Fangzhou Liu – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Tue, 03 May 2022 07:46:36 +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 Fangzhou Liu – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Liu: I chose Stanford, but I didn’t choose this https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/26/liu-i-chose-stanford-but-i-didnt-choose-this/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/26/liu-i-chose-stanford-but-i-didnt-choose-this/#respond Thu, 26 Apr 2018 09:34:01 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1140025 I tried my hardest to talk, too loudly and too often — only to be told by a friend much later that I “didn’t open my mouth."

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I first came to Stanford in the fall of 2015. All October, I tried my hardest to talk, too loudly and too often — only to be told by a friend much later that I “didn’t open my mouth” all month.

Stanford’s foreign that way. For me, it was because I grew up in a tiny equatorial country with an upbringing of the “children should be seen and not heard” variety. For other people coming from the Midwest, the East Coast or thirty minutes south of Palo Alto, it’s the immense institutional wealth, the weather, the accent or the fixation with technology.

But entering Stanford and living on my own, of my own accord, I wasn’t a child anymore. Adults can’t be shy.

Choosing to attend Stanford is one of the biggest decisions many of us have made so far. We spend a lot of energy justifying that choice, making the most of our education, and celebrating our attendance at, allegedly, one of the best universities for undergrads in the world — perhaps it is, but we certainly don’t know any other. Because we chose this.

And the choices don’t stop there. At Stanford, there’s a dizzying crush of opportunity for the taking, if only we choose. Famous-people lectures, poetry readings, office hours with rockstar professors, even our majors. The opportunity guilt most Stanford students have felt at some point or another seems to me like a way of saying we wish we were different people — if I was more outspoken, more sanguine, more focused on one interest at a time, I could make the most out of Stanford. (Sure, if I also had 72 hours in a day).

There’s something about entering a new place or phase of life that really revs the self-improvement engine. But I think that idea of choice and change assumes too much about our own control. It discounts the way we are destroyed by a text message, transported by a story; the uneasy feeling of that first night falling asleep in a room full of strangers. It disregards experience.

After the miracle of admittance, decision, enrollment, we forget that we have to live here. And living involves accident.

I, too, hoped — and still hope — that Stanford will improve me: freshman year, that meant acquiring the American art of conversation. After all, I’d chosen to come here rather than a public university in Singapore with people I’d known for more than ten years. But it was working for the student paper and having no control over who I was talking to for a story any given week, that finally forced me to find a measure of ease around strangers.

My first assignment was an interview with a doctor who’d contracted Ebola in one eye after working to fight the infection in Sierra Leone. Last November, a man talked to me for an hour and a half in support of an acquaintance who’d told him about her experience with sexual violence three decades ago — he last saw her some 15 years before we spoke. I’ve been moved and fulfilled by these encounters, unsettled and educated. Could I have experienced this elsewhere? Perhaps not. Would it have been better or worse? I have no idea.

These days, I’ve learned to talk as much as I choose. But those unexpected run-ins and bizarre phone interviews were much better than a lesson: They were real, they inspired thought and laughter and sometimes, awe. I’m glad all of this transpired at Stanford of all places, but I really wouldn’t know any better, would I?

To the newly admitted class of 2022, choose wisely, but don’t let it weigh on you too much. After all, it’s one of the first big decisions for many of you. You have all of college — whichever one you attend — to learn about choice, and to open yourself to encounter. Enjoy the ride.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

This piece is part of the Vol. 253 Editorial Board’s Admit Weekend series. Read the rest of the editorials here.

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Classmates’ genes may affect how well students do in school, study finds https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/18/classmates-genes-may-affect-how-well-students-do-in-school-study-finds/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/18/classmates-genes-may-affect-how-well-students-do-in-school-study-finds/#respond Thu, 18 Jan 2018 08:48:45 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1135264 Your classmates’ genes may affect how well you do in school, a team of education researchers has found in a new study.

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Your classmates’ genes may affect how well you do in school, a team of education researchers has found in a new study.

The study examined the relationship between the height, weight and educational attainment of 5,500 students and the genes of their peer group.

“We didn’t find a correlation to height or weight, but did find a small one with how far you go in school,” Ben Domingue, the study’s first author and an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Education, told Stanford News.

A similar effect has been found in mice: A recent study discovered that the DNA of a laboratory mouse’s cage mates influences the mouse’s anxiety, wound healing, immune function and body weight. Researchers call these correlations social genetic effects, which occur when the health or behavior of an individual is affected by the genes of a peer.

Researchers say that students’ genetics shape their personal traits, which then influence their schoolmates’ behavior. Peers who habitually stay up late due to a genetic predisposition, for example, may influence other students to stay up late as well, potentially affecting their performance in school and the amount of formal schooling they complete.

However, the effect of schoolmates’ genetics was relatively small, amounting to about an extra one-third of a year of schooling for students on average. Domingue added that the impact on students is not a foregone conclusion, since neither students’ genes nor those of their friends wholly determine their behavior and performance.

Kathleen Mullan Harris, senior author of the study and distinguished professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that the results are significant for drawing a link between peer group genetics and a socially-linked quality like educational attainment, rather than a physical one such as height or weight.

“Unlike height, educational attainment is socially contextualized,” Harris said. “There is more going on than genetics. Our results imply that scientific investigations into either genetic and social effects need to account for the other.”

The study also discovered that schoolmates are more genetically alike than strangers, suggesting that socioeconomic factors may cause students with similar genes to attend the same schools, said Domingue. This is an extension of previous research on the genetic similarities among friend groups.

“It is certainly the case that individuals do a lot of planning around which schools their children will attend,” the researchers said. “One of the side effects of this competition to gain access to certain schools seems to be the grouping of like with like.”

The study could inform further research in both social science and genetics. A better understanding of social genetic effects may enhance social scientists’ research on peer effects, while geneticists may need to consider the role of these effects in genetic studies of variables closely linked to one’s social context.

In addition to Domingue and Harris, the paper’s co-authors include Daniel Belsky of the Duke University School of Medicine, Jason Fletcher of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dalton Conley of Princeton University and Jason Boardman of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Members of Pi Phi, men’s rowing suspect a non-Stanford student drugged them at Sigma Chi event https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/16/members-of-pi-phi-mens-rowing-drugged-at-sigma-chi-event/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/16/members-of-pi-phi-mens-rowing-drugged-at-sigma-chi-event/#respond Wed, 17 Jan 2018 00:05:04 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1135144 At least five members of Pi Beta Phi and two members of the men’s rowing team suspect that they were drugged by a non-Stanford student visiting members of Stanford’s men’s rowing team at the Sigma Chi fraternity house on Friday night.

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At least five members of Pi Beta Phi and two members of the men’s rowing team suspect that they were drugged by a non-Stanford student visiting members of Stanford’s men’s rowing team at the Sigma Chi fraternity house on Friday night.

Members of Pi Phi, men’s rowing suspect a non-Stanford student drugged them at Sigma Chi event
At least seven students suspect they were drugged at Sigma Chi fraternity last Friday (CATALINA RAMIREZ-SAENZ/The Stanford Daily).

According to an email memo from Pi Phi house staff to sorority members, one of the men affected was transported to the hospital on Friday night despite a blood alcohol content lower than typical transport levels. Student residential staffers in both houses waited until late Sunday afternoon to report any news of the suspected drugging incident to Residential Education, who notified the Title IX office.

The Title IX office is now investigating the incident, and Student Affairs met with the Department of Public Safety in order to file a report on Tuesday because “it is suspected criminal activity,” according to University spokesperson Lisa Lapin.

The Monday evening memo stated that at least five members of Pi Phi at the Sigma Chi event experienced unusual symptoms “suspect of drug involvement.” Members said they did not remember what happened the night before although they had not consumed enough alcohol to cause a blackout.

“Symptoms aligned with that of Xanax or a similar benzodiazepine,” the staff member wrote. “But not all members took a drug test and we do not have official evidence.”

Benzodiazepines, also called “benzos,” are a type of drug that functions as a minor tranquilizer – “roofies” (trade name Rohypnol) are a type of benzodiazepine commonly known as a date rape drug. Xanax, also known by the scientific name alprazolam, is a benzodiazepine whose effects last for a shorter time than Rohypnol and is often used to treat disorders related to anxiety or panic.

The Pi Phi staffer also wrote that a Sigma Chi staffer reported in a Monday afternoon meeting that two male rowers also suspected they had been drugged at the party. One of these men was transported to the hospital, though his blood alcohol content level was “too low to have warranted a transport.”

The other rower tested positive after he went to the hospital voluntarily, the memo added. An anonymous source with direct knowledge of the event said that the rower was also a Sigma Chi member.

Members of Pi Phi raised concerns about their symptoms to their leaders on Saturday, and each student group investigated the incident throughout Saturday and Sunday.

Despite the Friday night incident, Sigma Chi hosted another party on Saturday night with a different sorority.

The Pi Phi memo describes the person suspected of bringing drugs to the party as “loosely affiliated with Stanford Men’s Rowing” but not a Stanford student and not someone linked to Sigma Chi. The suspect was invited to Friday’s event by rowers, the message said.

The Fountain Hopper, which broke the story early Tuesday, wrote that the suspect is a member of the Dartmouth College men’s rowing team, which was also reported to The Daily by anonymous sources.

By Sunday evening, pictures of the non-Stanford suspect were circulating along with what the email to Pi Phis called “rumors … containing false information.”

According to the memo, the Pi Phi staffer spoke with two residence deans, and learned that Residential Education reported the incident to the Title IX office. The memo went on to say that Title IX will be opening an investigation, and that specific students involved can choose whether to cooperate.

“There is a protocol that must be followed on the part of the university but ultimately our members have the power to decide what they would like to do,” the staffer wrote. “We as a chapter will support them in whatever they decide.”

All seven students have since recovered, according to the Fountain Hopper. But the incident could have other consequences for the Greek organizations involved. Sigma Chi was only recently removed from University probation, and Pi Phi is currently on probation. The organizations participated in a temporary and informal resident exchange earlier in the week, with several members of Sigma Chi staying in Pi Phi and vice versa, an exchange Sigma Chi used to participate in with the co-op Columbae.

The Pi Phi national organization is “in the process of gathering the facts behind this incident to determine if Pi Beta Phi policies have been violated,” stated an email from Eily Cummings, senior director of marketing and communications for Pi Phi national. Cummings added that the organization is investigating the incident alongside Stanford. Sigma Chi national has not yet responded to a request for comment.

“The reports shared from those who attended an open house event on Friday night are very concerning,” wrote Cummings. “A discussion was held at the chapter’s weekly meeting, and we will support the individual members affected.”

Pi Phi members were first notified of the incident in a Monday meeting followed by the memo sent that evening.

“We sincerely apologize for not having gotten this information to you earlier,” wrote the staff member on behalf of the staff team and Pi Phi president Lauren Maymar ’19. “We felt it was too soon, sought to respect the privacy of those affected, and felt we didn’t have all the information until now.”

The Daily has also reached out to Residential Education and Stanford’s Title IX office, neither of which has commented as of Tuesday afternoon.

 

UPDATE 1/18/18: Stanford has issued a notice to the alleged non-Stanford perpetrator in the drugging incident, banning him from campus and campus property.

“The notice is called a ‘Notice of Investigation’ and is issued by the Title IX office,” wrote University spokesperson Lisa Lapin in an email to The Daily. “It bars him from contacting anyone from the party and bans him from campus and all Stanford-owned property.”

The University investigation is ongoing.

 

Hannah Knowles and Courtney Douglas contributed to this report.

Correction: An earlier version of the article mistakenly stated that Pi Phi and another sorority were both on probation with its national organization at the time of writing. 

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Low-income students, athletes quarrel over new dining program https://stanforddaily.com/2017/12/06/low-income-students-athletes-quarrel-over-new-dining-program/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/12/06/low-income-students-athletes-quarrel-over-new-dining-program/#respond Wed, 06 Dec 2017 18:06:47 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1134529 A Twitter post questioning Stanford’s commitment to food security for low-income students sparked an online debate between student-athletes and those who believe the University's recent pilot of a "High Performance and Education" dinner targeted at athletes reflects Stanford's differing priorities.

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A Twitter post questioning Stanford’s commitment to food security for low-income students sparked an online debate between student-athletes and those who believe the University’s recent pilot of a “High Performance and Education” dinner targeted at athletes reflects Stanford’s differing priorities.

Michael Spencer ’20, who is also a Daily staffer, wrote the original Tweet comparing the HPE pilot program launched by Residential and Dining Enterprises (R&DE) this fall with the closure of dining halls over spring break until the upcoming break in 2018.

“How come it took Stanford years before deciding to keep a dining hall open for Spring break – for all those students who couldn’t make it home,” wrote Spencer, “and yet they didn’t think twice about opening up a new high-protein dinner WHICH FOLLOWS NORMAL DINNER 5 days a week for athletes.”

Spencer’s post led to a chain of replies from athletes and low-income students that revealed longstanding concerns about access to food for both groups on the regular campus dining plan. One professor even offered to pay for low-income students’ groceries during school breaks.

Running from 7:15 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. in Branner Dining and Ricker Dining after the close of regular dinner hours, HPE is open to all undergraduate students although its hours of operation and tailored nutritional options cater specially to student-athletes. R&DE spokesperson Jocelyn Breeland emphasized that HPE was developed with all students in mind.

“The impetus was a need to meet the unique dietary requirements of students – including athletes – who require more daily calories and specific nutrients to achieve peak physical performance,” wrote Breeland in an email to The Daily. “We also know that, for many athletes, the later dinner hour better accommodates their practice schedules.”

“However, a pillar of this program from the beginning has been our steadfast determination to make this program available to all students on a meal plan,” Breeland added.

Meanwhile, all dining halls have historically been closed over spring break, a situation that can be challenging for low-income students who stay on campus. Dining halls will be open during spring break for the first time this year, after undergraduate senators brought the issue to R&DE in late 2016, said Breeland. In the 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 school years, senators had cobbled together funding from the Diversity and First-Generation Office, the Financial Aid Office, student donations and ASSU reserves to provide low-income students with meal stipends over spring break as a stopgap solution.

Responding to these food security concerns, one faculty member joined the Twitter conversation to offer to pay for low-income students’ food personally.

“Any of my [first-generation low-income] and connected students who are going to be here over the break want to link to grab some stuff, I got you,” wrote Adam Banks, professor in the Graduate School of Education and director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. “We can hit the grocery stores and get cards and do whatever we got to do to make sure you’re good. Hit my email fam.”

But Spencer’s comment drew ire from student-athletes, who said that the HPE program comes as a much-needed fix for athletes who regularly miss regular dining hall hours for late practices.

