.” Compiled from submissions by disgruntled word enthusiasts around the globe, LSSU’s banished words list now serves as the gold standard for determining which […]

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Each and every New Year’s Day since 1976, Lake Superior State University has released its humorous “List of Words to be Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness.” Compiled from submissions by disgruntled word enthusiasts around the globe, LSSU’s banished words list now serves as the gold standard for determining which words have become so clichéd, vague, or meaningless as to warrant forcible expulsion from the national lexicon.

“Maverick” made the list in 2009, boosted by a wave of irritation spawned by the 2008 election; so did “bailout,” “Wall Street/Main Street,” and “first dude.” The 2013 list included “YOLO,” “fiscal cliff,” and “trending,” joining earlier classics like “awesome” (first banished in 1984, re-banished due to chronic overuse in 2007), “Y2K” (1999), and “To Be Perfectly Honest With You” (1992).

Without further ado, I present to you my 2013 “List of Words to be Banished from Stanford Campus for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness.” Feel free to add your own submissions (and criticize mine) via email or in the online comments section.

“Problematic”

Since first clawing its way forth from the slimy bowels of SLE, this little face-sucker has evolved into a fully formed alien invader, rampaging mercilessly around campus and leaving in its wake the burning wreckage of hundreds of formerly thought-provoking discussion sections.

Whatever original meaning “problematic” once had has long been lost in the foggy haze of bombast and grandiloquence. The word now serves primarily as a pretentious, pseudo-academic substitute for “I don’t like what you’re saying,” absolving the utterer of the responsibility to formulate a coherent, rational objection to views with which she may disagree. It has become an anti-intellectual vehicle for dismissing opposing arguments without having to clearly articulate why you actually oppose them.

In the online comments section of my colleague Adam Johnson’s recent piece on racism, for example, “problematic” reared its foul head no less than three times.  “To equate historical and current racist systems to prejudicial name-calling and throw them all under the same umbrella of ‘racism’ is 1. deeply problematic 2. awfully condescending and 3. ….really?” wrote one commenter.

“Other concepts such as bigotry and prejudice are equally problematic,” insisted another. And a third commenter dismissed the argument that anti-white slurs and systemic power imbalances can be lexically conflated as “deeply problematic,” without explaining why. In none of these cases did the commenters explain what precisely “problematic” meant or how the concept contributed meaningfully to the discussion. I expect this may be because the inherent vagueness of the term renders such an explanation impossible.

“Start-up”

Real start-ups – the original Silicon Valley engines for economic and technological dynamism – once aspired to goals more meaningful than applying a faux-antique filter to the photo of this morning’s funnily-shaped Philz’ coffee foam. Real start-ups, which once harnessed technical creativity and ingenuity in the service of progress, aimed to accomplish objectives that made human life easier and better, not kitschier and more brainless.

Your CS group’s recent relationship-finder app and Google belong to the same “start-up” category in the same way Chihuahuas and German shepherds belong to the same species – which is why “start-up,” its original meaning twisted to suit the needs of an app-obsessed generation fascinated with inflated IPOs, made the cut for this year’s list of banished words.

“Entrepreneurial”

See definition above.

“Interesting”
adj.

  1. I didn’t actually do the reading; please please please don’t call on me again (usage particularly common in IHUM/Thinking Matters sections).
  2. I don’t much care what you have to say.
  3. Both of the above. Usage particularly common among freshmen.

 

“Activist”

A mark of merit once reserved for the cadre of Stanford students who cared enough to involve themselves deeply in causes that brought them no personal glory or benefit, “activist” has since devolved into a platitudinous buzzword capacious enough to cover everything from actually tutoring underserved children to organizing a poorly attended speakers’ panel on muskrat rights in 19th-century Bulgaria. Like the equally generic catchphrase “entrepreneurship,” “activism” has become a vague category of do-goodership that everyone is expected to emulate but no one has ever clearly defined.

As Brendan O’Byrne pointed out in his farewell last week, we need to revive activism and make it mean something real for Stanford.

As an entrepreneurial activist for clear language use, Miles hopes you’ve found this column interesting – and not too problematic. Send him your banished word list nominations at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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ResEd to end Suites dining contract https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/30/resed-to-end-suites-dining-contract/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/30/resed-to-end-suites-dining-contract/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2013 22:24:52 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074492 An external vendor will take over the administration of Suites Dining from the current student-run nonprofit Governor’s Corner Dining Societies (GSCS), ResEd officials said today in an email to Suites residents.

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An external vendor will take over the administration of Suites Dining from the current student-run nonprofit Governor’s Corner Dining Societies (GCDS), ResEd officials said today in an email to Suites residents. GCDS’s current contract to provide food service to Suites residences will not be renewed for 2013-14.

(Courtesy of R&DE)
The Suites dining societies, Beefeaters, Avanti, Middleearth and Bollard, service the four Suites residences, Marx, Griffin, Anderson and Jenkins (Courtesy of R&DE)

Citing “University expectations of budget oversight, health and safety concerns and a pressing desire to lower the board rate,” ResEd Assistant Directors Aaron Buzay and Nate Boswell said that the decision not to renew Governor’s Corner Dining Societies’ contract for the 2013-2014 school year had been reached after “extensive review.”

GCDS employs four Suites chefs as well as a student CEO and CFO, kitchen managers and hashers.

“The department remains dedicated to employing student managers to run the Suites dining facilities in close cooperation with an independent, professional vendor,” the email read. No information was provided regarding the chefs’ contracts.

A controversial attempt two years ago by ResEd to contract Suites management to outside vendor Student Organized Services (SOS), which currently runs food operations on the Row, fell through after student complaints.

Suites Dining has been student run since 1982, making this the 30th consecutive year of autonomous student management. It is the only remaining student-run dining society on campus.

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A Stanford education and social engagement https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/29/a-stanford-education-and-social-engagement/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/29/a-stanford-education-and-social-engagement/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2013 06:56:29 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074470 There is a role for the modern university in wedding the power of the rigorous mind to the wisdom that comes with moral character.

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Alex Bayer’s excellent piece on the humanities’ role in a college education brought to mind this column, originally published April 30, 2012.

The purpose of a university education can sometimes seem a self-evident truth, on par with life, liberty and the fact that Cal sucks. The modern university, after all, obviously exists to promote learning and instill knowledge, to equip its students with a set of technical skills and to provide a safe, open space in which the intellect may thrive and develop.

But might intellectual goals alone constitute too narrow a vision, too humble an ambition, too timid an aspiration for a university that has always dreamed of better?

In a landmark 1837 speech to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society, Ralph Waldo Emerson famously defined the “American Scholar” as a man of energetic action as well as nuanced and advanced intellect. Emerson urged each student to become more than what he called a “mere thinker” – to become something larger than the accumulated library of his inner knowledge, to mold each man’s being into something greater than the sum of his intellectual parts. The great American thinker and poet concluded with his now-famous assertion that “character is higher than intellect” – that the scholar’s mind is not his only implement, not even his defining one.

Emerson understood the distinction between mind and soul and knew that a finely honed intellect could flourish in men and women of empty spirit. But he had higher aspirations for the American university; Emerson had the audacity to dream of a curriculum that shaped its students into complete moral beings, rather than mere soulless vehicles for the transmission and acquisition of knowledge.

In his wonderful essay “The Disparity between Intellect and Character,” Harvard professor Robert Coles tells the story of a brilliant moral philosophy student who treated his housekeeper, a fellow undergraduate at Harvard forced to clean rooms to pay her way through school, with the same respect he might give the trash she picked up. One day this young woman entered Coles’ office in tears. “I’ve been taking all these philosophy courses, and we talk about what’s true, what’s important, what’s good,” she cried. “Well, how do you teach people to be good?”

Coles knew, as did Emerson, that the disparity between intellect and character can be mapped onto the distinction between thought and action – that what one has inside the head matters much less than what one does with it. This is not a new or original idea – indeed, it amounts to scarcely more than the old adage that actions speak louder than words.

But ought a university, in fact, teach people to “be good”?  How can we teach each student to pursue what John Rawls termed her “conception of the good” without imposing a standardized, cookie-cutter picture of what that good looks like?

As we argue about the perils and benefits of social engagement inside the classroom, I have to admit that I don’t know the answer. But I do know that there is a role for the modern university in wedding the power of the rigorous mind to the wisdom that comes with moral character.

In his 1957 classic Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes tells the heartbreaking story of Charlie Gordon, a mentally disabled man who undergoes an experimental procedure to increase his IQ. We are introduced to a Charlie whose problem-solving skills are inferior to those of Algernon, a mouse in the lab. Soon, Charlie’s mind outstrips that of the doctors who engineered his transformation.

But he is no happier, no more secure, no friendlier. Charlie’s being is no more morally valuable than it was before the surgery; his newly powerful intellect serves only to give him a clearer appreciation of the faults and foibles of humankind. As he stands before the group of intellectually brilliant but morally empty scientists who made him who he is, Charlie finally shouts, “There’s one thing you’ve all overlooked: intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.”

Stanford has always been a school of doers, of men and women of action and energy employed in the service of visible achievement. The “College of the West,” David Starr Jordan wrote in 1904, is home to no “dewy-eyed monk,” no “stoop-shouldered grammarian.” The true Stanford scholar is the “leader of enterprise, the builder of states.”

As we pursue Jordan’s vision, let’s not forget the words of Emerson, Coles and Keyes.  We have work to do.

Miles welcomes your thoughts and comments at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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The Deep State Rises: American Cinema and the War on Terror https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/19/the-deep-state-rises-american-cinema-and-the-war-on-terror/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/19/the-deep-state-rises-american-cinema-and-the-war-on-terror/#respond Sun, 20 Jan 2013 01:23:39 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074205 We aren’t ready for Harvey Dent. Our heroes don’t have faces.

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“You know that day you once told me about, when Gotham would no longer need Batman?” asks Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne in 2008’s The Dark Knight.

“Bruce, you can’t ask me to wait for that,” replies love interest Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal).

“It’s happening now,” insists Mr. Wayne; “Gotham needs a hero with a face.”

Truly great films, like great novels, reflect the anxieties of the time in which they are produced.  Like the residents of Gotham, menaced by enemies they cannot see and do not understand, the American people long for public heroes, for White Knights.  But as in Gotham, the nature of our enemies has proven itself more conducive to clandestine warfare in the shadows and alleyways, violence hidden from view and tucked away in the darkly inaccessible corners of a wilderness of mirrors.

We aren’t ready for Harvey Dent.  Our heroes don’t have faces.

Since September 11th, the realities of asymmetric warfare – wars fought by nation-states against non-state actors – have radically redefined the nature of armed combat.  Advances in weapons technology, particularly explosives and chemical weapons, have enabled small networks of well-equipped terrorists to inflict damage immensely disproportional to their numbers.  One man armed with a canister of sarin gas, unsecured Soviet nuclear material, or (perhaps most frighteningly) an engineered supervirus now has the potential to kill thousands, if not millions, of his fellow human beings.  There are no longer any clear lines of accountability and redress: no red telephone to Moscow over which we can voice our complaints and expect complaints in return.