“Throughout the US about 86% of student athletes live below the poverty line,” wrote Shannon Coffee ’19 on Twitter. “So if there isn’t ONE dining hall open late enough to eat after a late practice where are they supposed to eat EVERYDAY?? Nobody is opposing low income students… just like you shouldn’t oppose athletes.”

Coffee was referring to a National College Players Association study on the adequacy of student-athlete poverty in “big-time” college sports, which found that 85 percent of full athletic scholarships offered by Football Bowl Series schools leave their players below the federal poverty line. 

Coffee and fellow student-athlete Estella Moschkau ’21 also pointed out that the HPE program is open to all “regular students” – sometimes at the expense of athletes who arrive at the dining hall after practice, they said. Their Tweets on the subject were subsequently deleted, but other Twitter users captured and published screenshots of the original posts.

Low-income students, athletes quarrel over new dining program
Republished screenshots (FANGZHOU LIU/The Stanford Daily).

The initial comments led to conflict between some students speaking out in support of student-athletes and some speaking out for low-income students. Twitter user @johnbrehhh took issue with what they saw as the attempt to trivialize low-income students’ concerns about food insecurity, publishing a photo of a “food bank” stocked during finals week.

Low-income students, athletes quarrel over new dining program
@johnbrehhh’s photo of a “food bank” (FANGZHOU LIU/The Stanford Daily).

However, football player Nick Wilson ’19 said that athletes also face challenges getting access to meals that fit their intensive schedules and special dietary needs.

“I have never had to organize a food bank, but I have had to go to meetings, practice, lifts, for 4+ hours everyday -oh, *during finals week* too,” wrote Wilson, “while having to stay on top of grades, and finding something to eat to maintain physical performance.”

“Not saying I’m oppressed, just looking for a little respect, which I’m sure you can understand,” Wilson added. “Student-athletes work hard and the fact that our peers are coming after us hatefully is ridiculous honestly.”

The conversation got heated when former football player Austin Hooper, who finished his Stanford career in 2016, argued that student-athletes should receive preferential treatment.

“Students/Social Justice Warriors relax, where do u think they get that money to build nicer dorms for STUDENTS?” Hooper wrote in a since-deleted Tweet, which was captured in screenshots by another user. “In a capitalistic society those who contribute will get pref treatment. Crazy how ppl who don’t contribute want to be treated the same.”

In response, Twitter user @_sopadecaracol wrote, “[Wow] imagine thinking fli students should starve because they “don’t contribute” to a school like an athlete does…”

Students on both sides thought the University can do more for student-athletes and low-income students.

Men’s basketball player Josh Hanson ’18 said he thought it was “super messed up” that dining halls have not been open during spring break in the past, and that other athletes would agree with him – even as athletes face their own difficulties with campus dining.

“[Access to food for athletes and for low-income students are] separate issues, albeit both being circumstances where the university failed (for the longest time) to meet the needs of different groups of students,” Spencer wrote, reflecting on his original post in a response to Hanson. “The tweet was meant to highlight that more than anything.”

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect the participation of Austin Hooper, a Stanford football alum and current NFL player for the Atlanta Falcons, as well as to more fully represent first-generation and low-income students’ response to the conflict.

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Behind the Fliegelman sexual misconduct investigation https://stanforddaily.com/2017/12/02/behind-the-fliegelman-sexual-misconduct-investigation/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/12/02/behind-the-fliegelman-sexual-misconduct-investigation/#respond Sat, 02 Dec 2017 23:37:50 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1134344 A confidential letter sent by Stanford to former graduate student Seo-Young Chu M.A. ’01 reveals new details about Chu’s public accusations of sexual assault and harassment against now-deceased English Professor Jay Fliegelman Ph.D. ’77.

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A confidential letter sent by Stanford to former graduate student Seo-Young Chu M.A. ’01 reveals new details about Chu’s public accusations of sexual assault and harassment against now-deceased English Professor Jay Fliegelman Ph.D. ’77.

The letter, which Chu shared with The Daily, indicates that then-Provost John Etchemendy Ph.D. ’82 personally oversaw a University investigation that found Fliegelman responsible for sexual harassment rather than sexual assault but also concluded that “Chu’s assent could be questioned” in an incident she reported as assault. Fliegelman was banned from campus for two years before returning to teach.

Investigation summary  

The letter, signed Nov. 27 by Stanford General Counsel Debra Zumwalt J.D. ’79, was in response to Chu’s request earlier last month to see the report Stanford commissioned on her case in 2000. The University declined to send the full report, citing its standard practices, but provided Chu with a summary of the findings that led to Fliegelman’s suspension.

According to Zumwalt’s summary, Chu reported back in 2000 that Fliegelman “engaged in a continuing pattern of sexual talk and comments,” which included phone calls Chu found “unwelcome and disturbing.”

“He left me voice messages about overdosing on male enhancement pills,” Chu wrote in a creative nonfiction piece recently published in Entropy. “He shared explicit fantasies with me — despite my protests.”

Fliegelman called his sexual phone calls to Chu “playful banter” and described his explicit conversations with her similarly, the investigation summary says. Chu, on the other hand, said she felt pressured.

According to the letter, Chu said she told Fliegelman that she was uncomfortable and wanted to leave before he initiated “oral-genital contact.”

The letter stated that the “physical sexual contact” occurred under “circumstances that were extremely inappropriate” and that Chu’s consent “could be questioned.” The investigation also drew on reports from third parties, who said that Chu had described the encounter as non-consensual around the time it happened.

But there were no witnesses to the incident of oral-genital contact, Zumwalt wrote, and Fliegelman disputed that he persisted despite Chu’s verbal refusal.

Fliegelman was eventually found responsible for sexual harassment and professional misconduct – but not sexual assault, something Chu questioned in an email Tuesday to Zumwalt and administrators responding to the investigation summary. Chu, now a professor of English at CUNY Queens College, disputed Stanford’s account of the oral-genital incident.

“The ‘contact’ between his body and mine was more extensive than what the summary describes,” Chu wrote in her email. “Why isn’t the word ‘rape’ mentioned? He violated the place between my thighs with both his mouth and his genitalia. I unfortunately remember him shoving his body into mine. (I hate the fact that I had to type those words.)”

She also said she recalled Fliegelman making her “stroke” an antique pornographic book. Stanford’s summary mentioned Fliegelman reportedly compelling her to watch porn, something she wrote she did not remember.

According to Chu, Fliegelman encouraged her several times to touch rare books in “an emotional manner” as part of the process of reading and researching — something that particularly unsettled her when it involved him physically “guiding” her.

“First his hands on mine, and then —  spontaneously, he assaulted my ear. My neck. Other parts of my body,” she wrote to The Daily, saying she didn’t resist out of “petrification.”

Chu said that Fliegelman was well aware of her psychological vulnerability at the time, having asked about scars on her wrists and arms. In 1999, she said, she was hospitalized after trying to commit suicide and was diagnosed as bipolar.

Origins of investigation

Chu’s first advisor at Stanford, Herbert Lindenberger, ultimately reported Fliegelman to the University, as first detailed in New Republic; Stanford hired an outside law firm to investigate.

Lindenberger told The Daily that his report was triggered by Fliegelman’s obvious anxiety that his sexual advances on Chu would be discovered by others. Lindenberger recalled being approached by Fliegelman after an oral exam with Chu went badly: Chu was 40 minutes late and unable to answer a single question.

“He was evidently quite nervous — in fact, obviously scared of what I might do to him,” Lindenberger recalled. “Out of the blue he said to me that Seo-Young had told him she was a virgin and that she was attracted to women. It was clear that he was trying to ward off suspicions that anything sexual had transpired between them.”

Lindenberger said he immediately guessed that “something serious was happening” and called on two senior female professors to work with him and Chu on a “cease-and-desist” letter to Fliegelman. But another graduate student had notified the Dean of the Humanities and Sciences at that point, setting a formal investigation in motion instead, he said.

Convening a faculty advisory board to review the case would have required Chu’s participation in the hearing, Stanford spokesperson Lisa Lapin told The Daily. (The full hearing process with the advisory board would have required witnesses, attorneys and cross-examination of the victim.)

Because no faculty board was gathered, Etchemendy made the decision on the case, suspending Fliegelman for two years without pay as recommended by the law firm and banning him from the department.

Terms of suspension

During the suspension, Fliegelman was allowed access to Stanford libraries and continued to live in off-campus faculty housing he owned.

In an email to The Daily, Lindenberger wrote that Fliegelman was given an office in “a prefab building at the edge of campus” where he continued to advise dissertation students during his suspension. Lapin disputed that Fliegelman was provided an office.

“Yes, he continued to meet with [his advisees],” wrote Lindenberger. “They were dependent on his help and they would have felt lost if he hadn’t been made available to them. He was the only expert in the department specializing in the early-American literature.”

Zumwalt’s letter to Chu also mentions a “significant financial sanction” against Fliegelman. According to Lapin, Fleigelman took a pay cut on his return and estimated financial losses related to his punishment at $1 million.

Chu said Stanford “needs to make available the details” of the $1 million figure and added that while she does not want money from the University, she has lost both time and money as a result of Fliegelman’s abuse — “the medical costs alone have been staggering,” she said.

Stanford’s policy on sexual harassment at the time stated that individuals found in violation may be subject to penalties as severe as discharge or expulsion. According to Lapin, Fliegelman could not be dismissed except by a full advisory board process, per University policy on faculty termination in 1999.

But Lindenberger recalled being told at the time that Fliegelman’s punishment was the most serious that Stanford had ever imposed in a harassment case.

The official censure of Fliegelman was not always echoed by other faculty. Lindenberger said that some of his colleagues believed that Chu “was to blame” for the incidents of harassment because of her initial enthusiasm for Fliegelman and eagerness to have him as an adviser. However, both Lindenberger and Chu said she was adamant that she was not interested in a sexual relationship from the first.

According to Lindenberger, Fliegelman also had the sympathy of former professors who had known him since he began his Ph.D. at Stanford in the early 1970s — and who later hired and tenured him upon his graduation.

“His former teachers (of whom I was not one) loved him as a person and greatly admired him as a scholar and teacher,” Lindenberger wrote. “These colleagues had a hard time believing he could do the things he was accused of doing.”

But few, if any, of these colleagues knew Chu, then a first-year graduate student who was new to Stanford.

Chu says that Stanford English Chair Alex Woloch witnessed some of Fliegelman’s verbal and emotional abuse toward her; in an email to The Daily, she said Woloch was present when Fliegelman “berated” her for wearing thick glasses and joined Fliegelman in yelling at her. In an open letter posted on Facebook, she wondered why Woloch did not intervene.

Stanford spokesperson E.J. Miranda told the Mercury News on Woloch’s behalf that Woloch did not know of any sexual harassment on Fliegelman’s part until he learned of the investigation.

“I have absolutely no memory of any conversation along these lines,” Woloch said in an email to The Daily, referencing Chu’s allegation that he saw Fliegelman berate her for her glasses. He strongly denied ever having joined Fliegelman in yelling at a student.

After the case

Lindenberger added that the English department chair of another university attempted to arrange a visiting professorship for Fliegelman because she “felt sorry” for him. Her efforts were cut short by protests from fellow women faculty, he said.

Lenora Warren, an assistant professor of English at Colgate University, recalled hearing rumors about Fliegelman’s misconduct when she visited Stanford as a prospective Ph.D. student in 2006. As a specialist in American and African American literature, she was directed toward Fliegelman and visited his house with other students to tour his library.

“They were still steering female graduate students toward him,” Warren said. “At the time I felt strange, mostly in the way that these rumors were out there, and feeling maybe pressure and knowing that Jay would have been the most appropriate person for me to work with at the time … and feeling that I [didn’t] know if I would have options if something happened.”

“It just was easier to take the rumors as true and not go there,” she said. She stayed at NYU.

New Republic’s article on Fliegelman quoted other women expressing unease about their interactions with Fliegelman. Dawn Coleman, whose dissertation was chaired by Fliegelman and Franco Moretti — a retired English professor also recently publicly accused of sexual assault — recalled repeated invitations to meet with Fliegelman for dinner at his house or restaurants during the professor’s ban.

“In retrospect, I cannot believe that I was not given a clear statement of the terms or reasons for his leave when I was one of the students most directly affected by it,” Coleman told New Republic.

After the Fliegelman case, Etchemendy “dramatically” strengthened Stanford’s policy on sexual misconduct, wrote Lapin. (Etchemendy was unavailable for comment at the time of writing, she said.) Modifications to the policy included an affirmative consent requirement as well as further restrictions even in cases where, unlike in Chu’s, all parties agree the interactions were consensual. In 2013, Stanford prohibited relationships between faculty members and graduate students in their departments; according to a blog post by Provost Persis Drell, faculty members found to violate the prohibition may be dismissed.

Fliegelman himself remained heavily involved in steering graduate students through the job market for much of his career, volunteering to chair the job placement committee for years in a row, wrote a former graduate student in a tribute.

He held a prominent place in academia through his death in 2007, when the Faculty Senate honored him with a customary memorial resolution praising him as a scholar and mentor. An American Studies award for undergraduate research, now discontinued, was named after him.

Today, his rare books collection and personal papers are housed in Stanford’s Special Collections.

Law professor Michele Dauber, a vocal critic of Stanford’s sexual assault policies, has called for the Faculty Senate to disavow its memorial to Fliegelman, laud Lindenberger for reporting him and apologize to Chu. She expressed particular disappointment in Etchemendy for joining in the resolution.

“What Fliegelman did was monstrous,” she said.  “In my opinion, he never should have been allowed to return to teaching and it is beyond outrageous that he was apparently put in charge of parts of graduate advising.”

Lapin wrote that memorial resolutions are not voted upon by the Faculty Senate, complicating an actual repeal of the original.

“It is the equivalent of an obituary in a newspaper,” Lapin wrote.

Chu left the Ph.D. program at Stanford after completing her master’s degree. Lindenberger said Chu’s parents and a group of faculty suggested she seek psychological help and that she “managed well” in the following year. She taught in a private school in the area and applied to Harvard, where she completed her Ph.D. and moved on to her current position at Queens College.

“Everybody knew Fliegelman, but only a few, like me, had worked with Chu,” wrote Lindenberger of Stanford’s English department in 2001. “She has [since] established an enviable academic career.”

On Wednesday, several of Chu’s colleagues wrote an open letter to English Chair Woloch, addressing the University’s recent letter to Chu. Their response, spearheaded by Gloria Fisk — another English professor at Queens College, CUNY — urges the Stanford English department to “declare its solidarity” with Chu.

As of Monday afternoon the message had gathered over 100 signatures from professors across institutions, including 18 from Stanford alumni and one from a visiting fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. Fisk said she and her collaborators did not circulate the letter among Stanford professors because they “understand there is an internal conversation underway at the department already.”

“We wanted to add to that conversation from our position as colleagues in other institutions, elsewhere,” Fisk said.

Fisk sent the message to Woloch and various members of the University administration Monday.

“This is all to say that we see Stanford’s problems as our problems, too,” the letter reads. “Alongside you, we hope to build an institutional culture that protects the right and ability of all of its members to do the work we love.”

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu. Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

An earlier version of the article incorrectly stated that Fliegelman died in 2008, not 2007, and that the university that offered him a visiting professorship during his suspension was Princeton. In fact, Princeton offered him a position a year before the incidents with Chu; another major university, which Lindenberger chose not to name, was behind the attempted arrangement during Fliegelman’s suspension. Finally, the initial version of this article said that Woloch had no memory of the scene Chu described involving Fliegelman berating her; The Daily failed to include the specific allegation of yelling in its communication with Woloch and has updated the piece to contain his more categorical denial of yelling. The Daily regrets these errors.

This post has also been updated to clarify the timeline of the open letter organized by Fisk and to add additional information about it as of Monday. Finally, an update clarifies that Dauber called for a disavowal of Fliegelman’s memorial resolution, rather than a repeal, given the obstacles to the latter action.  

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Brock Turner appeals sexual assault conviction https://stanforddaily.com/2017/12/02/brock-turner-appeals-conviction/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/12/02/brock-turner-appeals-conviction/#respond Sat, 02 Dec 2017 18:31:58 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1134336 Turner's 172-page appeal demands a new trial and seeks to overturn the convictions requiring that Turner register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

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Former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner is appealing his conviction of sexual assault.

His 172-page appeal demands a new trial and seeks to overturn the convictions requiring that Turner register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. Turner sexually assaulted an unconscious woman outside a Kappa Alpha party in 2015.

Originally found guilty of three felony counts of sexual assault, Turner’s six-month sentence sparked public outrage and an ongoing campaign to recall the judge. Turner’s appeal brief contends, among other arguments, that Turner was denied a fair trial by a “failure to present constitutionally sufficient evidence as to any of the three counts of conviction.”

“What we are saying [is] that what happened is not a crime,” John Tompkins, Turner’s legal adviser, told NBC. “It happened, but it was not anywhere close to a crime.”

Two Stanford graduate students testified in Turner’s trial last March that they saw him on top of an unmoving woman and that, when confronted, he tried to flee. Turner was ultimately convicted of assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated or unconscious person, sexual penetration of an intoxicated person and sexual penetration of an unconscious person.

Turner’s appeal brief argues that the prosecutor biased the jury by saying throughout the trial that the assault took place “behind a dumpster” rather than in the open space between dumpsters and a basketball court outside Kappa Alpha.

The prosecutor’s characterization “implied an intent on the appellant’s part to shield and sequester his activities,” the brief states, also citing negative associations with dumpsters such as filth and criminal activity.

The appeal criticizes the trial process for omitting consideration of a lighter offense for Turner and denying his legal team a chance to present evidence about his good character to the jury. The brief also states that Judge Aaron Persky ’84 A.M. ’85, now facing the recall effort, at one point didn’t respond satisfactorily to a “critical jury question.”

Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen told the Mercury News Friday that “Brock Turner received a fair trial and was justly convicted.”

“His conviction will be upheld,” Rosen said. “Nothing can ever roll back Emily Doe’s legacy of raising the world’s awareness about sexual assault.”

Law professor Michele Dauber, a friend of Turner’s victim who is leading the recall movement against Persky, weighed in as well, calling the argument that Turner was deprived of justice “ridiculous.”

“The problem with this case wasn’t that Judge Persky was unfair to Brock Turner, it was that Judge Persky was unfair to the victim when he sentenced Turner to only a few months in county jail,” she said in a statement.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu. Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

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Privacy breaches in University file system affect 200 people https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/17/privacy-breaches-in-university-file-system-affect-200-people/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/17/privacy-breaches-in-university-file-system-affect-200-people/#respond Fri, 17 Nov 2017 12:07:23 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1133761 Stanford is in the process of notifying some 200 people — a mix of employees and former students — that their privacy may have been breached due to incorrect settings in one of the University’s file-sharing systems.

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Stanford is in the process of notifying some 200 people — a mix of employees and former students — that their privacy may have been breached due to incorrect settings in one of the University’s file-sharing systems.

Until this week, files including sexual violence records based on counseling sessions, confidential University statistics and emails to the Office of Judicial Affairs — some with names and email addresses attached — were left broadly available on an internet server that students, faculty and staff from over 50 institutions regularly use. Any Stanford faculty, student or staff member with a SUNet ID was able to access the sensitive files; The Daily also found that an MIT student username and password were able to grant access.

The University was unaware of the data breach until it was notified by The Daily last Thursday. The Daily withheld reporting on the leak until the University secured all confidential information and notified affected parties.

“This is absolutely unacceptable and the campus is working diligently and urgently to assure that shared files are secure throughout the university,” wrote Stanford spokesperson Lisa Lapin in an official statement Thursday. “A thorough university investigation is under way as to the extent and duration of the file exposure.”

“We extend the deepest apology to the employees and former Stanford students who expected that their personal information would be treated with the greatest care by campus offices,” she added.

Stanford has used the Andrew File System (AFS) directory, where the sensitive information was until recently kept unlocked, since the 1990s. Every user with a SUNet ID is allotted 5 GB of data for personal storage and may also use the file system to access course materials and other resources.

But the sprawling server — home to over two decades of information from a range of departments in the University — compromised, among other data, 247 emails addressed to the Office of Judicial Affairs and at least 38 files recording confidential information on crimes, mostly sexual assaults, described to campus mental health counselors, the Office of Community Standards and other groups. The latter information on sexual violence was intended for tracking and reporting under the 1990 Clery Act, which mandates disclosure of campus crime.

Michael Duff, assistant vice president and chief information security officer, said that while the University can track overall AFS activity, it cannot track who has accessed specific files and folders. He said University IT also can not yet determine exactly how long many files intended for privacy were accessible for.

Compromised personal data

Within each directory, some folders and files were secured against general user access, even as the Clery files and confidential emails were left open to Stanford community members as well as people from the many other organizations that use AFS.

In the Vice Provost of Student Affairs (VPSA) directory, a file containing emails addressed to the Office of Judicial Affairs detailed concerns ranging from spousal assault to Honor Code violations to a discrimination complaint against a current faculty member. All correspondence included contact information for the sender, revealing names, email addresses and often phone numbers.

One of the Clery files also included the name and email address of the reporting party.

Most of the other Clery documents omitted names, noting instead basic demographic information such as gender, age, class year and ethnicity, as well as the accused student’s group affiliation at Stanford, in addition to a summary of what they reported.

But in a community the size of Stanford, data can be identifying even without names. Some of the documents described victim and assailant as narrowly defined as a pair of roommates of a certain class year living in a specific dormitory, or a student of a specific age and ethnicity assaulted by an upperclassman in a particular student group. Many of the files were also accompanied by dates.

In some cases, the level of detail present might have identified a reporting student to an acquaintance in the same social circles — or potentially to the individual they accused of assault.

In files where the involved parties may be identifiable, the University must notify the individuals. According to Duff, that’s where the University Privacy Office needed to make judgments on just how revealing the previously-accessible information was.

“If the population that fits given descriptions is large enough, no one would be able to identify that person,” Duff said. “It’s a whole field into itself — identification or re-identification of the data so that we can determine who we need to notify.”

Files recording sexual violence cases in a Clery Act folder were generated when an individual or a “Campus Security Authority” — for example, a counselor at Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) — filled out a web form created by the University’s Sexual Violence Advisory Board.

While many of the files are based on information disclosed to CAPS, James Jacobs, director of Vaden Health, emphasized that Vaden had no role in managing the Clery report files and that CAPS counseling records, which are separate from Clery data, have not been compromised.

“Vaden clinical records … have been and continue to be completely separate, completely protected and not shared,” he said.

According to Jacobs, CAPS and other entities on campus no longer file Clery reports with the AFS-linked system. Further, he said, CAPS therapists are no longer among the campus entities expected to make Clery reports.

The Clery files, which span from 2012 to 2015, were located within a folder owned by the Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS). However, according to the University, the summaries of individuals’ cases were not intended for police use or investigation; they were meant solely for fulfilling the University’s duties under the Clery Act, which a non-officer employee of SUDPS oversees.

CAPS’ website states that chart notes from a counseling session — recorded electronically — are kept for 10 years by law but protected with “strict security measures … including physical safeguards, encryption, and password protection.”

The University emphasized that because the Clery reports were generated from a separate process than in-session counseling notes, “SUDPS did not and does not have access to counseling records maintained by CAPS.”

But due to the mistake in the Clery folder’s privacy settings, the text entries to the Clery forms were essentially public.

In some cases, the Clery files potentially shed light on University decisions that confounded and angered many students when they were first announced.

One file described a sexual assault involving two members of the Stanford Band. Another file detailed a student’s account of being sexually assaulted by another student after at a campus event on the Quad.

A handful of files dealt with students who recalled experiences of sexual assault or molestation before they ever came to Stanford.

According to the University, it generally “would have been challenging if not impossible to conduct an investigation” given the high level information recorded in most of the forms.

Confidential University information

Other directories previously left unlocked on AFS include the Office of the President and Provost, the Vice Provost for Student Affairs and Vaden Health Center. Within these folders, however, subfolders and files had varying degrees of privacy.

Files that were accessible included 10-year compilations of University statistics produced each academic year by the Office of Institutional Research and Decision Support. Specific datasets marked as confidential range from statistics on faculty ethnic and gender diversity to detailed breakdowns of financial support for graduate students and levels of government-sponsored activity by school and laboratory.

Some documents include data from other institutions as well, such as a report comparing Stanford with its peer schools on metrics such as median student income, financial aid, research funding sources and faculty diversity. Stanford has since reached out to these schools to apologize for the breach.

Documents like these were not publicly available elsewhere — for example, on the University website — but were unlocked in AFS.

Budget planning resources, as well as memos between then-Provost Condoleezza Rice and the Faculty Senate, were likewise open to anyone with AFS access, including users from other schools.

What is AFS?

Named after Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon of Carnegie Mellon University, the Andrew File System has been in use at Stanford for close to three decades and is also used by a variety of universities and research laboratories. AFS allows a large number of users, each with their own computers, to access a centralized digital workspace owned by their institution or workplace.

Whenever Stanford affiliates log into a desktop machine with their SUNet ID and password, they are accessing the data stored in their personal AFS workspace. For example, students can download useful files into their workspace on a library computer and retrieve that file again when they log in to a dorm cluster computer.

At the same time, AFS allows individuals to use all the institution-owned resources that they are granted access to from their home computers. For instance, computer science majors often use AFS to download and submit homework assignments by entering the directory corresponding to their course.

“Essentially all of my assignments for CS classes are stored there,” said Jorge Ochoa ’18, a computer science major. “I keep my code there for safekeeping and because we have to upload our homework to AFS anyways to turn it in for most classes.”

One of the biggest concerns raised by the AFS data breach: It is hard to know who may have seen or even saved the exposed files during the time that they were accessible.

“I don’t usually need to look for things outside of my personal folders, but I have clicked around a bit either out of curiosity or trying to find class resources which are in a different directory,” Ochoa said.

When asked specifically about the SUDPS and Judicial Affairs files found by The Daily, however, Ochoa said he hadn’t seen any of the information in question.

Andrew Milich ’19, a computer science student who has used AFS for coursework, said that most students doing their homework would probably not stumble into places they shouldn’t be.

“The file system is a little hard to work with,” he said, although he admitted there could be a temptation to browse around. “You kind of have to know what you’re looking for to find something.”

Duff emphasized that any student who finds a security problem in a Stanford system is required by the Honor Code and Fundamental Standard to report the issue immediately to the Information Security Office, the University Privacy Office or another relevant department.

Every institution that employs AFS groups the folders used by its member departments into a single top-level directory. Since AFS was also designed to help different organizations share files, top-level directories are typically visible to users from other organizations that use AFS — meaning that organizations have to take charge of protecting their own information from non-members.

According to Duff, each department at Stanford is responsible for setting its folders and files to the correct accessibility level. That means that the University “relies heavily” on these subgroups to manage their files well. Centralized oversight is difficult, he said, not just for AFS but also for all file-sharing systems, from Dropbox to Google Drive.

“The challenge is how to achieve a zero error rate in the permissions across the hundreds of millions of files [and] folders stored at Stanford,” Duff said.

He added that the sheer scale of the systems needed to store information for an organization the size of Stanford means that each department must take charge of its own security.

The very top-level directory for Stanford, ir.stanford.edu, is overseen by University IT and has the correct settings, according to Duff.

Asked about what support Stanford provides to departments on setting AFS access, Duff pointed to online documentation, saying that “those using AFS are expected to understand how it works.”

However, Duff did describe actions that University IT can take to better ensure information privacy. For one, he said, it can improve awareness about privacy setting issues; right after The Daily informed the University of the incorrectly shared files, Duff emailed Stanford’s over 1,300 IT professionals with a note about the situation and extra tips for managing permissions.

“Inevitably, there are going to be some folks who maybe don’t understand how the permissions work, and they’re not IT people, these are just regular staff members and employees,” Duff said. “Because AFS has been here for so long, I do think there’s an element of, someone else set up the permissions a long time ago and over time just kind of forgot they were open and then other people starting dumping stuff in there.”

According to Duff, a push to move Stanford away from AFS toward other systems such as Box and Google Drive is underway; he hopes the process will prompt departments to review outdated files.

Still, he warned that the permissions errors are not “something there’s a 100 percent solution for.”

“As much as we will try, and we have tried for many years, to do all this stuff right, the scale makes it really tough,” he said.

Duff said that University IT adjusted settings on particular AFS folders to protect the mistakenly public data within two hours of being notified. But cleaning up after the leaks is a longer process. For instance, the University had to request the deletion of cached webpages on Google to prevent people from finding sensitive information even after it was locked.

Potential ramifications

According to Chief Privacy Officer Wendi Wright, the University is “informing individuals in accordance with FERPA and state privacy notification requirements, as applicable.”

Legally, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) protects “any information that protects the privacy of student education records” from being shared without written permission.

There are also additional state privacy laws — both statutory and constitutional — covering both students and employees.

According to Robert Rabin, Stanford’s A. Calder Mackay Professor of Law, the University could also be liable to tort lawsuits based on public disclosure of private fact if victims of the data breach can prove that a harm occurred (for example, that their information was accessed and used during the period that it was available).

“There could be two different pathways to responsibility,” Rabin said. “Vicarious liability is where the University is responsible for any branch of the university in violation. The other pathway is negligent supervision, that would be a direct claim that the University should have exercised greater oversight over the branches.”