This is no longer a war led by soldiers in clean-cut uniforms, advancing neatly in formation against a clearly defined enemy.  (We saw how well that strategy worked in 2012‘s The Dark Knight Rises, when Gotham PD’s entire police force marched off to fight Bane’s terrorist network and got trapped for months in an underground prison as inescapable as the mountains of Afghanistan). It’s a war in which Iranian nuclear scientists get assassinated by motorcycle bomb, nuclear centrifuges are disabled by computer virus, and undercover intelligence operatives entrench themselves in terrorist cells before thwarting their deadly machinations.  And most of all, it’s a war of unidentified men in black masks fighting by night, keeping the rest of us safe while the visible authorities disclaim responsibility – and even promise to hunt them down when they go too far.

Sound familiar?

Conservative pundit and film critic Ross Douthat complained in 2008 that American film studios had, in the aftermath of 9/11, succumbed to a paralyzing paranoia reminiscent of the “cynical, end-of-empire 70s.”  Instead of dutifully assembling a line of patriotic propaganda-fests replete with good old-fashioned foreigner-bashing, lamented Douthat, Hollywood had consistently churned out 70s-style anti-government, anti-corporate conspiracy flicks that blamed secretive cabals within America for the rise of terrorism.  “The film industry’s typical take on geopolitics,” contended Douthat, “traces all the world’s evils to the machinations of a White Male enemy at home.” The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor had been resurrected as Shooter and Syriana; The Manchurian Candidate made a Denzel-driven comeback recentered in the Middle East, but an international weapons conglomerate replaced the Communist Party as the film’s chief villain.  “We expected John Wayne,” bemoans Douthat; “we got Jason Bourne instead.”

To be fair to Mr. Douthat, Act of Valor hadn’t come out yet.  But even absent that particular piece of pro-America agitprop, the auteurs of Beverly Hills have shown themselves perfectly comfortable recreating – and yes, endorsing – the new and unprecedented type of total war necessitated by 9/11.  Much as the anti-establishment message of Apocalypse Now and Dog Day Afternoon eventually gave way to the unabashed patriotism of Top Gun and Red Dawn, so too has the anti-society nihilism of Fight Club given way to Captain America and, well, a reconstituted Red Dawn, featuring North Koreans instead of Soviets this time around and starring Chris Hemsworth rather than Patrick Swayze.  In Captain America and 2012’s The Avengers, the foreboding guys in black camo turn out to be not subversive agents of a corporate conspiracy, but well-intentioned representatives of S.H.I.E.L.D., the protective organization dedicated to saving the world from existential foreign threats.

If it’s unfettered stars-and-stripes heroics Douthat and his fellow conservatives are missing, they need look no further than Liam Neeson. In Taken (2008), former CIA agent Bryan Mills (Neeson) responds to the kidnapping of his daughter – a wholesome ingénue abducted by ugly Eastern European sex traffickers – by rampaging solo across the continent of Europe, wreaking bloody revenge upon everyone from effeminate French politicians to the film’s ultimate villain, a fantastically wealthy Arabian sheikh.  In the course of his revenge tour – a cathartic release of tension for an audience tired of whiny European complaints about our human rights record and hungry for an enthusiastic endorsement of unilateral American interventionism – Neeson tortures a baddie by tying him to an electrified chair and leaving him to fry in a windowless room that looks freshly imported from a CIA black site.

In a half-hearted gesture to the possibility that torture might produce more enemies than it kills, 2012’s imaginatively titled Taken 2 brings back the vengeful families of the Albanian Muslim gangsters Neeson brutally offed in the franchise’s first installment.  “You killed our men… our brothers… our sons,” threatens bearded mob boss Murad, suggesting for a brief metaphorical moment that continued American violence overseas might spike a never-ending downward spiral of retribution and punishment.   “I killed your sons because they kidnapped my daughter,” explodes an unapologetic Neeson – who then proceeds to annihilate everyone a second time before happily reuniting with his family and going home.  One wonders what might happen in Taken 3.

Occasionally the endorsement is less direct, reflected in themes and motifs rather than in-your-face montages of exploding terrorists in turbans.  In this month’s Gangster Squad, LAPD sergeants John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) and Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) go outside the restrictive confines of the law to take down diabolical mob boss Mickey Cohen.  Reviving a long tradition in American cinema (see The Star Chamber and, well, any superhero movie ever made) of well-meaning figures who subvert established lines of authority and accountability in their pursuit of justice, Brolin and Gosling lead an elite assassination team through the crime-ridden streets of L.A.

“Leave these,” commands Brolin with a gesture at his LAPD badge, “at home. Nobody will ever know what we’ve done.”  Secrecy is paramount, and public recognition unimportant, to these cloak-and-dagger upholders of the law.  As Gosling prepares to shotgun a prostrate criminal, the gangster mumbles in shock, “you can’t shoot me – you’re a cop.”

“Not anymore,” grins a steely-eyed Gosling.  BLAM.  Problem solved.  The movie’s tagline: “To save the law, break it.”

Gangster Squad’s unaccountable cops could just as well be Zero Dark Thirty’s Seal Team Six: righteous executors of justice in a messy, overly complicated world that needs cleaning up by hard men with big guns and no sympathy.  What directors like ZDT’s Kathryn Bigelow and Gangster Squad’s Ruben Fleischer have done is show us what the good guys can really do when their guns are liberated from the cumbersome technicalities of the law and the moralistic eye of public scrutiny.

Yet just as the film industry has proven itself less explicitly anti-American than conservatives fear, its more nuanced representatives have shown themselves capable of societal self-reflection – and guarded self-criticism –  to an extent liberals can appreciate.  Hollywood has adeptly restructured an age-old literary leitmotif – the hero who goes so dangerously far in fighting evil that he eventually becomes the evil himself – to fit a contemporary cultural moment anxious about the corrosive influence of the deep state on American life.

The Lord of the Rings has its Boromir and Star Wars has its Anakin Skywalker as surely as America has its Abu Ghraibs and Guantanamos.  “What would I do without you?” hisses Heath Ledger’s Joker to Batman during a violent interrogation in which our favorite masked vigilante smashes the Joker’s head into a steel table and crushes his hand under a gloved fist; “you… you complete me.”  The Joker is Batman’s creation as much as Batman is his; the morally compromised hero and the anarchic purveyor of chaos each serve as the other’s raison d’être.  Director Christopher Nolan, no acolyte of the liberal orthodoxy, nonetheless pays homage to the old Greenwaldian argument that violent counterterrorism, like any other force, tends to produce an equal and opposite reaction.

Peter Berg draws similar conclusions in his harrowing 2007 drama The Kingdom, a chronicle of the cultural clash between Saudi and American investigators in the aftermath of a horrific Khobar Towers-style bombing at an American expat housing compound in Saudi Arabia. The film opens rather as one might expect it to: Lots of innocent American bodies get strewn about into bloody fragments, a respected FBI agent dies, and as American investigator Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner) begins to cry, Special Agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) leans in to whisper reassuringly in her ear: “we will kill them all.”

Fleury and his team, of course, skillfully proceed to track down terrorist mastermind Abu Hamza in his heavily armed redoubt, machine-gunning countless jihadists along the way.  In the film’s bloody denouement, Hamza and his grandson are both killed, leaving his daughter and granddaughter sobbing in the charred remains of what had once been their home.  “Don’t fear them,” murmurs the mother to her child as Foxx and team depart; “we will kill them all.”  Thus does Berg bookend the film’s heartening shoot-’em-up climax with a chilling coda, adumbrating the shadowy outlines of a future filled with mutual vengeance and marked above all by the everlasting absence of a meaningful peace.

2012’s Argo is similarly subtle, embodying neither the unblinkered jingoism of the classic Middle Eastern hostage flick nor the self-flagellating internal doubt so often attributed to the weak-kneed liberal media.  Conservatives who left the theater in disgust after Argo’s opening exordium, which contextualizes the Islamic Revolution against Operation Ajax and the CIA-orchestrated installation of the brutally autocratic Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavī, would have missed out on just under two hours of American ingenuity triumphing over Iranian fundamentalism, capped by the inspiring image of returning CIA hero Tony Mendez (director Ben Affleck) walking past a white picket fence into a suburban home proudly bedecked with fluttering American flag.

Argo takes the time to understand the origins of anti-Americanism but doesn’t cave when faced with it.  In the course of his quest to rescue six innocent U.S. Embassy employees trapped in revolutionary Tehran, Affleck’s conflicted yet persistent Mendez confronts State Department idiocy (“Or you could just send in training wheels and meet them at the border with Gatorade,” he responds to a particularly harebrained scheme involving bicycles and the Turkish border) with the same understated tenacity with which he faces down the bearded zealots of the Revolutionary Guard.  Confronted by a fanatical pro-censorship bureaucrat in Iran’s totalitarian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Mendez doesn’t deliver a full-throated disquisition on American rights and values; he listens patiently, nods, and calmly takes the next step in getting his fellow citizens home.

Affleck’s pragmatic, ideology-less direction of Argo reflects a new set of cinematic values and strategies shaped by the tide of cultural evolution since 2001.  Certain themes resonate throughout the spectrum of post-9/11 action filmography: The amorality of warfare in an age of uncertainty; the need to keep the American public uninformed of the actions that keep them safe, lest they balk at those actions’ necessary dangers; the importance of secrecy, shadows, and unaccountability in fighting a new kind of terrorist; the essential rightness of the good guys, even when they act beyond the restrictions of law and social convention and even when they feel morally conflicted.  Justice is quick, swift, and clean: it’s telling that the most we see of national archenemy Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty is a hooked nose protruding from the depths of a body bag.

These new values are, of course, both external influences on and manifestations of our own extant beliefs.  Hollywood tells us what we should think as often as it reinforces what we already think, leads as often as it follows, guides as often as it reflects.  It is American society’s lodestar as surely as it is our vanity mirror.

The disjuncture here, of course, is that, as the timeless Alfredo reminds us in Cinema Paradiso, “life isn’t like in the movies. Life is much harder.”  In real life, there’s collateral damage.  In real life, there isn’t always a happy ending.  In real life, there are no credits to roll at the perfect plot-driven moment.

The challenge today’s audiences face, then, is recognizing and grappling with the moral dilemmas our best films interrogate while simultaneously acknowledging those films’ idealization of a more complex reality.

So to dismissive law-and-order conservatives weaned on skepticism and suspicious of the silver screen, take a second look at the popular culture you thought you hated.  And to aspiring Hollywood liberals, curb your enthusiasm: the films you love and the politics you hold dear may not mesh as smoothly as you once hoped they might.

“Some men,” observes Alfred (Michael Caine) in The Dark Knight, “aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Whether that enemy is the Joker or Al Qaeda, mob bosses from the East Coast or terrorists from the Eastern Hemisphere, it’s faceless heroes who are still fighting society’s battles today.  What Hollywood’s better directors are asking us is this: are we ready for Harvey Dent?  Do we still need our Dark Knights?  And if so, are we morally okay with that?

At the conclusion of The Dark Knight, Commissioner Gordon explains to his young son that Batman is “the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now.”

He had it backwards.  The Dark Knight may be the hero Gotham needs right now – but this city deserves better.

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Din and Discord https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/13/din-and-discord/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/13/din-and-discord/#respond Mon, 14 Jan 2013 07:27:16 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1074053 The less united we feel, the more prone we are to societal violence.