However, Rabin also said that going into court is an expensive and time consuming process, especially when harms might not be tangible. He was not confident such cases would be pursued, but did stress the significance of the blunder.

“If a vice provost or the department of public safety or whoever is not exercising sufficient caution about protecting student privacy, then the university should be concerned about that,” Rabin said.

In addition to the strictly legal ramifications, Stanford Law Professor and sexual assault activist Michele Dauber worries that there may be consequences for those considering reporting sexual assault in the future.

“One concern that I have is that when survivors find out that Stanford was not adequately safeguarding information that they thought was confidential, they may be even more reluctant to report sexual assault,” she said. “We don’t want students to feel reluctant to report, but an incident like this could have a chilling effect on the willingness of victims to come forward.”

Dauber emphasized that this is especially worrisome given that the last campus climate survey indicated a very low percentage of victims actually report their experiences with sexual assault to anyone at the University.

“The mistake was obviously inadvertent, and I’m sure whoever did it feels terrible about it,” Dauber said. “I’m sure that it wasn’t like Stanford wanted to do this, but this is important, and it’s important to get it right.”

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu, Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu and Ada Statler at adastat ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Harassment, assault allegations against Moretti span three campuses https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/16/harassment-assault-allegations-against-moretti-span-three-campuses/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/16/harassment-assault-allegations-against-moretti-span-three-campuses/#respond Thu, 16 Nov 2017 10:07:39 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1133565 two new allegations of Moretti sexually harassing graduate students have surfaced: one from a woman who says she had to set a dog loose to get Moretti to stop propositioning her and leave her house late at night and another incident described by multiple sources who say Moretti lost a job opportunity at Johns Hopkins after a graduate student reported that he touched her inappropriately.

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One week before he was first publicly accused of sexual assault and harassment by a former graduate student, Emeritus Professor of English Franco Moretti was profiled in The New York Times as a self-proclaimed revolutionary in literary scholarship.

Moretti, a founder of Stanford’s Literary Lab, has helped pioneer the growing field of digital humanities, approaching texts as data that can be computationally analyzed en masse. In the process, The Times writes, he has become something of a celebrity in the literary world by “promoting a ruthlessly impersonal idea of both scholarship and literary history itself.”

The beginnings of that celebrity loomed large in Kimberly Latta’s account earlier this month of the power dynamic underlying her public accusations of rape and sexual harassment against Moretti, her former professor at UC Berkeley. Moretti said he had only consensual sex with Latta, and he emphasized that he was just a “visitor” at Berkeley with “no prospect, back then, of ever being part of the American academy.” But Latta recalled feeling uncomfortable about sexual advances by an instructor who, even back then, was popular and admired.

“I was, of course, eager to work with him, I felt very much compelled — like it was a requirement of me,” Latta told The Daily. “If I was going to work with him, I would have to sleep with him.”

Now, two new allegations of Moretti sexually harassing graduate students have surfaced: one from a woman who says she had to set a dog loose to get Moretti to stop propositioning her and leave her house late at night and another incident described by multiple sources who say Moretti lost a job opportunity at Johns Hopkins after a graduate student reported that he touched her inappropriately.

Jane Penner was a doctoral student in English attending a summer seminar at Dartmouth when, she says, she had to fend Moretti off with her dog. Neither she nor Latta talked about their experience outside their circle of friends until the #MeToo movement encouraged Latta to formally contact Stanford with her account after over three decades. The third woman declined to speak to The Daily altogether.

“There wasn’t an obvious channel [to report],” Penner wrote in an email. “Second, Franco was a brilliant and powerful scholar. As a mere grad student beginning her dissertation, I couldn’t risk inviting his enmity.”

Moretti denied all accusations.

Berkeley, 1985

In the spring of 1985, Franco Moretti’s star was rising. Halfway into a one-year visiting professorship to Berkeley from the University of Verona, the first English language version of his book was out, and he was working and mingling at Berkeley with some of the hottest names in literary theory of the time.

“He seemed to be the most popular guy around,” said Latta. “He was in with the young, cool, hip people; he wasn’t in with the older statesmen of the department. He was one of the new, brash, young, hip, ‘we’re cool, we’re doing the Berkeley thing.’”

Meanwhile, Latta was a first-year graduate student in English. An invitation to dine with Moretti and some of his colleagues in English early in the semester struck her as “thrilling and wonderful,” an induction of sorts to an academic inner circle.

“It meant I’ve arrived; he thinks I’m smart,” Latta recalled thinking. “In the end it made me think the opposite because it meant he’s not interested in my brain.”

According to Latta, Moretti’s overtures to her escalated into one-on-one dinners, personal meetings in each of their apartments and public declarations of love — which she says Moretti relayed to her after the fact — that made rounds among the English faculty. Latta said she remembers Moretti telling her she reminded him of the heroine in “Le Rouge et le Noir,” or “The Red and the Black,” a novel about a man who seduces for his personal advancement.

These declarations mortified Latta even as she continued to “relish” his mentorship, said Michael Harrawood, an older undergraduate student in the department who heard about her dynamic with Moretti as it developed. Latta said she would sit in class with another professor, a friend of Moretti’s, and feel “intimidated” by the thought that the professor knew and apparently condoned her interactions with Moretti.

Latta recalls her relationship to Moretti as one of “jovial bullying” on his part and shamed acquiescence on hers. For instance, she said that he would try to hold her hand as they were walking on a street and cajole her in a way that she described as “friendly” but “pushy” — an attitude she felt powerless to resist.

“I thought ‘I can’t.’ I felt very afraid; it felt completely wrong,” she recounted. “I didn’t want to [hold his hand]; I didn’t want anyone to know, ironically, because I felt ashamed of myself. I felt ashamed it was happening, and I wasn’t strong enough to say ‘get the f— away from me’… I just didn’t have the strength.”

“So yes, I complied with him,” Latta said.

According to Latta, the uneasy compliance culminated in two counts of sexual assault after Latta explicitly rejected sex — once at her apartment and once at his.

“It was really traumatizing because I had a dissociative experience of being out of my body,” said Latta. “So I told myself, ‘This is not happening; this is happening to my body.’”

Moretti, on the other hand, said in an email to The Daily that his sexual intercourse with Latta was “fully consensual” and that they parted “on good terms” after further one-on-one meetings that were initiated by Latta as well as by himself.

Latta said she can believe that Moretti had a completely different notion of what was happening than she did. In her original post on Facebook, she recounted Moretti telling her that “‘you American girls say no when you mean yes’” after she said “no” to sex.

Aftermath at Berkeley, 1985

“I had to talk to him,” Latta said of their contact for the rest of the semester. “He was my professor, even after this.”

Although she eventually dropped out of the class to avoid him, she said, remembered that he gave her an A on the “crappy” final paper she submitted the following semester.

“Maybe that’s why he thinks it was friendly, because he didn’t totally fail me for the class,” said Latta.

Harrawood remembers being disturbed by the idea of Moretti “body-blocking” Latta and forcibly kissing her in his office — but he did not know that Latta’s complaint against Moretti also consisted of sexual assault until her public post this month. Of the parts that she did tell him, he said, his response was sympathetic but impotent.

“Kimberly told me and Tad [Piori], and we believed her, but someone asked me the other day: Why didn’t I report it?” said Harrawood. “And it was the first time I thought of it, and actually, I’m a bit ashamed of myself… It never occurred to me because I didn’t know who you reported stuff like that to.”

Frances Ferguson, another professor in the English department, was the go-to person for Berkeley Title IX cases at the time. According to Ferguson, Harrawood could not have stuck up for Latta without Latta initiating a formal report herself — the Title IX regulations at the time allowed solely firsthand reports to launch formal investigations, while third parties who had witnessed violations could only corroborate.

Latta said that she eventually paid a visit to Ferguson after the incidents of assault. Both women recall the meeting, but where Ferguson said she was “worried” about Latta’s emotional state at the time, Latta remembers Ferguson as “wooden” and “impassive.”

According to Latta, she was especially unsettled by the knowledge that she was talking to a colleague of Moretti’s as opposed to someone from another department. When Ferguson asked her not to say Moretti’s name outright — a practice that Ferguson said was required for Title IX complaints that were not intended to be formal reports — Latta assumed that Ferguson already knew the name of the accused because she was a friend of Moretti’s, the former student recalled.

Both Moretti and Ferguson denied knowing each other at the time, though they would have occasion to meet again during the informal hiring process at Johns Hopkins that gave rise to another allegation against Moretti.

Ferguson said that Latta did not mention the sexual assault during their conversation, an account that Latta believes to be true, though she does not remember what exactly she said. Latta remarked that her perception of Ferguson and Moretti’s relationship would likely have prevented her from speaking out.

Latta told Moretti about the meeting and said he threatened to ruin her career through a colleague whose wife was a “powerful attorney”; Moretti denies the claim and said he had no such connections at the time.

At the end of the school year, Moretti returned to Italy, where he would stay for another four years before accepting a post at Columbia. Ferguson and her husband, English professor Walter Benn Michaels, moved on to Johns Hopkins in 1988. Latta made no formal report, and no administrative action would ever be taken. But Latta, who took a seven-year-long hiatus from her doctorate after getting her M.A. from Berkeley in 1986, could not leave the events of the year behind.

“I wanted his support, I thought in the beginning — I thought it was because he really admired me and thought I was a bright young woman,” said Latta. “But it was not, and at the end of it all, I felt utterly insecure about myself as a student and as a thinker. I felt like my brain had been destroyed in a way.”

Dartmouth, 1995

Latta is not the only woman to accuse Moretti of inappropriate advances.

Penner said she met Moretti in 1995 while attending the School of Criticism and Theory, a six-week summer seminar that allowed graduate students in the humanities to learn from prominent faculty. The program, now hosted at Cornell, was held that year at Dartmouth in New Hampshire.

At the time, Penner was a doctoral student in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Moretti was still a professor at Columbia.

One evening, Penner said, she hosted a party at the home she was staying at for the seminar. According to Penner, Moretti lingered long after all the other guests had left to make sexual advances on her.

“I rebuffed him, but he continued to press his case and tried to touch me,” she told The Daily over the phone. “I continued to say no and asked him to leave.”

Then, she said, Moretti became “physically aggressive” — literally chasing her around the house downstairs.

“He acted as if it were a game, but I was alarmed,” Penner recalled, saying she feared both immediate physical harm and the professional repercussions of turning him down.

Not knowing how else to stop the harassment, she said, she ran upstairs to her bedroom, where she had shut in her dog for the party. She remembered that earlier in the evening, Moretti wouldn’t come inside the house until she put the dog away, apparently because he disliked the animals. Only when she let her dog out of the room did Moretti finally leave, she said.

While she wasn’t physically hurt, Penner said the episode left her shaken.

“He scared the hell out of me.”

Jonathan Grossman, an English professor at UCLA, confirmed that Penner told him about her experience with Moretti afterward. So did Rayna Kalas, now an English professor at Cornell, who was a fellow graduate student and close friend of Penner at the time. Kalas remembered Penner telling her about the incident when they reunited at school the following term.

“I remember her saying, ‘I had a very trying summer,’” Kalas said.

After learning of Latta’s allegations against Moretti last week, Kalas said, she encouraged Penner to go public with her story. Kalas speculated that Penner — currently the vice president and head of communications at the online lending company Upstart — is in a better position to accuse Moretti than those still embedded in the academic world where Moretti has left his mark.

“I think [academics] probably would feel reticent to come forward, and so I think in some ways [Penner] is in a unique position to be clear about what happened to her,” Kalas said.

The additional accounts of sexual harassment against Moretti come at what many commentators have described as a “watershed moment” for sexual assault and harassment claims.

“Every woman has had to do a sort of calculus,” Kalas noted. “When something happens to you, you think to yourself, am I going to come forward with this? What are the repercussions going to be for me? Is it worth it? At this moment … more and more women are coming forward.”

Johns Hopkins, 1997

In 1997, 12 years after Latta made her informal report about Moretti, Ferguson was a faculty member at John Hopkins when Moretti and his wife were considered for positions in the English department.

A faculty member who joined Hopkins after the incident said she heard from Ferguson firsthand that Ferguson and her husband, Michaels, were behind Moretti’s candidacy. Ferguson did not say whether she was directly involved in the hire when asked, stating instead that the department considered the possibility of extending offers to both Moretti and his wife when faculty numbers were down.

The former professor, who asked to be anonymous, added that prospective hires at small departments in Hopkins were usually solicited by current faculty rather than through a formal search process. The English department at Hopkins currently has under 20 people, and the number was under 10 permanent faculty at the time.

The informal nature of most hires meant that the invitation for Moretti to give a talk on campus in 1997 was a sign that he was being seriously considered for a hire, the faculty member said.

She and another professor present at the time both confirmed that a graduate student in the English department reported being touched inappropriately by Moretti during his visit — and that the department did not move forward with the hire because of the student’s report.

One of the former faculty members recounted that it was only this fall, reading Latta’s Facebook post on her allegations against Moretti, that she found out that Ferguson knew of the previous incident involving Moretti. Dismayed, she contacted Latta about what she described as Ferguson’s willingness to hire Moretti despite knowing about Latta’s report.

The student who reported harassment declined to comment.

Academia’s problem

The accusations against Moretti — as well as another recent accusation of sexual assault made against now-deceased Stanford English Professor Jay Fliegelman and allegations of harassment and cover-ups at the University of Rochester — have prompted the #MeToo dialogue sweeping the entertainment world to reach into the academic space.

Harassment in academia may be a more serious issue than people realize, a recent study of 300 complaints of harassment against faculty suggests. Most of the cases involved physical (not just verbal) harassment, and 53 percent of cases involved harassers accused by multiple students.

“Academia is particularly fertile territory for those who want to leverage their power to gain sexual favors or inflict sexual violence on vulnerable individuals,” Caroline Fredrickson wrote in The Atlantic last month.

Some academics interviewed by The Daily had conflicted responses to the recent reports.

“I don’t want to see a senior professor crucified and punished at the end of his career,” said Harrawood, “and at the same time, if he did it, I want Kimberly to have peace.”

Harrawood, who describes Latta as a friendly “acquaintance” rather than a friend, spoke to The Daily for over an hour to corroborate Latta’s account over 30 years after he met Latta. He said he believed her, even as he felt torn about the public accusations against Moretti and the ensuing backlash.

“My sense of things is that Moretti had a very different idea of what was going on,” said Harrawood. “But hell … this was in the ‘80s, and the world was very different then.”

Moretti, for his part, denied the list of allegations compiled by The Daily based on accounts from the sources in this report.

“There are numerous errors of fact, regarding both the situations and my behavior, in the statements included in your email,” wrote Moretti in an email, “but for now let me simply say that I have never sexually assaulted anyone, nor have I ever knowingly engaged in any kind of unwanted contact.”

Relationships between faculty and students were more common in previous decades, some academics reflected.

In the 1990s, Moretti met a graduate student in comparative literature he would go on to marry. Her education at Columbia overlapped entirely with his tenure there, although he declined to comment on the origins or nature of their relationship at Columbia, or to confirm that they are still married.

Harrawood indicated that he knew of at least two English professors at Berkeley who went on to marry their graduate students. Berkeley did not ban sexual and romantic relationships between faculty and students until 2003.

Stanford, too, has more rules today restricting faculty-student relationships than it used to. The University’s policy was last updated in 2014.

“Even in regard to consensual relationships, Stanford has in recent years strengthened policies so as to prohibit sexual or romantic relationships between faculty and all undergraduates, as well as graduate students for whom the faculty member has — or may in the future have — academic responsibility,” wrote Stanford spokesperson E.J. Miranda in an email to The Daily.

Faculty also undergo mandatory training on sexual harassment and misconduct every two years.

Miranda said the University would inform its Title IX Office of the additional allegations beyond Latta’s, which the office is currently investigating.

Neither of the new accusations were reported to Stanford, Miranda said.

Meanwhile, the Literary Lab that Moretti founded has recently updated the “About” page on its website to specify that “no unprofessional behavior, harassment or abuse will be tolerated from any member, and we expect all participants to adhere to and further these values.”

Reflecting on office hour visits to Moretti, Latta said she does not remember what they spoke about — only that she went frequently, and that it was likely academic, because of the kind of student she was.

“I was a very ambitious student then. I did a lot of office hour visits with all my professors, always in their offices,” said Latta. “Probably I was brown-nosing, trying to get in with with my professors.”

Dedicated enough to get into a top-tier graduate school and then good enough to make it in the academic job market, Latta said she capitalized on the graduate school experience to seek personal relationships with the professors who would help to shape her career. That relentless drive, she reflected, left her and others like her vulnerable to those they sought most to impress and become close to.

“[Forming relationships with faculty] is what you’re supposed to do,” Latta said.

 

Correction: An earlier version of the article mistakenly stated that third parties witnessing Title IX violations at Berkeley in 1985 could not help with the investigations of the claims. In fact, third parties were allowed to corroborate, but not initiate, formal reports that led to official Title IX investigations – only firsthand formal reports were accepted as the basis for launching an investigation. The Daily regrets this error.

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu and Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

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Two women accuse former Stanford professors of sexual assault https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/09/two-women-accuse-former-stanford-professors-of-sexual-assault/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/09/two-women-accuse-former-stanford-professors-of-sexual-assault/#respond Fri, 10 Nov 2017 07:46:34 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1133215 Two women have recently made public accusations of sexual assault against Stanford professors, one of whom is now deceased and one of whom is retired.

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This post has been updated twice with comments from Franco Moretti.

Two women have recently made public accusations of sexual assault against Stanford professors, one of whom is now deceased and one of whom is retired.

Franco Moretti, professor emeritus in the English department, faces allegations of sexual assault, harassment and rape made by Kimberly Latta, his former graduate student at UC Berkeley. In an email to The Daily on Friday morning, Moretti said the allegations were “utterly false” and described his interactions with Latta as “fully consensual.”

The other accusation came in a creative piece — part poetry, part personal essay — published Nov. 3 in Entropy by Stanford graduate Seo-Young Chu M.A. ’01. The piece details Chu’s accusations of harassment and rape against Jay Fliegelman, Stanford’s former Coe Professor in American Literature who died in 2007. According to Chu, Stanford suspended Fliegelman for two years without pay after conducting an investigation but then allowed him to continue teaching.

Franco Moretti

Latta wrote in a Facebook post Sunday morning first covered by Stanford Politics that she had contacted Stanford authorities about the sexual assault that occurred at Berkeley in 1984-1985, while Moretti was a visiting professor. Berkeley later invited him to return as a visiting Beckman Professor in 2002.

According to Latta, Moretti “sexually stalked, pressured and raped” her while he was her professor in the department. She said that he raped her in her Oakland apartment and would push up her shirt and bra and kiss her against her will in his office.

“He specifically said to me, ‘You American girls say no when you mean yes,’” Latta wrote.

Moretti denied the accusation of rape, maintaining that she had been a consenting partner throughout their acquaintance.

“I did meet Kimberly Latta during my visit at Berkeley in 1985; we went out to dinner together one night and back to her apartment where we had fully consensual sex and I spent the night,” wrote Moretti. “I did not rape her, and am horrified by the accusation.”

He added that he and Latta continued to meet, “including at her initiative,” and remained friendly until he left Berkeley.

When Latta reported the incident to Berkeley’s Title IX office, she said that both Moretti and then-Title IX officer Frances Ferguson attempted to silence her — an account that Ferguson disputes.

While Latta wrote that Ferguson, who was also an English professor, pressured her to state only Moretti’s initials in a report as Ferguson was “a friend of his,” Ferguson described the characterization as a “real misunderstanding.”

“I scarcely knew Franco Moretti, but even if I had been a close friend of his, I believe I would have told her what I told her at the time, which is that she had two options ahead of her,”  Ferguson said. “The last thing I would want would be to discourage someone from making a formal complaint.”

As Berkeley’s sole Title IX officer, Ferguson said, she would advise individuals who reported sexual misconduct or assault of their options: file a formal complaint, which she could then investigate through the Title IX office, or make an informal complaint to the accused, which Ferguson said amounted to a letter asking the accused to desist.

According to Ferguson, she was prohibited from keeping detailed notes on any case that was not filed as a formal complaint. The misunderstanding between Latta and herself, she said, originated from notes that she kept on her meeting with Latta, which she took in case Latta or another student made another complaint about Moretti. Ferguson said she redacted Latta and Moretti’s names in the notes in deference to the policy on record-keeping with informal complaints.

Nor was she aware that Moretti’s actions had reached the extent Latta described in her post, Ferguson said. In her recollection, Latta’s report to her included interactions that amounted to sexual harassment but not sexual assault.

“I had the impression that she was saying that he was asking her to have sex with him, but he was not putting pressure on her — past just being initially soliciting her attention,”  Ferguson said. “And I had the impression that I had not thought it had reached such an extreme path that it’d be useless for her to write a letter to him to say, ‘your attentions are unwelcome, please stop.’”

The relationship between Moretti and Ferguson remains disputed by all three parties involved. Both Moretti and Ferguson deny that they were friends at the time of the incident, but whereas Moretti claims that he and Ferguson “became friends later,”, Ferguson said that she saw little of Moretti outside of chance professional encounters.

Ferguson added that she later heard from her academic network that he allegedly sexually harassed another graduate student in the 1990s, a claim that Moretti also disputes.

After Latta told Moretti about her conversation with Ferguson, he threatened to “ruin [her] career” if she pressed charges against him, Latta wrote. Moretti denies that the conversation ever happened, saying that he first heard of Latta’s complaint against him – or any other sexual harassment complaint in a university setting – only on Nov. 10, the date he responded to The Daily’s inquiry.

“I did not know Frances Ferguson at the time (though we became friends later), had no powerful attorney friends, and certainly did not threaten to ruin any career,” wrote Moretti. “I was a visitor, with no prospect, back then, of ever being part of the American academy.”

Whether or not the conversation that year took place, Latta made no further report about Moretti in the decades that followed.

After earning her degree, Latta stayed in academia as an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and Saint Louis University before switching careers to psychotherapy and writing.

Moretti, who retired from Stanford last spring and is on leave this academic year, is known for his work on literary theory and digital humanities. He was unavailable by phone when The Daily contacted him Thursday evening but responded via email Friday morning.

University spokesperson EJ Miranda wrote in an email to The Daily that Latta’s complaint is ‘new’ to the administration and that the University has reached out to Latta for further information.

“The professor has retired and is not currently on campus,” Miranda wrote. “We of course are concerned and will be reviewing the report and whether there are any actions for Stanford to take.”

For his part, Moretti said that he only learned about the sexual harassment and assault allegations against him for the first time on Friday.

“Unfortunately, I fear this accusation will have an enormous impact on colleagues, friends, and family, despite being utterly false,” he wrote.

But in her original post, Latta said she was confident of her version of events and that she hoped to stand up for other women who might have been assaulted by Moretti.

“I will take any lie detector and make any affidavits necessary to assure that he is brought to justice,” she wrote.

Jay Fliegelman

Former English graduate student Chu, now an associate professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, wrote in her piece in Entropy that Fliegelman subjected her to months of sexual harassment in addition to raping her while she was studying at Stanford.

Fliegelman also made inappropriate statements to her, she said, asking her if she was a virgin and telling her once that “All men have rape fantasies, including your father.”

She recounted a conversation with him early on in their acquaintance in which he probed her desire to stay in her Ph.D. program over a restaurant meal between just the two of them.

Feeling uneasy, Chu wrote, she tried to fend off potential advances.

“I added that I was not ‘interested’ in the way people who are dating use that word, but he could always count on me to work hard and try my best to produce good scholarship,” she recalled.

“But I’m lonely,” Chu wrote that Fliegelman replied. “I’m needy. I need to feel desirable. I need you to desire me.”

Chu said she never pressed charges against the professor but that her statements to University personnel led the school to take up an investigation concluding in Fliegelman’s suspension.

Miranda did not comment on the specifics of the case, citing ongoing privacy concerns and saying that written permission to discuss such cases – required by FERPA to share information – “is rarely provided.”

“Both California employment law and FERPA restricted what we could say at the time about the details, though it was well known throughout the campus that the faculty member was suspended and banned from the department and its building for two years,” Miranda wrote in an email to The Daily Thursday evening.

“While we remain constrained by privacy laws and cannot speak about this specific case, we take concerns of this nature extremely seriously, conduct thorough investigations and inform both parties of the outcome of those investigations,” he continued.

Chu herself could not be reached by phone or email Thursday evening.

After leaving her doctoral program at Stanford, Chu completed a Ph.D. in English at Harvard University and has been teaching and writing since. Her first book, “Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?”, was published six years ago.

Despite his two-year leave from Stanford, Chu noted, Fliegelman remained a prominent scholar up to his death at the age of 58. One section of Chu’s published piece is a letter dated June 2016, addressed to the administrators of a graduate mentoring award formerly named after Fliegelman. The award’s exact title is unspecified in her essay but apparently references an honor that the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies named after Fliegelman in 2009.

Until at least 2014, Stanford’s American Studies department also presented the Jay W. Fliegelman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Honors Research.

“If you are one of Jay Fliegelman’s former students who had an experience worth celebrating: I believe you,” Chu wrote in the letter portion of her essay. “You need not provide documentation to persuade me. I believe that, in your experience, he was a wonderful mentor. Is it too much for me to ask you to believe me too?”

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu and Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Washington University in St. Louis once gave out an award named after Jay Fliegelman. In fact, a WUSTL professor won the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ award once named after Fliegelman. The Daily regrets this error.

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Retired English professor accused of sexual assault by former graduate student https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/09/english-professor-accused-of-sexual-assault-by-former-graduate-student/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/09/english-professor-accused-of-sexual-assault-by-former-graduate-student/#respond Fri, 10 Nov 2017 01:28:56 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1133143 Franco Moretti, Stanford professor emeritus in the English department, faces allegations of sexual assault, harassment and rape made by Kimberly Latta, his former graduate student at UC Berkeley.

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Note: This report has been updated with comments from Franco Moretti and Frances Ferguson in a separate post.

Franco Moretti, Stanford professor emeritus in the English department, faces allegations of sexual assault, harassment and rape made by Kimberly Latta, his former graduate student at UC Berkeley.

Latta wrote in a Facebook post Sunday morning that she had contacted Stanford authorities about the sexual assault and rape that occurred at Berkeley while Moretti was a visiting professor in 1984-1985 (first reported at Stanford Politics). Berkeley later invited him to return as a visiting Beckman Professor in 2002. The full text of the post is available below the article.

According to Latta, she initially reported the incident to Berkeley’s Title IX officer but was pressured to state only Moretti’s initials, as the officer was “a friend of his.” Latta said she remained silent about the incident over the years because Moretti threatened to “ruin [her] career” if she pressed charges against him. After earning her degree, Latta was an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and Saint Louis University before switching careers to psychotherapy and writing.

Moretti, who retired from Stanford last spring and is on leave this academic year, is known for his work on literary theory and digital humanities. He was unavailable by phone when The Daily ccontacted him this evening.

University spokesperson E.J. Miranda wrote in an email to The Daily that the report is “new” to the administration, and that it has reached out to Latta for further information.

“The professor has retired and is not currently on campus,” wrote Miranda. “We of course are concerned and will be reviewing the report and whether there are any actions for Stanford to take.”

 

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

***

After many years of silence, and with a heavy but angry heart, I sent this email to the appropriate authorities at Stanford University today:

“Subject: Sexual Predator Franco Moretti

Dear Those Who are Concerned about Sexual Abusers at Stanford:

I am writing to report that when I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley in 1984-85, my then-professor Franco Moretti sexually stalked, pressured, and raped me. He specifically said to me, “You Americans girls say no when you mean yes.” He raped me in my apartment in Oakland. He also would frequently push me up against the wall in his office, right next to the window that looked out at the library, and push up my shirt and bra and forcibly kiss me, against my will. I reported him to the Title IX officer, who was then Frances Ferguson, Ph.D. She was a friend of his and urged me not to make a report. I insisted, but she persuaded me to leave only his initials in her documents, in case someone else reported that he had abused her. I have no reason to believe that she did not do what she said she would do. I told Franco about my conversation with Ferguson, and he threatened to ruin my career if I pressed charges against him. He said he had powerful friends who were attorneys who would ruin my name. I remained silent for all these years because I was in academia. I have told a number of people about it privately, however. These are upstanding, well-known professors of History and English at other institutions, who would certainly corroborate my story.

I am encouraged to report in the wake of the Weinstein and #metoo movements.

This man has certainly assaulted many other women over the course of his fabulously successful career. It’s time that the truth came out about this predator. I will take any lie detector and make any affidavits necessary to assure that he is brought to justice.

Sincerely,

Kimberly Latta

Kimberly S Latta, PhD, LSW

Pittsburgh, PA

 

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Over 50 workers protest ‘chronic understaffing,’ ‘unacceptable workloads’ in dining halls https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/02/over-50-workers-protest-chronic-understaffing-unacceptable-workloads-in-dining-halls/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/02/over-50-workers-protest-chronic-understaffing-unacceptable-workloads-in-dining-halls/#respond Thu, 02 Nov 2017 07:57:33 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1132393 Workers from two dining halls hand-delivered petitions to Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE) management on Tuesday, lodging a formal complaint against what they describe as “chronic understaffing” and “unacceptable workloads” that they say the department has ignored for over a year.