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In last week’s column, I suggested that the origins of this nation’s unusually high levels of gun violence may lie partly in the erosion of the human connections that make America cohere. This week, I’d like to examine more deeply the dangers of social dislocation in a nation grounded firmly in diversity and individualism – and to ask, as Lincoln once did, whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

The relative absence of unifying coercive mechanisms or natural cultural affinities in this country has generally meant that the ties that bind us to our fellow Americans must be forged freely and voluntarily. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations,” observed de Tocqueville in 1835. “They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive.”

The unifying social purpose of the German Volk or the Soviet proletariat has been fulfilled in America by the church, the sports team, the labor union, the company, the family, the Elks Club and the millions of other associative groups that give individual lives a larger meaning.

But amid the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, many sociologists argue, that old communal order began to crumble, replaced by an increasingly atomized society that valued solitude over togetherness and withdrawal over engagement. “I am a rock/I am an island,” sang Simon and Garfunkel in 1965. “I’ve built walls/ A fortress deep and mighty/ That none may penetrate/ I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain/ It’s laughter, and it’s loving I disdain… I touch no one and no one touches me.”

With each man his own island, the institutions that had bound society together began a long slide into obsolescence, with communities drifting further apart from one another even as their own members fled in droves. Political scientists, for instance, have noted a marked uptick in political party polarization, with Democratic and Republican legislators further apart on the ideological spectrum than they have been at any time since the 1920s. At the same time, a wave of political “dealignment” since the 1960s has sparked an exodus from both major parties, with the number of independents – at 40 percent, an all-time high – now outnumbering both committed Republicans (27 percent) and die-hard Democrats (31 percent). The parties don’t trust each other anymore, and we sure don’t trust them.

The U.S. military, once the crucible of the Greatest Generation, has undergone a seismic shift of similar proportion. The abolition of the draft has transformed the army into a professional, all-volunteer force, increasingly sequestered from civil society – with dangerous consequences. Lamenting “the modern military’s disjunction from American society,” Stanford History Professor Emeritus David Kennedy has observed that “history’s most potent military force can now be put into the field by a society that scarcely breaks a sweat when it does so. We can now wage war while putting at risk very few of our sons and daughters, none of whom is obliged to serve.”

The citizen and the soldier have split; so have an increasing number of husbands and wives. The meteoric rise of divorce rates since 1965 has resulted in a significant increase in the number of single-parent families – even as the number of Americans living completely alone, neither married nor cohabiting nor sharing a space with roommates, has reached an all-time high of 28 percent.

Not only do we increasingly live alone, we dislike talking to people who don’t agree with us. Not talking to them, as legal scholar Cass Sunstein points out in his book “Republic.com 2.0,” has become easier than ever, thanks to the comfortable “echo chambers” and “information cocoons” of the internet, which shelter us from the unpleasant cacophony of dissenting voices. And income inequality is at an all-time high, dividing rich and poor into extremes of stupendous luxury and grinding poverty.

None of this, predictably, bodes particularly well for society as a whole. Psychologist Muzafer Sharif’s classic Robber’s Cave experiment demonstrated the perils of inter-group competition and celebrated the benefits of intra-group cooperation: people are happier and less violent, in short, when we feel connected and dedicated to a common goal. The less united we feel, the more prone we are to societal violence.

The very nature of voluntary social disintegration, unfortunately, makes it one of the problems least amenable to solution by political means. Forcing people to associate violates core American traditions and values; the strength of our communities has been reinforced, as de Tocqueville noted, by the fact that we actively and freely join them. Next week, I’ll take a look at analyzing some tentative solutions.

“No man is an island,” wrote English poet John Donne. “Any man’s death diminishes me,/because I am involved in mankind./And therefore never send to know for whom/ the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

How right, and how prescient, he was.

Make a connection with Miles at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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Death, community and the death of community https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/08/death-community-and-the-death-of-community/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/08/death-community-and-the-death-of-community/#comments Wed, 09 Jan 2013 07:51:19 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073953 Common explanations for America’s high homicide rate are unsatisfactory on their own.

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Columbine. Aurora. Newtown. The nation needs answers, and all we get is more death – and more questions.

The most complex question, and by far the most heavily politicized, is why. Why does the United States have a gun-related murder rate 19.5 times higher than that of similarly high-income countries around the world? Why are mass shootings so devastatingly common here? What makes us so perversely special?

Conventional liberals have a ready-made answer: uniquely lax gun laws and the frustrating permanence of the Second Amendment. Conventional conservatives have no similar go-to response; gun rights advocates instead point to causes as diverse as mental illness, the influence of violent video games, a decline in religious belief and the gradual erosion of America’s bedrock Christian morality.

Yet the evidence indicates that these common explanations for America’s high homicide rate are unsatisfactory on their own. Stronger gun laws, for instance, do not always correlate with less gun crime, or vice-versa. Among OECD countries, Mexico, with its near-total ban on private firearm ownership, has a firearm homicide rate three times as high as America’s. Tiny Switzerland, meanwhile, with its strong tradition of militia service, has 420,000 assault rifles stored at private homes and gun ownership rates second only to the U.S. among rich countries – yet the small Alpine nation recorded only 40 gun-related homicides in 2010. America averaged 10,987 per year from 2007 through 2009. The city of Chicago alone recorded twelve murders in the first week of 2012.

Most damningly, our homicide rates are 6.9 times higher than the rich-country average even when all types of murder – not just homicides by gun – are included. If people wanted to kill each other with equal ferocity in other countries, and easier access to guns was the only differentiating factor, we would expect overall murder rates to be much more similar, even if the widespread ownership of guns made them the murder weapon of choice in the U.S.

The mental illness explanation suffers from similar problems, as do the video game and religion narratives. There is no reliable evidence to suggest that the United States has more mentally ill people per capita than other rich countries – though as my colleague Emily Cohodes suggests, we have a long way to go in treating mental illness adequately. Largely secular Europe has murder rates far lower than the heavily religious U.S. And there is actually a negative correlation between video game spending per capita and gun violence; game-crazy Japan, Germany, and South Korea have per-capita murder rates near zero.

I’m no sociologist, but I think there’s something else going on here – something difficult to quantify, and something the media has largely ignored. My guess is that America’s high levels of violence stem at least in part from the slow disappearance of community, broadly defined; communities that give individual lives meaning and bind men together in the social fabric that defines us.

“Man is by nature a social animal,” remarked Aristotle in his Politics; “an individual who is unsocial naturally… is either beneath our notice or more than human.” Sartre, ever the optimist, groaned that “hell is other people” – but history has given him the lie. Human beings, buffeted by the tides of suffering and despair, have always sought solace in their fellow men.

In uniquely diverse America, a land explicitly grounded in difference rather than homogeneity, voluntary association has traditionally slaked man’s thirst for social meaning. Alexis de Tocqueville famously called us “a nation of joiners” as early as 1835, observing that American civil society constituted itself around voluntary institutions like the church, the political party, the reading group and the theater.

But as Harvard sociologist Robert D. Putnam argues in his seminal and troubling work Bowling Alone, participation in collective social ventures, from bowling clubs to voting booths to labor unions to churches to the Boy Scouts, has declined sharply since the 1960s. Putnam laments, with formidable statistical evidence, the slow individualization and atomization of American life. Our connections to each other are fraying, slowly being replaced by the formless void of television and the Internet.

Here could be the missing piece of the sociological puzzle surrounding guns and violence. Japan, Switzerland, Korea – all largely homogeneous societies, whose populations look similar, share basic cultural assumptions, in which each individual naturally recognizes something of himself in his fellow citizen. Belonging to the larger whole is an easy task.

The U.S. is different. It takes more work to appreciate the basic humanity of people who look, talk, eat and entertain themselves differently than you do. Uniquely high levels of income inequality make life qualitatively different for rich and poor, separating social classes into isolated spheres of existence. Voluntary associations and institutions have traditionally helped establish unifying connections across such boundaries, erasing alienating differences and forging ties of common humanity.

With the disappearance of such connections comes dislocation and violence. Philosopher Hannah Arendt has noted that mass killings require the systematic dehumanization of the victim; it is hard to kill someone, after all, with whom one feels a shared sense of being.

It is unsurprising, then, that so many mass murderers kill immediately following a serious withdrawal from society. James Holmes, the Aurora theater shooter, quit his neuroscience graduate program at the University of Colorado in June. He murdered twelve people in July. Even before dropping out, Holmes lacked meaningful connections to the other students in his program. In the words of one fellow student: “He always seemed to be off in his own world, which did not involve other people, as far as I could tell.”

George Hennard, who shot 50 people in Killeen, Texas on the sixteenth of October 1991, was unemployed, and those who knew him described him as “angry and withdrawn.” On Sept. 27, 2012, Andrew Engeldinger shot five people to death in Minneapolis. He had just lost his job. Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter, was described as a “loner” and “antisocial.” He had craved a sense of belonging and hoped to join the U.S. military. His mother, Nancy Lanza, “squashed” that dream, reminding him that he “didn’t like to be touched.” After dropping out from classes at university in 2009 – the same year his father left the house – Lanza withdrew even further into himself, finally shooting his mother and 26 other people this December.

Enjoying the solitary life does not mean that a murderous rampage is imminent. Nor does it tell the whole story: access to guns, deficiencies in the mental health system and drug and gang-related violence are all part of the picture too.

But if we want to explain this particularly nasty iteration of American Exceptionalism, it would be wise to consider the possibility that death in our communities may flow in part from the death of community itself.

Contact Miles at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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It could be a wonderful year https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/07/it-could-be-a-wonderful-year/ https://stanforddaily.com/2013/01/07/it-could-be-a-wonderful-year/#respond Mon, 07 Jan 2013 19:08:04 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073862 Some stories never change.

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Like a great many of you, I spent much of my Christmas Eve this year enjoying Frank Capra’s 1946 holiday classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Nearly seventy years after its release, the heartwarming story of selfless Bedford Falls banker George Bailey’s lifelong suffering and last-minute redemption continues to resonate deeply with millions of viewers each and every December. Paying homage to time-honored American values of courage, civic duty and devotion to community, “It’s a Wonderful Life” illuminates the brightness of a single thoughtfully-lived life against the encroaching darkness of selfishness and despair, weaving a narrative whose moral chiaroscuro is mirrored in the film’s timeless black-and-white cinematography.

Part of the film’s enduring appeal undoubtedly lies in the simplicity of its blueprint for an ethically healthy community. As the nation crawls back up the unforgiving face of the fiscal cliff, reels from the horrific aftermath of yet another mass shooting, and, as Bedford Falls did, begins to welcome home our soldiers from a long and brutal war, we could stand to learn a few lessons from the trials and tribulations of George Bailey.

At first glance, Capra’s portrayal of small-town Bedford Falls appears to endorse an essentially liberal vision of the good society. The film’s greedy antagonist, the wealthy and self-aggrandizing Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), has no greater goal in life than the constant acquisition of more money and larger properties. The pernicious Potter, a true vulture capitalist, buys up and dismembers cherished pieces of small-town Bedford Falls, turning happy family homes into soul-sucking slums and reducing hard-working blue-collar men to impoverished serfs. The only thing standing in his way is the heroic George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), owner of the Building and Loan, who selflessly rejects the bold, adventurous life of which he has always dreamed in order to lend his fellow citizens the money they need to get a hand up in life.