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Workers from two dining halls hand-delivered petitions to Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE) management on Tuesday, lodging a complaint against what they describe as “chronic understaffing” and “unacceptable workloads” that they say the department has ignored for over a year.

Over 50 workers protest 'chronic understaffing,' 'unacceptable workloads' in dining halls
(The Stanford Daily Photo Team).

“We are overloaded and under the unsustainable stress of covering vacant positions,” reads one petition signed by about 40 Arrillaga Family Dining Commons workers. “We are tired of being scapegoats for management’s failures.”

Addressed to assistant director of Residential Dining East Campus Bob McClenaghan, the documents spell out concerns from workers who service Arrillaga Family Dining Commons and Gerhard Casper Dining Commons, respectively. During their break on Tuesday, a group of about 20 workers entered McClenaghan’s office to hand off the petitions with representatives from their union, SEIU Local 2007.

The union and its stewards – workers who act as a liaison between their peers, the union and the University – have received an uptick in complaints about understaffing, according to Arrillaga steward Luis Carriel. In recent weeks, he said, an increasing number of members have sought him out to report experiences of getting yelled at for not working fast enough and to say that they were exhausted from doing the work of multiple people.

“It’s just a health and safety concern we all have in general,” Carriel said. “Where it’s like, ‘I have to run around and get this done because I have to have it done by this time, but it takes two to three people to do this, and I’m doing it by myself.’”

According to the petition sent to Arrillaga Dining, the dining hall has vacant positions for food service workers of category III, IV and V, which current workers “desperately need” the management to fill.

Carriel says that the problem is not new. For the last year during monthly “summit” meetings with management, he says his concerns have been brushed aside, with administrators citing long-term factors such as stiff competition for new hires with local employers Google and Facebook as reasons for the lingering vacancies.

In an email response to The Daily, Executive Director of Communications at R&DE Jocelyn Breeland described the recent summits with the union as productive and said the petitions came outside established channels of communication between workers and the management.

“We were surprised to receive the petition on that day, given the progress made and that our next summit is scheduled in a few days,” wrote Breeland. “Our expectation is that we will discuss this and other topics with SEIU according to our mutually-established process.”

Breeland acknowledged that R&DE faces “the same challenges” as local employers and other branches of the University in “filling all positions,” citing low unemployment rates throughout the country and in the Bay Area. She added that R&DE has taken “a number of steps to recruit and retain skilled workers” amid a “challenging job market,” ranging from passing referral cards for potential hires to employees and the union to taking part in local job fairs to recruiting from a variety of schools.

SEIU Senior Organizer Seth Leibson and Carriel also questioned R&DE’s commitment to hiring more staff, pointing to the pool of “casuals” whom they say R&DE could recruit from if it chose to. So-called casuals are workers who may not join the union and do not receive union benefits because they work under the threshold of 20 hours per week for R&DE. Leibson said that he knows of casuals who have stayed in the position for years without prospects of advancement.

“Casuals work right side-by-side with our members, so they certainly are affected by workload the same way our members are,” said Leibson. “Even many of our workers who have a union have felt intimidated and afraid to speak up to management, so you can imagine casuals are less likely to express independent concerns.”

R&DE disputed the claim that the management is reluctant to hire casual employees.

“Casual employees are a talent pool we rely on to fill permanent positions and a significant portion of the current bargaining unit staff initially worked for the University as casual employees,” wrote Breeland.

Breeland also challenged the petition’s claim that staffing shortages and overwork have compromised worker well-being.

The petition called on Stanford to “provide adequate cover for the increasing number of our co-workers out on sick leave and disability, caused in large part due to our ever-increasing workload and pressure.”

Breeland responded that when employees are unexpectedly absent, R&DE works “diligently” to seek temporary replacements to keep dining hall operations going, and minimizes worker injuries and absences through health and safety programs.

On the management’s response to the petitions, workers and R&DE also provided different accounts. Leibson said that Executive Director of Human Resources Ann Marie Mutso was “not happy at all” when the workers submitted the petition and insisted on speaking to union organizers on the side of the office in the absence of the workers.

However, Breeland said that Mutso only asked to speak with the union organizers separately to give a safety reminder about non-employees entering the dining hall kitchens. According to Breeland, Mutso offered to speak to the workers about their concerns at the next summit as she did not have a chance to read the petition at the time.

On the whole, Breeland said that R&DE aims to foster an “open and [collaborative] relationship” with its employees and SEIU. But workers who signed the petition backed its message of distrust.

“Many of us have brought this issue [of short-staffing] to management’s attention and been met only with excuses,” the petition read. “We are told that management cannot find workers to fill vacant full-time positions, even as many toil in Dining year after year as ‘temporary’ or ‘casual’ employees with low wages and no benefits at one of the most prestigious and wealthy universities in the world.”

 

Contact Fiona Kelliher and Fangzhou Liu at fionak ‘at’ stanford.edu and fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Psychologists explore how people conceive of human experience https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/24/psychologists-explore-how-people-conceive-of-human-experience/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/24/psychologists-explore-how-people-conceive-of-human-experience/#respond Tue, 24 Oct 2017 09:43:23 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1131731 “Is a beetle capable of experiencing joy?” and “Is a robot capable of experiencing guilt?” were just some of the unusual questions that Stanford psychologists posed to participants in a recent research study about human conceptions of mental life.

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“Is a beetle capable of experiencing joy?” and “Is a robot capable of experiencing guilt?” were just some of the unusual questions that Stanford psychologists posed to participants in a recent research study about human conceptions of mental life.

Kara Weisman, Ph.D. student in psychology and the study’s lead author, along with psychology professors Carol Dweck and Ellen Markman, asked 1,400 adults questions about the mental capacities of beings and inanimate objects to learn how people conceive of abstract human experiences such as consciousness and emotion.

According to the research paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Oct. 11, the team found that Americans have a three-part conceptual structure of mental life – the three parts being body, heart and mind. “Body” refers to physical experiences of pain and hunger, “heart” describes social and emotional experiences such as joy and pride, and “mind” applies to cognitive capacities such as memory and vision.

The finding contrasts with previous work on the subject and could change how researchers think about human social behavior and ethical reasoning.

Weisman told Stanford News that the study’s questions were designed to help participants sidestep the challenge of discussing abstract issues such as the nature of life and consciousness directly. Rather than interpret each response individually, the researchers sought to discover similarities and contrasts across each participants’ answers to 40 different questions they were posed.

“Our primary interest was really in the patterns of people’s answers to these questions,” Weisman said. “So, when a certain person thought a robot could think or remember things, what else did they think it was capable of doing? By looking at the patterns in people’s responses to these questions, we could infer the underlying, conceptual structure.”

The three major groups of mental capacities — body, heart and mind — emerged from analysis of these patterns across over 1,000 respondents.

To control for potential confounding factors such as the framing of the questions, researchers altered the experimental setup in different phases of the study. For instance, some participants were asked to assess beings individually, while others were explicitly told to compare different beings with each other. The team found that despite variations in the details of the language and setup, the three categories of mental experience were plainly recognizable in every phase of the study.

According to Weisman, the Stanford study challenges the precedent in mind perception research set by a 2007 psychology study conducted at Harvard University, which proposed a two-part structure of mental life: experience  or the ability to feel guilt and hunger, and agency, or the ability to make plans or control one’s impulses.

One possible application of the body-heart-mind model lies in enhancing social relationships as well as people’s relationships with technology, those behind the study said. Researchers said that if humans view a robot as possessing a “mind” rather than being a mere machine, they may be better able to think of robots as humans, improving the quality of the interaction.

The framework could also shed light on how to reduce dehumanization among people, the researchers say. For example, objectification might take the form of emphasizing a person’s body over the mind and heart, while other forms of prejudice and stereotyping might take the form of focusing only on people’s “minds” and neglecting their emotional life, or focusing only on people’s “hearts” and underestimating their intellectual abilities. The scholars argue the body-mind-heart model may provide a useful perspective for understanding how and why people enhance or reduce mental capacities within those three major clusters.

“This is an exciting new framework, but it’s just the beginning,” Dweck said. “We hope it can serve as a takeoff point for theory and research on how ordinary people think about age-old questions about the mind.”

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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DeVos makes surprise visit to Stanford https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/12/devos-makes-surprise-visit-to-stanford/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/12/devos-makes-surprise-visit-to-stanford/#respond Fri, 13 Oct 2017 00:04:06 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1131008 Students in Graduate School of Business (GSB) class GSBGEN 383: “Practical Policy and Politics” had a particularly high-profile guest speaker Thursday morning: Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who visited Stanford before heading to a school in Milpitas.

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Students in Graduate School of Business (GSB) class GSBGEN 383: “Practical Policy and Politics” had a particularly high-profile guest speaker Thursday morning: Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who visited Stanford before heading to a school in Milpitas.

The MBA/MSx course is taught by GSB lecturer Keith Hennessey ’90, who was assistant to the U.S. President for Economic Policy and director of the U.S. National Economic Council under President George W. Bush. According to Hennessey, students only learned that DeVos was visiting when she walked into the room.

“They were quite surprised when she walked in the room, and there was a surge of excitement and adrenaline as they suddenly realized they’d be able to ask and challenge her directly on these topics,” wrote Hennessey in an email to The Daily. “They did both, quite effectively.”

DeVos spent the full one hour and 45 minutes fielding questions from the class, with most of the questions coming from students. Hennessey declined to elaborate on the content of the session as well as any past acquaintance he might have had with DeVos during his career as a policymaker.

“I’m sorry I can’t say more about the substance because we agreed it would be off the record,” said Hennessey.

After delivering the lecture, DeVos paid a visit to the d.school, where she spoke to several students. Jacqueline Wibowo ’18 M.S. ’18 was working on a group project for a management science and engineering class when DeVos approached them in their workspace.

“She just ended up coming to our stations asking what we were doing,” said Wibowo.

Wibowo said her group was working to brainstorm a possible research question based on a single-word prompt, “money,” and was curious about DeVos’ thoughts given her background.

“She said she was thinking about her grandkids [and] how she would explain the concept of money to a two-year-old for the first time,” said Wibowo.

Wibowo added that some of her project partners had reservations about DeVos based on her decisions as Secretary of Education, but that the group agreed that she was “articulate” and her contribution “very insightful” despite their misgivings.

DeVos sparked controversy last month when she revoked key Obama-era Title IX regulations, rescinding the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter that enumerated school’s responsibilities for handling sexual assault cases and, among other things, mandated that schools use a lower standard of evidence to find guilt in such cases. DeVos has criticized schools’ Title IX programs for overstepping their authority and denying accused students due process — a focus that quickly came under fire from advocates for sexual assault victims, including many at Stanford.

Interim guidelines issued by DeVos now allow colleges and universities to decide what standard of evidence they want to employ.

“This interim guidance will help schools as they work to combat sexual misconduct and will treat all students fairly,” DeVos said. “Schools must continue to confront these horrific crimes and behaviors head-on. There will be no more sweeping them under the rug. But the process also must be fair and impartial, giving everyone more confidence in its outcomes.”

Prior to DeVos’ confirmation as Secretary of Education, campus activist groups mobilized students to oppose her appointment by calling their local and state representatives. She was eventually confirmed by the margin of just one vote, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tiebreaker.

According to GSB spokesperson Heather Hansen, the communications office did not receive advance notice of DeVos’ visit to Stanford.

 

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles ‘at’ stanford.edu and Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Politeness helps online products sell, researchers find https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/05/politeness-helps-online-products-sell-researchers-find/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/05/politeness-helps-online-products-sell-researchers-find/#respond Fri, 06 Oct 2017 05:19:51 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1130699 Stanford researchers found that the greater the number of words that demonstrated respect for the customer or suggested authority, the greater the volume of product sales.

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Polite language that appeals to authority and cultural norms can boost product sales, Stanford scholars found.

Politeness helps online products sell, researchers find
Dan Jurafsky, linguistics professor and co-author on the study (Courtesy of L.A. Cicero).

Second-year computer science PhD candidate Reid Pryzant, linguistics professor Dan Jurafsky and Young-joo Chung, a lead scientist at Japanese e-commerce platform Rakuten and a former visiting scholar at Stanford, applied machine learning methods to over 90,000 food and health-related product descriptions on Rakuten. They found that the greater the number of words that demonstrated respect for the customer or suggested authority, the greater the volume of product sales.

“Product descriptions are fundamentally a kind of social discourse, one whose linguistic contents have real control over consumer purchasing behavior,” the researchers wrote in an article presented at the SIGIR Workshop on eCommerce in Tokyo, Japan. “Business owners employ narratives to portray their products, and consumers react accordingly.”

The online retail industry has long sought to understand why the same product sells with varying degrees of success across different listings and websites. Previous research has explored consumers’ responses to product reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations, but understanding the effect of advertising language on sales has been tricker, according to the researchers.

For instance, brand names like “Nike” or phrases like “free shipping” might boost sales — but these words only indicate facts about the product and the sales strategy rather than the linguistic devices that advertisers employ.

“We’re more interested in framing,” Jurafsky told Stanford News. “How do advertisers frame the text to appeal to people independent of those other obvious sales factors?”

To isolate the impact of advertising language, Pryzant suggested adversarial machine learning, a cutting-edge statistical technique that plies predictive models against each other.

The method allowed researchers to identify words that correlated with high sales independently of a predetermined pricing strategy or factual information about the product. But Pryzant and Jurafsky did not expect the approach to be as successful as it turned out to be.

“Adversarial learning is a really hot topic right now,” Jurafsky said. “But it’s been challenging to get it to work for language. So this is really exciting technically and suggests other potential applications.”

Previously, adversarial learning was mostly applied to image analysis rather than language, forcing the team to adapt the method to the new task.

“The idea came quickly, but fitting the technique to our needs was hard and took time,” Pryzant said. “But the model was good at predicting sales on the first try, which was a gratifying result.”

The method allowed researchers to identify sales-boosting words and make generalizations about the kind of advertising language that appeals to Japanese consumers. In addition to linking product success to words and suffixes that indicated deference and respect, the researchers found that higher-selling items  tended to give more specifics about product features.

The team also found that tradition was a major framing device among successful products. Words and phrases that suggest authority and cultural institutions, such as “long-standing shop,” “Christmas” or “year-end gift” helped products to sell better.

Jurafsky noted that the results built on his findings in his 2014 book “The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu,” which analyzed the language of food advertising and menus.

“Using words that appeal to tradition — we also saw that on American menus and even on the back of potato chip bags,” Jurafsky said. “Talking about authenticity and tradition is just a really useful framing device.”

According to Jurafsky and Pryzant, the next step is to expand the scope of their study to other languages, such as Chinese and English. Jurafsky commented that he was interested in parallels and contrasts between advertising words in different languages, since different cultures might have different norms for interacting with consumers and invoking tradition.

More generally, the researchers were also concerned with the moral implications of studies on framing devices, which might be used to manipulate the public both in business and in politics.

“From my perspective as a linguist, I think the more we know about how people are using language to influence us, the better,” said Jurafsky. “If we as consumers know that people are using certain kinds of framings, that has to help us spot when we’re being manipulated.”

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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California Attorney-General talks Trump: ‘You build a wall, I’ll buy a ladder’ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/09/28/california-attorney-general-talks-trump-you-build-a-wall-ill-buy-a-ladder/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/09/28/california-attorney-general-talks-trump-you-build-a-wall-ill-buy-a-ladder/#respond Thu, 28 Sep 2017 09:20:41 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1130380 Dubbed the Golden State Warrior for a series of high-profile challenges to the White House, California Attorney-General Xavier Becerra ’80 J.D. ’84 struck a confident tone on the state’s policies under the Trump administration at a Wednesday evening event hosted by Stanford in Government (SIG).

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Dubbed the Golden State Warrior for a series of high-profile challenges to the White House, California Attorney-General Xavier Becerra ’80 JD ’84 struck a confident tone on the state’s policies under the Trump administration at a Wednesday evening event hosted by Stanford in Government (SIG).

“You build a wall, I’ll buy a ladder,” said Becerra, referring to the anti-immigrant border wall proposed by the White House“Why would I spend $20 to $40 billion to build a wall, when we learned that technology thousands of years ago?”

Organized by SIG alongside several co-sponsors, the event began with a brief prepared speech from Becerra, followed by a discussion moderated by SIG chair Alexis Kallen ’18 and sociology professor Tomas Jimenez. A question-and-answer session with the audience concluded the hour-long event, during which audience members raised questions about a range of issues such as DACA, healthcare legislation and racial discrimination in law enforcement.

Throughout the evening, Becerra connected his progressive politics to his personal roots.

“I don’t need to talk about where I want to take this state as Attorney-General,” said Becerra. “All I have to do is take a look at where I come from, and you can say quite a lot about where I want to go.”

Becerra explained that his status as a first-generation college student with immigrant parents informed his thinking about the importance of offering equal opportunities – especially regarding access to quality education – to historically less well-off communities, from undocumented immigrants to people of color.

Replying to an audience question on reducing incarceration rates for young people of color, Becerra said, “Make sure those people have the chance to go to a good kindergarten and have the chance to keep going from there.”

On the future of California and the U.S. under Trump, Becerra also emphasized the importance of the country’s historical foundation – its Constitution.

“At the end of the day, we’re a nation of law, not of a particular man,” Becerra said.

When Jimenez raised the question of California’s popular opinion shift on immigration since its overwhelming support of Proposition 187 in 1994, Becerra suggested that the state was going through a cyclical shift in political attitudes, much like the rest of the U.S. is today. However, he highlighted the strength of both the country’s and state’s legal institutions in preventing anti-immigrant sentiment from influencing the law, even in the 1990s.

“But for the courts, our institutions, we would have had a law in the state of California that would have denied [immigrant] kids that kindergarten,” Becerra said.

Audience member Francesca Lupia ’19 said that Becerra’s focus on the economic argument for supporting immigration to the U.S. forced them to rethink their view of immigration as a primarily ethical question.

“[I believe] that keeping families together and giving people fleeing instability and discrimination the opportunity to come to the United States goes beyond the person’s ability to contribute to the economy,” Lupia said. “But I also realized I can’t close my eyes and not think that economic factors aren’t a big part of both the pro- and anti-immigrant views.”

According to Sam Feineh ’19, director special events at SIG, Becerra first approached SIG about a possible event at Stanford following a history of collaboration with the group, including a SIG-run summer fellowship that sponsored a student internship in Becerra’s office while he served in the House of Representatives.

Stanford loomed large in Becerra’s discussion of his educational roots. He attended Stanford both for his undergraduate degree in economics and for law school. Two of his three daughters also completed their bachelor’s degrees at Stanford.

“I thought I was middle class growing up as a kid — until I drove to Palo Alto,” Becerra quipped.

But Becerra urged students from communities that are underrepresented in professional careers like law to be optimistic above all else.

“I shouldn’t be sitting here today as an Attorney-General, and by God let’s finally get rid of this ‘first Latino’ or ‘first person of color’ to do this or that,” Becerra said, responding to a student who sought advice for students of color seeking higher office. “My mother could have done this job without thinking too hard. So could my father, if he had the chance to get beyond sixth grade.”

“I’m not supposed to be here, but I survived, and I’m going to win my election in 2018, and I’m going to have fun,” Becerra added to applause from the audience.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Boardman to retire August https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/14/boardman-to-retire-august/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/14/boardman-to-retire-august/#respond Tue, 14 Mar 2017 10:04:07 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1124959 Greg Boardman, vice provost for student affairs, will retire on Aug. 31 after 13 years at Stanford and a rocky past year of student criticism.

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Greg Boardman, the vice provost for student affairs, will retire on Aug. 31 after 13 years at Stanford and a rocky past year of student criticism. Provost Persis Drell will announce plans for a search committee early in spring quarter.

Boardman to retire August
Greg Boardman will step down as vice provost of student affairs in August (Courtesy of Stanford News).

As vice provost, Boardman oversees a swathe of services and community centers that affect nearly every aspect of student life, from the Registrar’s Office, which runs course registrations each quarter, to Vaden Health Center. Part of Boardman’s work is coordinating among many branches of Student Affairs. The Trump administration’s executive order on immigration and travel is one example of a campus-wide issue that has involved collaborations across community centers — such as the Bechtel International Center, the Markaz Resource Center and Vaden — in order to address student needs.

“Greg’s devotion to the whole student has been unwavering throughout his career,” former Provost John Etchemendy Ph.D. ’82 said in an interview with Stanford News. “At Stanford, he has championed students’ development as lifelong learners and leaders. He has been a supportive friend and mentor to students and staff, through both happy times and troubled times.”

At the same time, many students associate Boardman with unpopular decisions to restrict hard alcohol at undergraduate parties and residences and to suspend the Stanford Band. Over the past decade, Boardman has also come under fire for issues as varied as mental health services at Stanford and the adjudication process for Honor Code violations — in part due to the wide-ranging responsibilities of the Office of Student Affairs.

In addition to his role as vice provost, Boardman serves on the Stanford Athletics Board, the Stanford Alumni Association Board and the Haas Center for Public Service National Advisory Board. Boardman has spent much of his career in university administration with a special focus on residential programming and campus life.

Since he was appointed to his current post in 2006, Boardman has established various student life-related University divisions such as the Diversity and First-Generation Office, the Office of Sexual Assault & Relationship Abuse Education & Response (SARA) and the Office for Military-Affiliated Communities. Within Student Affairs, Boardman has emphasized long-term planning in communications, resource use and responses to student needs, launching the “Future of Student Affairs” program last spring.

As his time at Stanford draws to a close, Boardman has also pursued new initiatives to bridge the gap between students and the University, such as open office hours with students — an arrangement that Boardman first proposed to the Undergraduate Senate. However, Boardman has had to contend with a student body that some say increasingly sees Stanford’s recent decisions on hard alcohol, sexual assault and Band as symptoms of an administration that values its image over student welfare.

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Researchers’ grasslands study could help predict effects of global warming https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/08/researchers-grasslands-study-could-help-predict-effects-of-global-warming/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/08/researchers-grasslands-study-could-help-predict-effects-of-global-warming/#respond Wed, 08 Mar 2017 08:59:27 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1124590 A team of Stanford and Columbia University researchers have found that U.S. grasslands may be more sensitive to atmospheric dryness than rainfall. They examined 33 years of satellite data to draw their conclusions.

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A team of Stanford and Columbia University researchers have found that U.S. grasslands may be more sensitive to atmospheric dryness than rainfall; their study suggests that scientists may have to look more to rising temperatures than precipitation in predicting plants’ response to global warming.

Published on March 6 in Nature Geoscience, the researchers’ study examined 33 years of satellite data to understand grassland productivity in dry conditions. The timescale and quantity of data the team examined allows the study to inform predictive models of how environments will respond to droughts which are likely to become more prevalent with rising temperatures around the globe.

“Just looking at changes in precipitation isn’t going to tell you the whole story,” lead author Alexandra Konings, an assistant professor of Earth System Science, told Stanford News. “U.S. grasslands are way more sensitive to vapor pressure deficit (VPD), which is important. Because VPD is so tightly linked to temperature, we can predict that it’s going to keep going up in the future.”

VPD measures the amount of water in the atmosphere, which directly affects plant productivity. Plants employ varied strategies in response to dryness, from closing up the openings on their leaves and stopping growth in order to conserve water to remaining open to absorb carbon dioxide despite the risk of drying out.

Researchers' grasslands study could help predict effects of global warming
Researchers at Stanford and Columbia found that grasslands respond more to dryness than rainfall (Courtesy of Stanford News).

As the largest land-cover type on earth, grasslands are particularly important because they store vast amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and support a wide range of wildlife and livestock. Understanding how plants respond to changes in the atmosphere is especially important in U.S. grasslands, which are a predominant source of carbon uptake or storage of carbon from the atmosphere.

One of the researchers’ major tasks was distinguishing the effect of the plants’ behavior from the impact of climate conditions in publicly available remote sensing satellite data. The study’s authors combined statistical methods with expertise in biology and geoscience to obtain usable data on plants’ productivity and identify finer distinctions in their behavior across different regions. The study uncovered regional variation in plant responses to drought, an important addition to current climate models because many models treat all grasslands as the same.

“Carbon uptake is associated with growth, and how that responds under climate is a large source of uncertainty in future climate change predictions,” Konings said. “Under increasing temperatures, we’re going to potentially see a lot less green grasslands – but this study shows that’s going to be more true for some regions than others.”

The study shows that grasslands that continue to absorb carbon dioxide in drought conditions are more easily damaged by drought than plants that close their openings to conserve water.  Although the grasslands seek to take in carbon to continue growing amid drought, the dry conditions ultimately inhibit plant growth throughout the season.

Unlike previous efforts, the study was able to obtain data for several decades because it used satellite images of plant greenness, rather than on-the-ground measurements. Researchers hope to apply the novel method to ecosystems and climate patterns around the world.   

“I think there’s a lot still to be done with this metric,” Konings said.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Matson to step down as Stanford Earth dean https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/28/matson-to-step-down-as-stanford-earth-dean/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/28/matson-to-step-down-as-stanford-earth-dean/#respond Wed, 01 Mar 2017 07:57:17 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1124034 Pamela Matson announced Tuesday that she will step down as dean of the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences after a 15-year tenure.

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Pamela Matson announced Tuesday that she will step down as dean of the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth) after a 15-year tenure. Provost Persis Drell will announce plans for a replacement search early in spring quarter.

“We have a strong community of faculty and students who make positive impacts every day, increasing the understanding of the planet we share and developing solutions for the most critical challenges we face as a society,” Matson told Stanford Earth. “I am enormously grateful for the partnership and guidance of the Stanford Earth faculty and colleagues across campus.”

Matson to step down as Stanford Earth dean
Pamela Matson announced Tuesday that she will step down as dean of Stanford Earth (Courtesy of Adam Voorhes).

As dean, Matson oversaw the growth of Stanford Earth in size and academic scope, as well as the expansion of research and teaching partnerships across campus. Her interdisciplinary vision led her to hire geomicrobiologists, soil scientists, agricultural and land-use researchers, resource economists, geographers and oceanographers to complement the school’s traditional expertise in geology, geophysics, geochemistry and energy engineering.

“Under Matson’s leadership, the scope of Stanford Earth’s research and teaching has expanded greatly and in ways that have never been more important for our students and for society,” Drell said.

Today, Stanford Earth faculty and students from a broad range of fields tackle the varied scientific and policy challenges that the Earth faces, such as energy sustainability, food and water resources, climate solutions and natural disaster risks.

“Pam has been an agent of change for the school,” said Welton Joseph and Maud L’Anphere Crook Professor Stephan Graham M.S. ’74 Ph.D. ’76, who has worked under six deans at Stanford. “The outside world can now look at Stanford and recognize a school committed to studying Earth change over all time scales, including those happening today.”

Matson’s emphasis on cooperation across disciplines extended beyond Stanford Earth. She played an instrumental role in Stanford’s Initiative on the Environment and Sustainability in the early 2000s and helped to plan the Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building (Y2E2), which set new standards for energy conservation and performance on campus while uniting researchers from fields as varied as biology, law and anthropology under one roof in pursuit of sustainability research.

Minority representation within the field was also a special concern of Matson’s. Under her leadership, the school created an Office of Multicultural Affairs to catalyze and sustain diversity efforts across the school. Over Matson’s 15-year tenure, the percentage of female faculty grew from around 10 percent to 29 percent, and underrepresented minorities rose from two percent to five percent.

Students may remember Matson as a former director of the Earth Systems program for undergraduates and for her role in the launch of the O’Donohue Family Stanford Educational Farm, which over 450 students have visited for a class module or a field trip since last fall. Matson, who is a member of the U.S. Academy of Sciences and a former MacArthur fellow, plans to continue her teaching and research at Stanford Earth after stepping down as dean.

“I look forward to spending more time advising and teaching both undergraduate and graduate students, leading executive training and returning to research,” she said.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Ticket lottery for Justice Sonia Sotomayor opens on Feb. 24 https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/24/ticket-lottery-for-justice-sonia-sotomayor-opens-on-feb-24/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/24/ticket-lottery-for-justice-sonia-sotomayor-opens-on-feb-24/#respond Fri, 24 Feb 2017 10:11:33 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1123660 A previously private talk by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor has been opened to all Stanford faculty, staff and students. The event will take place on March 10 in Memorial Auditorium.

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A previously private talk by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor has been opened to all Stanford faculty, staff and students. The event will take place on March 10 in Memorial Auditorium.

Ticket lottery for Justice Sonia Sotomayor opens on Feb. 24
U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor (Image credit: Courtesy of the Collections of the Supreme Court of the United States)

Current Stanford community members with a valid Stanford University ID will be able to enter a ticket lottery starting at 10 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 24 and ending at noon on Monday, Feb. 27. Only one lottery entry is allowed per person, and individuals will be notified of the results by email on Feb. 28.

Sotomayor, the first Supreme Court justice of Hispanic heritage, was first invited as a speaker at a private event at Stanford Law School. When the Class of 2017 presidents included Sotomayor in a list of potential graduation speakers, the Office of the President contacted the Law School about opening the talk to the broader campus.