But “It’s a Wonderful Life” is also imbued with fundamentally conservative virtues of self-reliance, individual agency and collective morality. The government is nowhere to be seen; Bedford Falls’ poor and destitute find solace in the generosity of a private individual. The film’s famous closing scenes contain no Robin Hood-esque IRS agent swooping in to tax Mr. Potter’s estate and redistribute the proceeds; Bedford Falls instead finds joy in community, shared duty and family. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously remarked that “the central conservative truth is that culture, not politics, determines the success of a society.” Culture (shared values of charity), not politics (the hand of the state), is the town’s indisputable guiding force.

All in all, “It’s a Wonderful Life” reflects the political and cultural spectrum of a different time – a time in which the prevailing wisdom, shared assumptions, and basic fabric of society looked fundamentally different. Without going nearly so far as to suggest that the ideal America is the America of 1946 romanticized in film, I do think very much that filmgoers in 2012 could stand to gain by incorporating a few of Capra’s lessons into our own lives today.

Taking care of our own, eschewing the empty pursuit of money in favor of a cause, whether that be family, athletics, art, scientific progress, or activism; taking the time to know and support the members of your community – these are not particularly liberal or conservative ideals. “Material well-being,” observed Theodore Roosevelt in 1910, “represents nothing but the foundation, and that… foundation, though indispensable, is worthless unless upon it is raised the superstructure of a higher life.” That higher life is the subject of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and it should be our object now.

Ultimately, the film suggests that our problems flow from nonpartisan sources, and that fruitful solutions may lie in a philosophy of life that transcends political lines and that may not be achievable via political means.

Small-town 1940s America may be gone, and with it the possibility for small-town 1940s solutions to small-town 1940s problems.

But some stories never change.

Did you watch It’s a Wonderful Life this year?  Let Miles know what you thought at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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Two visions of democracy https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/25/two-visions-of-democracy/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/11/25/two-visions-of-democracy/#comments Mon, 26 Nov 2012 06:59:04 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1073349 Do we want our representatives to serve us best, or to actually be us?

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Political scientists draw an elementary distinction between two models of representative democracy, both first articulated by British political philosopher Edmund Burke. In the first, termed the “delegate model,” elected officials exist only to articulate the voice of their constituents. Like the monstrous king that adorned the original cover of Hobbes’ “Leviathan,” these public officials are theoretically mere agglomerations of the people they represent, possessing no opinion or will separate from the collective voice of the voters.

In the second, termed the “trustee model,” voters elect the best candidate to office in the hopes that he will wisely exercise his own judgment in the service of the public interest, regardless of how his constituents may feel about each particular issue. Voters entrust power to such a trustee, Burke thought, in order that “his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience” may benefit the public at large, especially when dealing with particularly complex issues about which the masses may be uninformed. “Your representative,” remarked Burke, “owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

American democracy has generally sought to strike a balance between these two models, with each historical era favoring one or the other to a degree conditioned by the needs and prevailing temperament of the people. The Framers – distrustful of a trustee-like “virtual representation” model in the British Parliament under which each Member theoretically represented the whole Empire but in reality cared little about the welfare of the American colonists – deliberately favored the delegate model, embedding in our Constitution an electoral system whereby each member of Congress directly represented the interests of the State from which they hailed. As concerns about “pork barrel” spending and distaste for narrow partisan interests have grown, however, the trustee model has swung back into vogue. No longer is it intellectually fashionable for senators or representatives to openly admit to hoarding federal dollars in their state or district, for example, although the delegate model would (and does) encourage such tactics.

Both models have their advantages. American democracy benefits most when our representatives are both directly beholden to the wishes of the people and free to exercise their own expert judgment on specific issues about which voters know little or have no clear opinion.

But recent events have made clear the greatest danger of a delegate model run amok: the dumbing-down of democracy to the commonest denominator.

When interviewed by GQ for its December issue, for instance, Florida GOP Senator Marco Rubio refused to give a clear answer to the simplest of questions: “How old do you think the Earth is?”

“I’m not a scientist, man,” replied Rubio carefully. “I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.”

Let’s be clear here. Mr. Rubio is an intelligent, educated man, and well aware that the Earth is billions of years old. But in order to get elected by a crowd of conservative Florida Republicans almost as old as they think the Earth is — in other words, the constituents he’s supposed to represent — he’s got to pretend like he doesn’t have a clue.

Under the limits of a pure delegate model, representatives are required to act as stupid as their constituents really are. That perverse constraint on our national intelligence is the primary subject of Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell’s biting memoir, “A Nation of Wusses: How America’s Leaders Lost the Guts to Make Us Great.” A discouraging chronicle of “politicians pretending to stand on principle while, in fact, pandering to their bases” and “flip-flopping on issues, not because of new information, but because of new polls,” “A Nation of Wusses” exposes an American political class increasingly willing to abandon brains and bravery for political gain, whether on the age of the Earth or global warming. It’s a sad story of people who know better deliberately trying not to.

In some sense, a pure delegate model is the American Dream materialized — a Washington populated entirely by Mr. Smiths, average guys and gals just like us.

But such a model also requires that those average guys and gals limit themselves to averageness. To strive for anything more or better would be to become a trustee, to use one’s own wisdom and experience to serve the public good to the fullest, and to grow beyond the confines of the mold imposed by the unexceptional median voter. Such a model leaves no room, in short, for Lincolns — politicians who eschew the safe, easy choices in favor of what they know to be right and true.

The question is, do we want our representatives to serve us best, or to actually be us? I’ll take the former.

Shoot Miles your best guess as to the age of the Earth at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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China Complex https://stanforddaily.com/2012/10/22/china-complex/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/10/22/china-complex/#respond Mon, 22 Oct 2012 08:14:14 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1072094 Few things capture the spirit of a nation more keenly than the future it sees itself living. Apparently we don’t think much of ours.

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“I’m from the future. You should go to China.”

Thus speaks menacing mob boss Abe (Jeff Daniels) in the recent hit film “Looper” to Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an assassin sent to kill his older self (Bruce Willis) by the black-coated, time-traveling mob. As the America of 2042 crumbles into a dystopian wreck populated solely by the homeless and trigger-happy, Young Joe cheerfully kills himself and then merrily sets off to Shanghai for a future he knows will end in death at his own hand.

Few things capture the spirit of a nation more keenly than the future it sees itself living. Apparently we don’t think much of ours.

Empty political rhetoric about American exceptionalism aside, public discourse in this country has become increasingly populated by a vision of the future in which a decadent and weak-willed America falls under the economic dominance of a rising China.

In June of this year, China surpassed the United States for the first time in the eyes of the global public as the world’s number one economic power. Gallup found that Americans share that opinion, with 53 percent of Americans viewing China as the country most likely to dominate the future world economy (up from just 16 percent in 2000).

Writing in The New York Times, venture capitalist Eric X. Li seized on these widespread fears of inevitable decline, declaring bluntly that “China’s political model is superior.” America’s future, Li wrote, will be marked by “endless referendums, paralysis and insolvency.” The only way to fend off disaster, he concluded, is to become more like China – an unlikely possibility, since America “seems incapable of becoming less democratic even when its survival may depend on such a shift.”

The creeping pessimism has even snuck its way into that most quintessentially American of institutions: professional football. Two years ago, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell went off on a memorable radio rant when the NFL postponed a Sunday night game between the Minnesota Vikings and Philadelphia Eagles due to blizzard forecasts.

“We’ve become a nation of wusses!” yelled an infuriated Rendell. “The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.”

That pretty much sums it up: The country is about to be overrun, à la the upcoming Chris Hemsworth blockbuster “Red Dawn,” by untold legions of goose-stepping China-bots.

There’s only one problem: We’ve heard this all before.

First it was Nazi Germany, 1936, destined to rule the world as America fell to pieces. Writing in June 1941, essayist E.B. White spoke discouragingly of the everyday New Yorkers he interviewed who had lost faith in the fundamental precepts of American democracy. One man, fascinated by the clean young faces of the German soldiers in the newsreels, told him calmly that fascism was the future. “Another man,” wrote White, “informed me that our democratic form of government was decadent and not worth bothering about.” Not a single man maintained faith in the American way. Instead, wrote White, “I found paralysis, or a sort of dim acquiescence, as in a child who is duly swallowing a distasteful pill.”

Then it was the Soviets whose model was inherently superior, at least until 1989; and then Japan, with its brilliant industrial policy, at least until its lost decade; and now it is China.

The fact is, we do need reform, and fast. As Thomas Friedman and many others have written, we are spending, among other things, too much on consumption (or, in one critic’s terms, “warfare and welfare”) and not enough on research and investment. We are failing to negotiate the clean energy challenge. And structural deficiencies plague our public commitments to the poor and weak (Medicare and Social Security foremost among them).

In 1967, French intellectual Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber penned The American Challenge, a critique of European economic attitudes and policies in the face of a seemingly indomitable American industrial juggernaut. Unless Europe reformed and reformed quickly, Servan-Schreiber urged, the Continent would fall irretrievably behind in the race for economic and political prominence.

We need another statement like Servan-Schreiber’s: one that recognizes the problems America faces and the advantages China and other rising economies have acquired, but nonetheless maintains that reform and progress are possible within the framework of our nation’s political and economic traditions. Empty complaints and defeatism have never gotten us anywhere, and they won’t do much good now.

Write Miles anytime at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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Lessons from above https://stanforddaily.com/2012/10/15/lessons-from-above/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/10/15/lessons-from-above/#respond Mon, 15 Oct 2012 17:19:48 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1071805 As companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic forge further outward and upward, we could use more projects modeled on the example of Red Bull Stratos.

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When professional daredevil Felix Baumgartner fell to earth at 833.9 miles per hour yesterday, he shattered records, helped acquire valuable data for future scientific endeavors and captivated millions of viewers around the world.  But his four minutes of free-fall and eventual safe landing in the New Mexico desert did much more than that.  It also provided a model for what the future of space exploration – and great enterprise more generally – could look like.

First, Baumgartner’s jump was financed by Red Bull, a private corporation with a financial interest in big-time media publicity and an apparent penchant for the daring and dangerous.  In an era of drastic cuts in government funding for research and development, Red Bull spent untold millions of dollars on a project that took five years to plan.  Private corporations like Red Bull have one institutional advantage over governments in this regard: political administrations come and go quickly, as do their priorities and ideologies, making long-term national projects – from wars to space exploration to basic research – difficult to sustain.  Exxon-Mobil CEO Lee Raymond famously remarked that “we see governments come and go.”  That is terrifying.  But it also speaks to the unique capability of corporations to think big, and long-term, in ways ephemeral democratic governments can’t or won’t.

Second, the scientific expertise backing Red Bull Stratos (the official name for Baumgartner’s death-defying stunt) flowed from a combination of private ingenuity and publicly funded research and education.  The mission’s medical director, Jonathan Clark, previously oversaw the health of astronauts at NASA.  84-year-old Joe Kittinger, the previous highest-jump record-holder in charge of direct communication between Mission Control in Roswell and the ascending Mr. Baumgartner, acquired his formidable skills in the United States Air Force.  Mike Todd, who designed Mr. Baumgartner’s next-generation suit, worked for defense contractor Lockheed Martin.  Senior flight engineer Marle Hewitt is a retired US Navy Commander, while Technical Project Director Art Thompson received his education in the public University of California system and then founded his own successful aerospace firm.

Third, Red Bull Stratos required a sustained, collective application of effort by a well-coordinated team of dedicated professionals, many of whom will go forever unmentioned in the major news reports.  It required phenomenal levels of personal courage and initiative by one particularly daring man, yes.  But sheer guts and individual heroism weren’t enough – the project also required contributions from a vast array of hardworking men and women whose names won’t make it into the record books.

Fourth, people care, and care a lot.  Eight million people tuned in to Red Bull’s live feed of Baumgartner’s dive, shattering the previous YouTube record of half a million (recorded during the Summer Olympics).  Human beings still want to expand the boundaries of what is technologically and physically possible, even at tremendous financial cost and with little direct and immediate benefit to themselves.

All of this is instructive – and encouraging.

As companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic forge further outward and upward, we could use more projects modeled on the example of Red Bull Stratos.  Great achievements can be realized, knowledge expanded, barriers broken, by harnessing the engines of private enterprise to the technical skills provided by a well-funded system of public education and a vision articulated by the collective will.

There are many men and women out there ready to be the next Felix Baumgartner – ready to chart new frontiers in space, medicine, the arts, and engineering.  If yesterday’s spectacle was any indication, we can all help them get there – by channeling the formidable power of the invisible hand, by supporting the new and the innovative, and by recognizing and celebrating the valuable contributions society at large makes to the achievements of each individual hero.

“Sometimes,” remarked Mr. Baumgartner as he prepared to fall from the heavens, “you have to go up really high to understand how small you really are.”  How right he was.

Contact Miles at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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Affirmative Action? Good, but not enough https://stanforddaily.com/2012/10/08/affirmative-action-good-but-not-enough/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/10/08/affirmative-action-good-but-not-enough/#comments Mon, 08 Oct 2012 07:17:25 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1071559 Affirmative action before college is too little, too late.

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On Wednesday, the Supreme Court of the United States will hear oral argument in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas.  Brought by Abigail Fisher, a white student who claims that the University of Texas system denied her admission because of her race under its current affirmative action plan, Fisher has the potential to render race-based affirmative action unconstitutional in university admissions – especially given the conservative bent of the current Court.

The upcoming case has reignited an old series of debates, largely untouched since 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger, about the continued relevance of affirmative action programs in higher education.  People smarter and more informed than I am have advocated various policy solutions – shifting the focus of affirmative action from race to class, doing away with affirmative action altogether, or strengthening a fading national commitment to students of minority descent by preserving the status quo – in response to what could be one of the Court’s most important rulings on race and education this side of the new century.  I’m not going to rehash these debates here.

Instead, I’d like to argue very briefly that all of this rather misses the point.  All parties to the argument seem to agree that affirmative action artificially increases the number of minority students admitted to universities; they simply disagree about whether this measure is justified.  I’d like to suggest that the very fact that African-American, Hispanic, and lower-class students of all races still continue to require assistance from the state in order to make it to college is proof in itself that this country continues to face very serious problems in educational and social equity – problems that begin long before the senior year admissions dance to which Fisher is about to set the tune.

By the time a high school senior decides to apply to college – and many, too many, never do – many of her skills, interests, talents, and convictions have already been determined by her parents, living environment, and level of educational opportunity.

The Fisher case provides instructive evidence in this regard.  The University of Texas system, in an attempt to maintain a diverse entering class via racially neutral means, has long used a “top ten percent” system to admit freshman applicants.  The system works, as the name suggests, by automatically accepting applicants from the top ten percent of their high school class.  Since a significant number of high schools in Texas remain effectively racially homogeneous, the “top ten percent” plan has had the beneficial side effect of admitting African-American and Hispanic students who have performed well by the standards of their de facto segregated high schools – even if not by state or national standards – into the University of Texas system.

But by the time the top ten percent plan has kicked in, many of these students have faced twelve years of schooling in an inadequate, segregated system.  The damage has been done.  And affirmative action has become a Band-Aid on a gaping wound.

In short, affirmative action before college is too little, too late.  Tinkering with admissions numbers when a child is 18 does little to address the many underlying root causes of inequality – causes from race to class to geographic location – that this country has yet to deal with in a satisfactory, even adequate, manner.

Whatever the Court decides in Fisher will make headline news.  The countless individual stories of kids in schools with more guns than books, kids with single moms or dads whose jobs got them home too late to read before bed, kids who missed out on the elite $20,000-per-year kindergarten regime and had to settle for inadequately funded public schools – those stories won’t.

But those are precisely the stories we should be listening to.

Contact Miles at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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Fire in a Crowded World? https://stanforddaily.com/2012/10/01/fire-in-a-crowded-world/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/10/01/fire-in-a-crowded-world/#respond Mon, 01 Oct 2012 18:12:14 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1071303 Nearly three weeks after the September 11th attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya that left Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three members of his staff dead, the debate continues: who should be held ethically responsible, and how?

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Nearly three weeks after the September 11th attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that left Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three members of his staff dead, the debate continues: who should be held ethically responsible, and how?

One line of accusation favors condemning Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (pseudonym “Sam Bacile”), the filmmaker thought to be the mastermind behind “Innocence of Muslims,” the movie that set off protests across the Islamic world and may have helped trigger the deadly assault in Benghazi.  According to this line of thought, Nakoula and his fellow filmmakers knew that their actions would cause harm to U.S. personnel overseas, had no right to engage in “hate speech” that defamed Islam and Muslims, and are therefore the chief villains in this still-unfolding story.

Some pundits and commentators have even argued that Nakoula and Florida pastor Terry Jones, who helped promote the video, should be subjected to legal prosecution.  “It is not clear to me why Sam Bacile and Terry Jones are not being prosecuted for engaging in hate speech,” explained one representative commenter on the New York Times website.  “It is one thing to criticize, something totally different to incite. This film is almost the literal equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded movie theater.”

“Sam Bacile and Terry Jones have shouted fire in a crowded theater,” explained another anonymous commenter, garnering 1,371 “likes.” “That crowded theater is the 7-billion-person world we live in, connected via the Internet… At the very least, a lawsuit against them should be allowed to proceed.”

Anthea Butler, a professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania, went so far as to contend in USA Today that Nakoula should be jailed.  While free speech is an important right, argued Butler, it’s not important enough to justify causing the deaths of U.S. personnel overseas.  “While the First Amendment right to free expression is important,” she concluded, “it is also important to remember that other countries and cultures do not have to understand or respect our right.”

But while this line of argument may be emotionally powerful and superficially convincing, I do not believe it holds up under closer logical scrutiny.

First, this type of argument is even more insulting to Muslims than the film it purports to condemn.  By comparing the speech of Nakoula and Jones to “shouting fire in a crowded theater,” the argument relies on the premise that Muslims/Arabs always burn and pillage things whenever Islam is insulted, like robots programmed to attack on sight.  That premise is essential to the argument; we can only morally blame Nakoula if his words directly cause death, and his words can only directly cause death if we assume that Muslims will kill in response to them.

That is racist and, quite frankly, false; out of a global population of more than 1.5 billion Muslims, a very small and fanatical faction of extremists participated in the attacks in Libya.  Human adults, including Muslims, exercise free will and make choices of their own volition – choices like the decision to attack or to refrain from attacking.  People aren’t automatons, and to argue otherwise is insulting and wrong.

Second, to argue that Nakoula and Jones should be jailed, as Professor Butler does, holds our actions hostage to the irrational whims of extremists everywhere.  Since stupid, insulting films offend Islamic extremists, this argument goes, we should prosecute those who make them.

Unfortunately, there are many things that offend Islamic extremists.  Women voting and working outside the home, say, or teaching evolution in the public schools, or worshipping a different God (or many gods, or none at all).  What happens to those freedoms when we subject them to Professor Butler’s odd logic?  Are they crushed under the relativist hammer as easily as the right to free speech seems to be?

A better response to the attacks in Libya should incorporate three essential pieces.  First, it should recognize that the vast majority of Muslims worldwide, unlike the bloodthirsty rioting horde implied by the “fire in a crowded theater” analogy, are peaceful, capable of reasoned argument, and respond to insult with words rather than rockets.  Second, it should make clear (as President Obama did) that Nakoula’s insulting, deplorable film does not represent the sentiments of the American people any more than Ambassador Stevens’ killers represent Muslims.  And third, it should make clear that religious tolerance and free speech can work together, rather than against one another – that the answer to bad speech is better speech, not misguided legal prohibitions.

Use your free speech rights anytime to contact Miles at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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Unterreiner: To the Class of 2016 https://stanforddaily.com/2012/09/17/unterreiner-to-the-class-of-2016/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/09/17/unterreiner-to-the-class-of-2016/#comments Tue, 18 Sep 2012 06:10:36 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1070739 The only people who don't make mistakes at Stanford are the people working in the admissions office at 355 Galvez Street.

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It has become traditional for Daily columnists to offer each year’s incoming freshman class a bit of advice accumulated from the wisdom that flows from time and experience. I’m not going to do that.

I’m not going to do that because time and experience have taught me that failure forges us into stronger thinkers, citizens and friends. It is struggle, not success, that reveals – and changes for the better – who we are. So I’m not going to help you avoid it.

Unterreiner: To the Class of 2016Because even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. The only people who don’t make mistakes at Stanford are the people working in the admissions office at 355 Galvez Street. As much as you may get wrong, always remember this: they got you right.

They got you right. That will be easy to remember this week, and easy to forget by the end of the year. Never lose sight of where you came from and who you are – the person you’ll be during the sun and new friends and pageantry of NSO, the person who worked hard for four years to get here, the person who shone and stood out and impressed – no matter what happens in Chem 33 or Math 51 or the HumBio Core.

But don’t be afraid to leave that person behind either. Don’t be afraid to be uncomfortable. Don’t fear the transformation that comes with defeat.

That’s part of why we’re here at The Daily’s new Opinions section. We are proud to represent, to listen and, yes, to challenge you – especially as you learn and change in the crucible that is this place we call home together.

In this space over the coming weeks, you’ll see columns and editorials on student mental health, on campus culture and politics, on the November election, on sexuality and art and the environment. You’ll see columns you love, columns you profoundly disagree with, columns you can’t stand and, if we do our job well, columns that inspire or change you.

But whatever you read in this space, know this: we will not take our job for granted.

Early last week, rioters burned down the Libyan consulate in Benghazi, taking the lives of four American diplomats, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. The ostensible cause: an amateur film mocking the Prophet Muhammad.

The tragic deaths underscore the importance of both our rights and responsibilities as journalists – rights and responsibilities we take seriously. We at The Stanford Daily are proud to defend the right to free speech – a right not granted or understood in many parts of the world. We are also committed to exercising that right fairly, respectfully and with the force of reason, logic and intellectual rigor.

Along the way, we, like you, will make mistakes. We, like you, will seek to learn from them. And we, like you, will grow and change.

In short, we are your paper, and this is your Opinions section. Like you, we will always do our very best. When we fall short, we expect you to hold us accountable – via op-eds, emails, or letters to the editor. And we will remain committed to our core principles – rational argument, respectful debate and fair dialogue – even as we adapt to the changing reality of campus culture and the world around us.

Welcome to campus. We look forward to working with you.

Miles Unterreiner

Managing Editor for Opinions, Volume 242

 

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Unterreiner: What to do about Chick-fil-A? https://stanforddaily.com/2012/08/16/unterreiner-what-to-do-about-chick-fil-a/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/08/16/unterreiner-what-to-do-about-chick-fil-a/#comments Thu, 16 Aug 2012 08:01:02 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1069697 The messy public debate that has swirled around the Chick-fil-A corporate empire over the past month is one we should be having, and one that adds an important new set of voices to the defining civil rights issue of our time.

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In an odd sort of way, I’m glad Dan Cathy said what he said. Because the messy public debate that has swirled around the Chick-fil-A corporate empire over the past month is one we should be having, and one that adds an important new set of voices to the defining civil rights issue of our time.

But the public needs to be a great deal more precise about what exactly we’re arguing about. This isn’t really one big argument; it’s actually a series of smaller, more specific debates, and it’s vital that the American public clearly define each one before coming to a reasoned, informed conclusion.

The first argument we could have, I suppose, is whether Mr. Cathy ought to be allowed, as the chief operating officer of a family-owned business, to publicly state his opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage. I hope you’ll agree with me that the First Amendment case is pretty clear-cut and doesn’t need addressing here.

The second argument we could have is one about whether Cathy’s comments make good business sense. This is an empirical argument that (a) needs to be backed up by facts and figures, and (b) isn’t over yet, since the total financial impact on Chick-fil-A has yet to be determined. It’s therefore not a particularly useful argument to address seriously in this column.

The third argument we could have is a debate about whether local governments and municipalities, distressed by Mr. Cathy’s comments, in fact have the power to ban Chick-fil-A from opening or maintaining franchises within their jurisdiction. This is essentially a legal question, and the answer is an apparently clear “no.” UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has pointed out that “denying a private business permits because of such speech by its owner is a blatant First Amendment violation.” Cornell law professor Michael C. Dorf has observed that “the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbids government officials from discriminating against a person or business based on the viewpoints expressed by the person or by a representative of the business.” And Adam Schwartz, senior attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, has declared that “the government can regulate discrimination in employment or against customers, but what the government cannot do is to punish someone for their words.” One doesn’t need to be a legal expert to see why: Today’s Boston Chick-fil-A could just as easily become tomorrow’s Birmingham Starbucks.

This leaves us with only one fruitful debate to actually have: whether you, as an individual, will eat at Chick-fil-A. This is essentially a moral question that only individuals are equipped to answer, based on the convictions about marriage equality each person is entitled to have. Unlike marriage equality itself, this isn’t a question of rights or legal and political obligations, a problem that the courts or the legislature can solve for us. This is a question we must all answer for ourselves.

I’ve never eaten at a Chick-fil-A, and Mr. Cathy’s comments have now ensured that I never will. I won’t send my dollars to a corporation only to see my money turned around and donated to political lobbies dedicated to preventing gays and lesbians from entering into the same fulfilling, long-term relationships, protected and sanctioned by the state, that everyone else is allowed to enjoy. And I’m confident that in the long term, the tide of history will sweep away opinions like Mr. Cathy’s, and that the Americans of 50 years from now will look back on us and wonder what the hell took us so long.

But until that time, let’s enjoy one thing about this debate: the chance to glimpse the soul of America through the free and voluntary choices of its people. If you don’t like what Mr. Cathy said, make Chick-fil-A hurt. And if you do, go get a chicken sandwich there every day this week.

There’s not really anything else we have to talk about.

Tell Miles what you plan to do about Chick-fil-A at milesu1@stanford.edu.

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Unterreiner: Sport, space and the nation https://stanforddaily.com/2012/08/09/unterreiner-sport-space-and-the-nation/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/08/09/unterreiner-sport-space-and-the-nation/#comments Thu, 09 Aug 2012 08:29:10 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1069500 Every four years, just as America is at its most divided, we have a chance to come together again through sport. This election year, there is more to divide us than usual. Thankfully, there is more to unite us as well.

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Every four years, just as America is at its most divided, we have a chance to come together again through sport. This election year, there is more to divide us than usual. Thankfully, there is more to unite us as well.

I write primarily about politics, and the more I read and write, the more discouraged I tend to become. Every day seems much like the next: another Israeli-Palestinian peace plan fallen through, another shooting at a cinema or temple, another bombing in Iraq, another squabble over health care or tax returns or fried chicken, another fight between the 1 percent and the 99 percent over, in Lasswell’s famous definition, who gets what, when and how.

That’s why I so treasure those few truly politics-free moments — the moments when we are no longer Republicans or Democrats, upper-crust or lower-class, black or white or brown, but simply Americans. Those moments don’t come often, and most of them seem to come at the Olympics.

It was impossible to feel cynical about much of anything when Gabby Douglas’ smile lit up the world after winning the all-around. The furor around Mitt Romney’s comments about Britain’s preparedness for the Games disappeared from memory when Britain’s Mo Farah and our very own Galen Rupp, training partners in Oregon, embraced after going 1-2 in the 10,000 meter final — two men of different faiths, different ethnicities and different countries, united through shared, brutal effort in the service of sport. Politics lay forgotten as the entire country watched Alex Morgan put a brilliant finish past a horrified Canadian squad in the final minute of extra time, snapping 122 minutes of tension in one final moment of glorious victory. To paraphrase Barack Obama: At that moment we were no longer divided into red states and blue states, but united as fifty red, white and blue states.

When I’m watching NBC’s wonderfully nationalistic coverage of the Games, swamped in patriotic slow-motion montages of American athletes overcoming tremendous adversity to run, jump, swim and, in Ryan Lochte’s case, give disastrous interviews for the stars and stripes, I forget for a moment all the things that need fixing about our country and remember everything we’ve done right.

And among those things is continuing to support the American space program, which recently landed the cutting-edge Curiosity rover on Mars after a ridiculously complex landing procedure involving parachutes, rockets and, in the final moments of the so-called “seven minutes of terror,” delicate landing cables.

These are the moments that make us remember why we live in this country, the moments when we can honestly and unflinchingly celebrate collective national achievements, the moments where rancor and bitterness have no place.

They are also the moments on which it is most difficult to place a price tag. Who knows what will come of our distant exploration of a mysterious planet, or which child will be inspired to do great things by watching Missy Franklin or Michael Phelps?

Already, however, critics on both sides of the partisan divide have raised complaints that we ought not to spend the time and money to explore space when there are pressing problems here on Earth; that pure government-funded research without a direct and immediate impact on human welfare is inherently useless; that Olympic athletes get too much attention, earn too much money and divert our attention from more important problems.

Those complaints constitute a dangerous narrowing of our vision and a frightening lowering of our ambitions for humanity. Confining our discussions of the public welfare to narrow questions of self-interest, division and distribution robs the nation of its ability to enjoy a good life that cannot be captured by recourse to numbers, facts and figures.

There is a time and place for everything, and the problems of our nation and the world cannot be solved by feel-good heroics alone. But as far as it is in our power, we ought to continue to support the projects, people and ideas that transcend our small, man-made boundaries and enrich the sum of this human experience we all share.

Share your favorite Olympic moment with Miles at milesu1 “at” stanford “dot” edu.

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Unterreiner: On freedom and fizzy things https://stanforddaily.com/2012/07/26/unterreiner-on-freedom-and-fizzy-things/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/07/26/unterreiner-on-freedom-and-fizzy-things/#comments Thu, 26 Jul 2012 08:02:02 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1068982 The New York City Board of Health will vote September 13 on whether to implement Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed ban on sugary soda in containers larger than 16 ounces. Rather than having a pragmatic, detail-oriented, empirically-based discussion about the merits of Bloomberg’s proposal, however, New Yorkers have, in true American style, elevated the debate into nothing less than a blood-and-tears struggle for freedom against the oppressive forces of tyrannical statism.

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The New York City Board of Health will vote Sept. 13 on whether to implement Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed ban on sugary soda in containers larger than 16 ounces. Rather than having a pragmatic, detail-oriented, empirically-based discussion about the merits of Bloomberg’s proposal, however, New Yorkers have, in true American style, elevated the debate into nothing less than a blood-and-tears struggle for freedom against the oppressive forces of tyrannical statism.

City Councilman Daniel Halloran invoked Martin Niemöller and resurrected the threatening specter of Nazism. “When they came for the cigarettes, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t smoke. When they came for the MSG, I really didn’t care because I didn’t order it very often. I’m not a big salt eater, so I didn’t mind when you guys regulated salt. But what will the government be telling me next?”

Eight-year-olds grabbed Big Gulps and slurped them provocatively at a 200-person mass protest outside City Hall. Soda company spokesmen wailed loudly about the impending demise of personal liberty. And City Councilman Oliver Koppell denounced the ban as “a clear overreaching of government into people’s everyday lives.” “This infringement on the rights of New Yorkers,” lamented Koppell, “leads us to ask: What will be banned next?”

Oddly, it would have been a better idea for Koppell et al. to ditch the high-minded rhetoric and stick with the empirics. Because practically speaking, the plan is unlikely to work. People will buy two smaller drinks at one store, go next door and buy another or make up the calories with a Big Mac and a beer.

But it is precisely on the principle that each man has the right to eat and drink as he likes — the grounds on which the anti-anti-soda people have staked their argument — that the pro-gastronomic-freedom crowd is wrong. Such an argument might once have made ethical sense in a world in which each individual bore the whole cost of her poor decisions. But in a post-Affordable Care Act world of mutual dependence and interconnected costs, there can be no expected right to other people’s money without the expected responsibility to use it wisely — or face the consequences.

As I briefly argued in my last column, a world in which some people have the right to eat, drink and smoke themselves into oblivion at the legally mandated expense of everyone else would be neither efficient nor fair. It would be inefficient because there would be little incentive to treat oneself well if society bears the costs of not doing so, minimizing the chance that individuals will make healthy lifestyle choices. And it would be unfair because no one should have to pay for his neighbor’s irresponsibility — one reason our society is so rightly fed up with bank bailouts and golden parachutes for the creators of toxic derivatives.

Rights — especially so-called positive rights, or rights to something of value provided by the government — generally entail responsibilities, regulations or conditions on the use of the item of value. One can drive as he likes on his own private raceway; on the public roads, he is subject to stoplights and speed limits. When one makes money, he may spend it as he likes; when he receives food stamps, he must spend it on food. One may use his own money to purchase plastic surgery, but Medicare covers only medically necessary procedures and drugs.

In short, we can have personal freedom or we can have government generosity, but we ought not to have both. Eat and drink as you like, but don’t expect everyone else to pay for the consequences. Or vote — as we have — to care for the public with taxpayer money and accept the practical restrictions on personal behavior that are likely to follow. We cannot expect a fiscally sustainable, fair and just society to do otherwise — in New York or anywhere else.

Share your thoughts on soda at milesu1 “at” stanford “dot” edu.

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Unterreiner: Obamacare lacks essential features https://stanforddaily.com/2012/07/19/unterreiner-obamacare-lacks-essential-features/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/07/19/unterreiner-obamacare-lacks-essential-features/#comments Thu, 19 Jul 2012 08:01:58 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1068842 With the vast majority of the Affordable Care Act upheld by the Supreme Court, Obamacare — or what Paul Begala justly called “a policy conceived by the Heritage Foundation, midwifed by Newt Gingrich, raised by Mitt Romney, and then adopted in adulthood by Barack Obama” — is set to become the law of the land.

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Unterreiner: Obamacare lacks essential featuresWith the vast majority of the Affordable Care Act upheld by the Supreme Court, Obamacare — or what Paul Begala justly called “a policy conceived by the Heritage Foundation, midwifed by Newt Gingrich, raised by Mitt Romney, and then adopted in adulthood by Barack Obama” — is set to become the law of the land.

That is largely a positive development: for the tens of millions of previously uninsured Americans who will now have access to a physician, for health insurance companies granted millions of new customers and for an America whose care outcomes have persistently ranked last among developed-world nations.

But more can be done. To curb skyrocketing costs — already twice as high as those in other developed countries — policymakers should remove damaging restrictions on incentivizing healthy behavior by health care consumers and allow insurance companies to price-discriminate based on lifestyle choices.

Health insurance is in this regard a uniquely restricted market. Car insurance companies, for instance, are allowed (as they should be) to charge unsafe drivers more for car insurance. You cause a crash, your premiums go up. Life insurance companies, meanwhile, are allowed to charge people who smoke and older, unhealthier customers more for end-of-life insurance policies.

This all makes intuitive sense. There is no reason why people who drive safely or don’t smoke should be forced to subsidize the poor choices of other people by paying equal prices for these kinds of insurance. And they’re not.

Health insurance, however, is different. As Jon Stewart noted in a segment last November, national lawmakers struck down Pennsylvania Rep. Kathleen Dahlkemper’s HR 3472, which would have “given people a financial incentive to make health improvements” by “allowing health insurance companies to raise or lower premiums based on blood pressure, smoking status, cholesterol levels, body weight, or blood glucose control.”

Many health insurance companies have proposed offering lower prices to people who join gyms, lose weight, join a running club or meet a certain set of medically determined health standards — all activities that have been shown to improve health, lower the incidence of chronic disease and reduce the need for expensive after-the-fact care (the carrot). Others have proposed charging smokers, overeaters and the sedentary more, both to cover company costs and to provide negative incentives to improve personal health (the stick).

Under current law, however, many of these options are off the table. That should change, on both grounds of efficiency and grounds of fairness.

First, a market in which insurance companies are allowed to price-discriminate would reduce health care costs by incentivizing behaviors proven to reduce the incidence of disease, much as road safety is improved by incentivizing drivers not to crash. (Our current health care market is more akin to a world in which everyone pays the same flat rate to fix everyone else’s cars when they crash, regardless of our own driving quality — a world that would be neither efficient nor fair.) In an America far unhealthier and more obese than most European countries, and an America that spends outlandishly on health care while achieving discouragingly poor outcomes, such cost-cutting would go a long way.

Second, regardless of overall market efficiency, it is unjust to force consumers who consciously take care of themselves to subsidize the poor health choices of other consumers by paying the same rate for far less expected care. Genetic or congenital problems, of course, are a different matter and should be covered by the state (or by private insurance operating under a mandate from the state).

All of these changes should also be coupled with healthy eating programs and food vouchers for kids who have limited access to high-quality meals, a reduction in cuts to physical education programs in schools and incentives for employers to offer employees exercise options before, during or after work. Not everyone currently has the same opportunity to stay healthy, and we should strive to create a level playing field for all.

James Madison famously observed in “Federalist No. 51” that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary” — in other words, that no higher power is required to govern the decisions of perfect men. Quite nearly the same could be said of health care: perfectly healthy citizens need no doctors.

No extension of coverage — although it is a huge step in the right direction — can be fiscally sustainable in a society that is permanently sick, overweight and sedentary. What we need now is a system that incentivizes preventative, healthy choices — a system that encourages us to become the gym-class versions of James Madison’s angels.

Email Miles your views on Obamacare at milesu1 “at” stanford “dot” edu.

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Unterreiner: Olympic gender lines shouldn’t be erased https://stanforddaily.com/2012/07/12/unterreiner-olympic-gender-lines-shouldnt-be-erased/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/07/12/unterreiner-olympic-gender-lines-shouldnt-be-erased/#comments Thu, 12 Jul 2012 08:00:01 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1068559 With the Summer Olympics set to begin July 27 in London, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has ruled that women with hyperandrogenism — a condition in which the body produces excessively high levels of androgens, “male” hormones with performance-enhancing effects — may be declared ineligible for competition.

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Unterreiner: Olympic gender lines shouldn't be erasedWith the Summer Olympics set to begin July 27 in London, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has ruled that women with hyperandrogenism — a condition in which the body produces excessively high levels of androgens, “male” hormones with performance-enhancing effects — may be declared ineligible for competition.

Prompted by several high-profile cases of gender ambiguity in international athletic competition — among them the controversy surrounding South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya, the 2009 world champion at 800 meters who was later found to have unusually high levels of testosterone and both male and female organs — the IOC’s ruling has frustrated intersex activists who advocate for an identity-based, rather than biology-based, classification of athletes. People who identify as women, such advocates have suggested, ought to be allowed to compete as women, regardless of their physical characteristics. As Barbara King wrote at npr.org, “Excluding athletes who have trained and competed as women from the Olympics on the basis of naturally occurring hormones in their blood inappropriately reduces athletic ability to hormone levels, and gender to biology.”

This type of argument makes some excellent points. First, the IOC ruling held that androgen levels falling into the “male range” might render hyperandrogenic female athletes ineligible. Androgens, however, occur naturally in both males and females, and just as some women are taller than some men, some women have higher androgen levels than some men. It is therefore unclear precisely why the term “male range” should be used to describe androgen levels, any more than heights between 5-foot-8 and 6-foot-5 should be called the “male range.”

Furthermore, the ruling appears discriminatory on its face — male athletes with abnormally high but naturally occurring levels of testosterone are not subject to expulsion from the Games. Why should women with abnormally high levels of androgens be subject to regulations while men with similarly unusual levels are not?

But I ultimately disagree with the idea that gender classifications in competitive sport should be made on the basis of self-defined identity rather than biological indicators. Reasons unique to the nature of athletic competition dictate that we decide otherwise.

First and most simply, there is a very important purpose for drawing lines — yes, sometimes arbitrary and sometimes apparently irrational — between men and women in the arena of sports that do not exist in society at large. That purpose is ensuring that women have a safe, productive and fruitful arena in which to compete on an equal playing field, just as men do.

Completing the fight began with Title IX. Without a distinction between men and women on the playing field — in other words, in a world in which the only deciding factor was absolute performance — there would not be a single woman at the Olympics, and few in college or professional sports, today.

If we accept the necessity of drawing some sort of line, it also follows that there will be some people — hopefully as few as possible — who fall unfairly on the wrong side of it, much as some teenagers are mature enough to drink at 17 and some 30-year-olds are not, or some 15-year-olds are intelligent and well-informed enough to vote and some 50-year-olds are not. Our goal should therefore be minimizing the error zone of a clearly necessary line, not eliminating it altogether.

Last, unlike matters of human rights or political equality, athletic competition is a zero-sum game. Gains for one — at least in terms of places, medals and points, the primary indicators of Olympic success — are necessarily made at the expense of another. If Athlete A wins gold, Athlete B by definition cannot. While allowing intersex or high-androgen individuals to, for example, participate fully in society, to vote and to hold jobs on the basis of their self-identity expands the pie of rights and abilities available to all, allowing intersex individuals with abnormally high levels of male hormones to compete as women unfairly disadvantages other women.

Ultimately, changes to IOC policy should certainly be made. The science behind the logic needs updating, more thought should be given to defining a “normal male range” and the IOC should consider what to do with hyperandrogenic men.

But that is insufficient reason to do away with the concept of a line between men and women in sports — a line that works to the benefit of both women and the athletic world at large.

Miles wants to hear what you think about gender lines at the Olympics. Email him your views at milesu1 “at” stanford “dot” edu.

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Independence Day, Stanford and the military https://stanforddaily.com/2012/07/05/independence-day-stanford-and-the-military/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/07/05/independence-day-stanford-and-the-military/#comments Thu, 05 Jul 2012 18:07:17 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1068487 One year later, we have made little progress toward recognizing and appreciating the students on this campus--all too few--who have chosen to serve their country by enlisting in the armed forces.

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Yesterday marked the 236th year of this nation’s independence, a day celebrated, in true American style, by loud explosions and cheap beer. But another milestone went by this spring, less widely remarked but of great importance to this campus: it has been a little more than one year since the Faculty Senate voted to allow the return of ROTC, or Reserve Officer Training Corps, to Stanford for the first time since 1970.

One year later, we have made little progress toward recognizing and appreciating the students on this campus–all too few–who have chosen to serve their country by enlisting in the armed forces. We owe them better than that.

Independence Day, Stanford and the militaryZero. Seven. Zero. Four. The month and day we loudly celebrate this country’s freedom every year. But also, in that order: the number of buildings on this campus dedicated to military veterans or military personnel; the recent number of undergraduate campus veterans, out of a student body of some 6,600; the number of ROTC classes cadets can currently take at Stanford; and the number of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan one particularly eloquent veteran told me about, in harrowing detail.

Instead of recognizing the unique contribution members of the military make to our community, we have long exiled their programs and training from campus and fought a bitter battle to keep them out. Instead of giving them a community and dedicated space, we have picketed their 7 a.m. morning workouts with denunciations of imperialism.

There are very good reasons to oppose military action abroad. This is not the time for me to list them. But soldiers volunteer to protect and defend their country; they don’t get to decide when or where.

I don’t know everything about the growing disconnect between citizen and soldier. But in my spring quarter class on global justice two years ago, it was a military veteran who spoke most perceptively and most thoughtfully about the ethics of war and humanitarian intervention. And I do know that in my history class on the background of current global problems, it was an ROTC cadet who delivered a presentation on crucial military aspects of the U.S.-China diplomatic relationship that the rest of us knew nothing about.

I do know that this year, Sergeant Chris Clark wrote one of the best op-eds I have ever read, about his experience on a dirt road somewhere in Iraq. I do know that our Stanford military personnel are people I would be proud to see leading my country, in war or in peace. I do know that I cannot truly know the sacrifice it takes to leave one’s family and board a plane, never knowing if you’ll see them again.

So let’s argue about the ethics of humanitarian intervention. Let’s oppose American global imperialism. Let’s take as many steps as possible toward the world peace we all seek.

But let’s also remember, recognize and appreciate the men and women on this campus who continue to ensure that we can celebrate the Fourth of July–and the liberties and freedoms it represents to us all–next year, and the year after that, and after that. We owe our fellow students no less.

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I Do Choose To Run: What is this place? https://stanforddaily.com/2012/06/07/i-do-choose-to-run-what-is-this-place/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/06/07/i-do-choose-to-run-what-is-this-place/#comments Thu, 07 Jun 2012 07:28:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1068072 I cannot help but wonder if we might locate at least part of the elusive, hard-to-define Stanford spirit in our architecture as well.

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I Do Choose To Run: What is this place?A high school teacher of mine once observed that if we truly wish to understand the soul of a society, we need only look at what it builds. Public architecture, he argued, gives material form to the abstract values of the community that constructed it.

The peoples of medieval Europe built their cities around immense cathedrals — their own humble homes dwarfed by the house of God, its spires and pinnacles pointed skyward to redirect the eyes from the mundanity of earth to the glories of heaven. The Romans placed the enormous Colosseum at the center of their capital, an edifice of public entertainment in the heart of an empire of “bread and circuses.” Nazi Germany crushed its population under the gargantuan weight of an architecture of militantly straight lines and implacable granite immensity, subsuming the individual man in the great mass of  “Völkisch” oneness.

As I prepare to leave this place after four years, I cannot help but wonder if we might locate at least part of the elusive, hard-to-define Stanford spirit — the spirit the New Yorker tried to capture this year, the spirit that animates this University’s innumerable accomplishments and triumphs, the spirit that courses through the veins of every student and alumnus — in our architecture as well.

Perhaps in the ever-flowing stream of creative destruction that razes old buildings and erects bigger and better ones, we could discern Stanford’s dedication to the intellectual cutting edge, to the perpetual abandonment of old ideas in the pursuit of new knowledge. In the essential sameness of the Main Quad, unchanged amid the unending upheaval of the rest of campus, we might see Stanford’s dedication to the core principles of a liberal education given physical form — a recognition that as new technologies change the world, the fundamental questions of humanity stay the same.

We have countless gyms for a community driven by fitness and appearance; an enormous new business school to give concrete form to our restless entrepreneurialism; community centers for a diverse student body that hails from around the world and from every corner of society, economy and sexuality.

But some unanswered questions remain. I cannot help but wonder if our architecture might symbolize our community’s imperfections as surely as it does our successes.

There is, for example, no community center, or any dedicated space at all, for Stanford military veterans. Might that symbolize a troubling gap in our commitment to diversity and inclusion — on a campus where, all too recently, there were only seven undergraduate veterans out of a student body of some 6,800?

Everywhere we see sandstone, Spanish mission architecture, red-tiled roofs — conformity. As represented by the battle over Chi Theta Chi this year, are we uncomfortable with true, as opposed to superficial, human difference, or deeply alternative notions of what constitutes a life well lived?

What does it mean that at the very heart of our thoroughly secular campus lies a church? Is MemChu simply an paradox, a bizarre antiquation out of place in and unsuited for the rigors of an uncomfortable modernity? Or does it reflect the unacknowledged presence of an enduring faith in universal progress, reason, the fundamental and ineradicable goodness of man?

At an event for returning alumni during Homecoming Weekend this year, a particularly thoughtful audience member spoke eloquently on the essential importance of place, arguing that there was something special, indefinable but real, about this campus, something he simply felt and knew every time he returned to Stanford. He worried that the proposed expansion to New York City might irretrievably alter the character of this University, even if the same faculty, students, classes, donors and sponsors inhabited and supported our East Coast branch. There would be, he feared, something missing there. Something lost.

I cannot help but agree. Stanford somehow retains its essential identity even as its constituent parts — the students, faculty and staff who give it life — uproot themselves and move on. This place is defined by more than the people who, for a fleeting moment or two, occupy its dorms and classrooms, its dining halls and auditoriums. Stanford — whatever that is — cannot be replicated, moved, copied or imitated. It is here and only here.

In addition to the buildings and the campus, however, we are Stanford as well. Wherever we go, there, too, will Stanford go. We will carry it with us always, imperfections and all.

 

Miles has been honored to have the opportunity to write this year, and to hear your comments and criticisms. Email him any last words anytime at milesu1 “at” stanford “dot” edu.

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I Do Choose To Run: Hypocrisy and the ARP https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/21/i-do-choose-to-run-hypocrisy-and-the-arp/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/21/i-do-choose-to-run-hypocrisy-and-the-arp/#comments Mon, 21 May 2012 07:28:00 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1067013 Ultimately, it seems that where the ARP is concerned, all sides are willing to throw their intellectual baggage out the window.

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I Do Choose To Run: Hypocrisy and the ARPI want to suggest that both ardent proponents and harsh critics of the Alternative Review Process — roughly speaking, although the partisan lines are not nearly this simple and clean-cut, “liberals” and “conservatives” — take a moment to reexamine their opinions about the ARP against the light of their own deeply held moral and ideological convictions. Because it seems to me that both sides have abandoned important tenets of their larger philosophies in their pursuit of policy victory.

Let’s start with the so-called civil libertarian or leftist position. This campus recently witnessed a widely supported drive to collect signatures for a California ballot referendum outlawing the death penalty in this state on the grounds that (among other reasons) it is racially discriminatory, convicts and executes innocent people and denies the accused due process of law. More broadly, law-and-order liberals tend to worry a great deal about the possibility of false convictions in criminal cases, the right of defendants to adequate counsel and the overly harsh nature and length of criminal sentences. They also argue that severe punishment of offenders doesn’t necessarily bring “closure” or relief to victims or victims’ families, dismissing the “family’s feelings” rationale for imposing exacting retribution upon violent criminals.

So what happened to the left’s supposed dedication to protecting the rights of the accused against the abuses of an overly harsh and inflexible system? It seems odd that campus liberals are now arguing for (among other things) a system that denies the accused the right to face his accuser, does not provide him with an attorney or qualified attorney substitute, eliminates the traditional right of the accused to be considered innocent until proven guilty, removes his right to call witnesses in his favor and to cross-examine the witnesses assembled against him and can place the accused in situations of double jeopardy.

It might be argued in response that broader social paradigms simply don’t apply on a communal college campus, where everyone knows everyone else, racism doesn’t exist and the possibility for false convictions is low or nonexistent. First of all, that comparison is slightly illogical: areas of the country with less racism or a smaller-town vibe don’t have fewer legal protections for accused criminals, and as Stanford sets up its own quasi-judicial system, it’s not clear why we should either.

But for an illustration closer to home, let me refer you to a now-famous report from the Stanford Police Department of April 9th, 2011, reporting a sexual assault on Stanford campus by an unidentified male, “Black, around 30 years of age” — who suddenly morphed into an “Asian Indian” man who smelled of a “scent similar to apples” upon further reflection by the victim. Any chance for a false conviction there, or any sense that race might play a role in influencing memory or justice, even on this campus?

But the standard “conservative” position on the ARP is equally bizarre and contradictory.  Out of a broader ideological ethos that trumpets harsher punishments for all, fewer protections for alleged criminals and a swift resolution to cases involving people who were obviously guilty all along has magically emerged a deep and nuanced concern for the natural rights of unjustly accused Stanford males, unfairly trampled under the heel of an oppressive judicial system.  Where did that come from?

As soon as the women of this campus are the victims, the conservative narrative seems to imply, the possibility for false convictions skyrockets; the Bureau of Judicial Affairs undergoes a nefarious transformation into a totalitarian regime bent on expelling innocent frat boys, rather than an institution dedicated to the pursuit of justice; and the lack of technical protections for the accused becomes an immense concern every student on campus should deplore, rather than a positive development facilitating the justified punishment of depraved felons. A little consistency, please.

Ultimately, it seems that where the ARP is concerned, all sides are willing to throw their intellectual baggage out the window. Campus liberals become stern law-and-order enforcers, thumping their fists on the table and demanding justice for victims, while campus conservatives suddenly acquire a passion for the fine details of due process and fair trials, quibbling over the legal technicalities they usually detest when applied to society at large.

As the ARP becomes the third rail of campus politics, emotional op-eds fly and the old Undergraduate Senate punts the question to the new senate, fearing to actually accomplish something important, let’s all take a moment and think about whether our opinions on this important policy issue are in fact consistent with our deeper underlying values. If we do, the final result will be more honest, more thorough and, in the end, a great deal more meaningful.

 

Let Miles know what you think at milesu1 “at” stanford “dot” edu.

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I Do Choose To Run: What conservatives get right about the family https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/07/i-do-choose-to-run-what-conservatives-get-right-about-the-family/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/07/i-do-choose-to-run-what-conservatives-get-right-about-the-family/#comments Mon, 07 May 2012 07:28:04 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1065667 By adopting cutthroat fiscal policies that make it harder and harder for working-class moms and dads to find the time and money to spend meaningful time with growing kids, conservatives are themselves undermining the family values they profess to promote.

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I Do Choose To Run: What conservatives get right about the familyFirst of all, don’t freak out. It’s a short article.

My freshman year, at our dorm Crossing the Line event, there was one question whose answer I still remember. Our moderator asked us to cross the line if our biological parents were divorced or separated. Fewer than a quarter of students walked across the room.

That response gave me pause then and still does today. Divorce rates in the United States for the first marriage are generally estimated to hover around 50 percent. Add in the children born out of wedlock to parents who never marry in the first place — four out of 10 babies in 2007 — and the statistics for America as a whole become staggering.

So what does it say about marriage that, at least according to my completely unscientific survey, the world’s most successful, driven, bright kids — measured by their admittance to Stanford — tend to come from families where both parents are still married? Might stable marriages lead to more successful children? And if so, might the Right be right about the importance of the nuclear family and community in fostering responsible, virtuous young people?

My opinion is: sort of.

There’s no doubt that two-parent families confer a series of advantages on children. Most obvious among them is time: time parents spend reading with kids, time invested taking them to and from productive after-school sports and extracurriculars, time enjoyed having meaningful conversations over real, healthy, home-made meals, time spent obsessing over test scores and grades — in short, time not spent leaving children in front of the television or video games munching on a Big Mac while working an exhausting second job to pay the bills a wife or husband might otherwise be able to help pay. Raising a child successfully takes enormous amounts of work, and two-parent families have an advantage in splitting what can be a formidable workload for single moms and dads.

In his influential new book “Coming Apart,” libertarian thinker Charles Murray argues convincingly that American social life is increasingly becoming polarized between two diametric demographic opposites: an elite upper class that tends to marry and stay married, connects with the surrounding community and has at least one college degree, and a lower class that doesn’t marry, never forms meaningful social connections and rarely graduates from high school, let alone college.

These data mesh discouragingly with the message of Robert D. Putnam’s thought-provoking “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” which examines declining levels of participation in civic networks among American families since 1960. Putnam argues powerfully that the average American is less connected to her fellow citizens, possesses shallower social networks and is less involved in her local community than ever before.

In these respects, I think there’s actually something valuable to be taken away from the generally absurd conservative outrage over “Julia,” Team Obama’s recent digital poster-child.  As Ross Douthat points out in the New York Times, Julia “seems to have no meaningful relationships apart from her bond with the Obama White House: no friends or siblings or extended family, no husband (‘Julia decides to have a child,’ is all the slide show says), a son who disappears once school starts and parents who only matter because Obamacare grants her the privilege of staying on their health care plan until she’s 26.” That is a dark vision of the good life, indeed.

So far, so good. Family and community can have noticeable positive effects. But here’s where the Right goes wrong.

By adopting cutthroat fiscal policies that make it harder and harder for working-class moms and dads to find the time and money to spend meaningful time with growing kids, conservatives are themselves undermining the family values they profess to promote.

By making it impossible for gays and lesbians to marry, conservatives are preventing the formation of stable nuclear families that they (quite rightly) aim to support.

By refusing to acknowledge the lingering influence of racial discrimination in this country, conservatives are missing the opportunity to target family-friendly social and economic policies toward especially high-risk minority communities, where the two-parent families are particularly rare.

By supporting wars overseas — and in this criticism I include President Obama — conservatives are removing tens of thousands of fathers and mothers from the lives of their children at some of the most vital moments in their emotional development — moments stolen from them by a helicopter flight in Kabul or a firefight in Helmand. Even worse, sometimes those absences are permanent, tearing a family apart forever.

So sure, let’s encourage stable marriages, happy families and community morality. But let’s do it honestly, and without the disingenuous hypocrisy that mars too many conversations about the family today.

 

If you have better data than a Crossing the Line event from three years ago, Miles would love to see it. Email him anytime at milesu1 “at” stanford “dot” edu.

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