The resulting event is a joint effort by the Office of the President, Stanford Law School and the senior class presidents. After an address by Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Sotomayor will speak in dialogue with M. Elizabeth Magill, dean of Stanford Law School.

In an email to The Daily, Class President Anna Wang ’17 noted that Justice Sotomayor “reflected [the senior class’s] values,” such as a strong desire to contribute to society and a commitment to diversity.

Sotomayor is currently one of three women on the Supreme Court, along with Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who delivered Stanford’s annual Rathbun Lecture on a Meaningful Life earlier this month.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Tessier-Lavigne refuses ‘sanctuary campus’ label, pledges support for undocumented community https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/17/tessier-lavigne-refuses-sanctuary-campus-label-pledges-support-for-undocumented-community/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/17/tessier-lavigne-refuses-sanctuary-campus-label-pledges-support-for-undocumented-community/#respond Fri, 17 Feb 2017 08:23:02 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1123240 University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne declined to officially declare Stanford a “sanctuary campus” in a Thursday meeting with a coalition of students and campus workers pushing Stanford to take a stronger stance in defense of undocumented community members.

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University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne declined to officially declare Stanford a “sanctuary campus” in a Thursday meeting with a coalition of students and campus workers pushing Stanford to take a stronger stance in defense of undocumented community members. However, Tessier-Lavigne promised to continue partnerships with Stanford Sanctuary Now (SSN) by connecting it with the University Working Group on Immigration Issues and enhancing online admissions information for undocumented applicants.

According to Lisa Lapin, vice president of university communications, Tessier-Lavigne refused the sanctuary label because the term was “not well-defined” and might put students and employees at risk of federal sanction.

But for many student supporters, refusing the sanctuary name is an abdication of responsibility.

“[Tessier-Lavigne] said that he feared that it would make us a target for the Trump administration and that it could potentially put students at risk,” said Kari Barclay, a first-year Ph.D. student in theater and performance studies. “But the people who need it are already targets.”

The sanctuary campus movement was inspired by the “sanctuary city” status that 30 municipalities in the U.S. have adopted. Sanctuary cities generally do not use municipal funds to enforce federal immigration laws and grant residents access to city services regardless of their immigration status. However, the term does not have a legally precise meaning.

Since the presidential election, campus movements have adopted the term “sanctuary” to mean policies that protect undocumented students and employees from federal immigration enforcement. An important thrust of the movement has involved urging administrators to formally declare their schools sanctuaries, although only a handful of colleges have acquiesced, such as the University of Pennsylvania. Administrations that declined to adopt the name include the University of California system and Harvard University.

At Stanford, the sanctuary movement grew out of a November petition initiated by Renata Martin, a first-year Ph.D. candidate in biology. Thursday’s meeting between SSN and Tessier-Lavigne was planned following Inauguration Day protests at Stanford, in which over 100 students walked out of class to march for rights that they feared would be threatened under President Donald Trump’s administration.

While disappointed by Tessier-Lavigne’s refusal of the sanctuary campus label, SSN expressed more qualified reactions to the University’s explicit policies. Since November, the University has promised to protect the privacy of student and employee records, reiterated that immigration enforcement officials cannot enter campus unless legally required to do so and connected students with the Immigrant Rights’ Clinic, which is funded through the Stanford Law School.

Lapin noted in an email to The Daily that the University has been firm in its support for immigrants since the November election.

“The University has been consistently expressing its support, throughout the fall,” Lapin wrote. “But yes, the students’ articulate comments and sharing of their personal experiences has also been influential.”

Lapin also pointed out that many legal assistance and security promises from peer institutions that student and faculty appeals have pointed to are in place at Stanford as well.

SSN member Emma Hartung ’17 acknowledged that many of the group’s specific requests are outlined with the knowledge the University has already made some basic commitments to student safety.

“We’re pleased with the support for students on the record, including the recent [amicus brief],” Hartung said. “But we’re hoping Stanford can commit to being a leader [in the sanctuary campus movement] as they are in so many things.”

Hartung emphasized that legal support for local communities and campus workers — including both direct employees and subcontractors — could be enhanced and more widely publicized. She added that the University could educate workers about their immigration rights and promise “all possible protection” from federal immigration enforcement, such as advance notice of impending inspections in worst case scenarios.

One campus worker was among the 10 SSN representatives that met with Tessier-Lavigne. The worker, who declined to be named, said in a prepared statement, “This place is the economic support of our families. We feel proud to work here. We would like to hear an official declaration of support.”

When asked if workers would receive University support as well, Lapin wrote to The Daily, “We support everyone in our community.”

Yvette Borja J.D. ’18, a leader in Stanford Advocates for Immigrants’ Rights (SAIR) at the Law School, said that the University could also develop clear protocols in case officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) come on campus. While she believes the University could clarify its policies, Borja generally approved of Stanford’s stance so far as it compares to peer schools.

“I mean, there’s always room for improvement, but I don’t think Stanford is strikingly behind on [protecting students and employees],” Borja said.

She added that the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the Law School has recently received funds to hire an additional attorney, while SSN has a special subgroup for workers in need. A range of programs and services for Stanford affiliates and local residents is operating out of the Law School, including the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, an immigration pro bono program and SAIR’s legal rights teach-ins and information sessions for affected community members.

Barclay expressed disappointment that the University was not able to commit immediately to the concrete protocols SSN suggested, but acknowledged that the meeting was about “laying the groundwork” for future collaboration.

Beyond specific measures, many SSN members and supporters echoed Hartung’s call for moral leadership from the University. Postdoctoral fellow Alan Ceaser was dissatisfied with what he saw as the University’s noncommittal stance, especially its refusal to declare itself a “sanctuary.”

“It’s frustrating,” said Ceaser, who waited outside the meeting to show support for SSN. “Stanford’s kind of been hedging its bets and saying, ‘Let’s see how it happens.’”

On the other hand, Borja took a pragmatic view of the issue.

“The title ‘sanctuary’ is about feeling safe, and if the University is not comfortable about taking the label then they need to publicize the measures that they’re adopting,” said Borja. “The most important thing to me is that people feel safe.”

According to Barclay, Tessier-Lavigne said he hoped to work with SSN and its affiliates to better communicate Stanford policies and resources for undocumented students and employees, to the benefit of both sides. The University has already created a resource page for undocumented students and students affected by President Trump’s executive orders on immigration. Meanwhile, SSN aims to proactively engage with the University to advocate specific proposals and more publicity for existing policies.

SSN member John Bonacorsi J.D. ’18 reflected that the direction the sanctuary movement takes from here is defined by ongoing efforts from both students and the University.

“What does ‘sanctuary’ really mean?” said Bonacorsi, noting the term’s lack of inherent legal meaning. “It means what we make it mean, by advocating for treating workers better and making policies more clear. Right now, we’re in the process of working with the school to find out what ‘sanctuary’ actually means.”

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Nicholas Ahamed ’15 and Anna Ntiriwah-Asare ’14 win Gates Cambridge Scholarship https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/14/nicholas-ahamed-15-and-anna-ntiriwah-asare-14-win-gates-cambridge-scholarship/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/14/nicholas-ahamed-15-and-anna-ntiriwah-asare-14-win-gates-cambridge-scholarship/#respond Tue, 14 Feb 2017 17:35:13 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1122959 Two recent Stanford graduates have won the 2017 Gates Cambridge Scholarship for graduate study at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

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Recent graduates Nicholas Ahamed ’15 and Anna Ntiriwah-Asare ’14 have won the 2017 Gates Cambridge Scholarship for graduate study at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. They will join a cohort of 36 American scholars-elect this year in pursuing fully-funded graduate studies at the prestigious university.

“Ever since I studied at Oxford during winter quarter of my junior year, I knew I wanted to go back,” Ahamed said in an interview with the Stanford News Service. “Studying at Cambridge allows me to fulfill a longtime passion of mine.”

Since its establishment by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship program has sponsored graduate studies for over 1,400 outstanding students from outside the United Kingdom. Of these, 39 have been Stanford alumni.

While at Cambridge, Ntiriwah-Asare plans to complete a doctorate in education, while Ahamed will read a master’s degree in international relations and politics.

Ntiriwah-Asare’s passion for social justice and narrative brought her to education, which she sees as a way of using academic research to tangibly benefit marginalized communities.

“I am incredibly honored to receive the Gates Cambridge Scholarship because of the values it promotes of not only producing excellent academic work but using this work to help others beyond the academy,” Ntiriwah-Asare told Stanford News.

Throughout her education, Ntiriwah-Asare has sought to connect her academic interests with social action. As an undergraduate, Ntiriwah-Asare served as executive director of the Alternative Spring Break program, mentored high school students preparing for college and, as a sophomore, co-led the Black Student Union. In 2013, she was one of 10 students who received Stanford’s Deans’ Award for Academic Achievement, which honors undergraduate students for their “exceptional, tangible” intellectual achievements.

Nicholas Ahamed ’15 and Anna Ntiriwah-Asare ’14 win Gates Cambridge Scholarship
(Courtesy of Stanford News Service)
Gates Cambridge Scholar Anna Ntiriwah-Asare.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in medical anthropology, Ntiriwah-Asare went on to pursue a master’s in multidisciplinary gender studies at Cambridge that sharpened her focus on the connections between race, education and gender. Her master’s thesis, “Intersectional Feminism and Cultural Relevant Pedagogy: A Black Feminist Case Study in Stockton, California,” has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Gender and Women’s Studies.

“As a Ph.D. student in Education at Cambridge, I will focus on the role education has played in suppressing Black women’s narratives and how Black women have still thrived in academic spaces despite this challenge,” Ntiriwah-Asare wrote in her scholar-elect profile. “As a Gates scholar I will use this knowledge to facilitate more inclusive learning environments and curricula.”

Ahamed, who currently works as a data scientist at Civis Analytics, began to apply statistical methods to race and voting issues as an undergraduate at Stanford.

“As a Muslim in post-9/11 America, my loyalties are constantly questioned,” Ahamed wrote in his scholar profile. “All too aware of [the inequalities still present], my research at Stanford University focused on bringing rigorous methodologies to questions of politics, race and voting.”

Nicholas Ahamed ’15 and Anna Ntiriwah-Asare ’14 win Gates Cambridge Scholarship
(Courtesy of Stanford News Service)
Gates Cambridge Scholar Nicholas Ahamed.

Ahamed’s honors thesis examined Islamophobia in America from a statistical perspective, synthesizing his political science major and statistics minor. Outside the classroom, Ahamed engaged his political interests as an educator and writer, serving as managing editor of opinions at The Daily and leading an Alternative Spring Break trip to Washington, D.C.

Ahamed credited his research accomplishments to his thesis advisor, David Laitin, a professor of political science, and his academic advisor, Lauren Davenport, an assistant professor of political science.

“They taught me how to conduct research that could be impactful and improve lives, as well as be academically rigorous, scientific and empirical,” he said.

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Before Stanford: The Muwekma Ohlone people https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/23/before-stanford-the-muwekma-ohlone-people/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/23/before-stanford-the-muwekma-ohlone-people/#respond Tue, 24 Jan 2017 06:44:11 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1118115 At least 5,000 years before Spanish soldiers first set foot on California soil, the ancestors of the present-day Muwekma Ohlone tribe lived, fished and buried their dead on the land that was to become Stanford University.

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It was spring of 1922. Just west of where Oak Creek is today, Stanford student Bruce Seymour ’24 uncovered a human skull. The human being who had inhabited these bones was male, Native American and over 4,000 years old.

At least 5,000 years before Spanish soldiers first set foot on California soil, the ancestors of the present-day Muwekma Ohlone tribe lived, fished and buried their dead on the land that was to become Stanford University. A semi-sedentary people with an affinity for water, the Ohlone built many of their homes on the banks of the San Francisquito creek that now bounds Oak Creek on the west.

The 1922 find was christened Stanford Man I, in honor of its location and the archaeological dig that led to its discovery. The Native American man proved to be the oldest human being known to have lived in the San Francisco peninsula.

For the academic archaeological community, this was a significant discovery. For the Muwekma Ohlone tribespeople, however, the bones were all they had left of an ancestor.

Geraldine Green of the Seneca tribe articulated her people’s attitude towards the dead at the 1996 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

“We leave them alone, they are through. They are given what information they want. They have done their jobs; we need not bother them anymore,” Green said.

Green touched on a fundamental reverence for the dead that is perhaps as much human as it is cultural. The Faculty Senate voted unanimously in favor of a proposal to return all Native American remains held in the Stanford museum in 1989. Then-graduate student Laura Jones M.A. ’84 Ph.D. ’90 saw the nationally controversial proposal as an “ethical decision about human rights.”

“The human remains have human rights, and those rights were represented by their descendants,” Jones said.

Jones drove the truck bearing the Ohlone ancestral remains back to the tribal council, who buried the bones in park land. With it, she sowed the seeds of a decades-long partnership between Stanford archaeology researchers and the Muwekma Ohlone tribe that, in her view, vastly enriched the archaeological process. One year later, the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) added legal force to the moral precedent, mandating the return of Native American remains all over the country.

But the act of repatriation also created schisms in the academic world. Archaeologists in the 1980s and 1990s argued: What about a millennia-old ancestor, as ancient as the Harappans or the early Egyptians? At what point does our beholdenness to memory and culture stop?

The outdated academic debacle touches on a resounding theme: the rightful relationship between the peoples, past and present, who call this swath of the Bay Area home. These historical questions challenge the University’s conscience and compel its members to act even today. The recent controversy over place names that honor Junipero Serra, the father of the Spanish missions in California, revisits the impact of Spanish colonialism on the Ohlone peoples.

Today, Stanford’s values and identity are expressed and tested by its treatment of the past.

THE HISTORY OF THE LAND

Before Stanford: The Muwekma Ohlone people
(MCKENZIE LYNCH/The Stanford Daily)

Ten thousand years before before the Spanish set their sights on the lush bay of San Francisco, the first Native American peoples were living off the marshland. For at least 5,000 years, they existed in organized tribal societies, landscaping the wide brush with oaks, setting traps for shellfish and burying their dead together with the remains of mussel shells in towering pyramid-like mounds called shellmounds. Each shellmound was a monument to their craft, their food and the reverent burial of their dead that would grow throughout their lives.

“Ohlone” and “Costanoan” (Spanish for “coastal”) are catch-all terms for the various indigenous tribes that lived between San Francisco and Monterey, while the Muwekma Ohlone is the self-coined tribal name of those Native American descendants living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

While the remnants of the indigenous people’s creations hint at their vibrant cultures, they exist in the written record entirely through the flat, assessing gaze of the other. The Spanish soldiers who first encountered the tribe living in present-day Palo Alto noted the “Indians” mainly for their foreign dress and the food they offered in aid of the soldiers’ first exploratory advance through the Bay.

Ironically, the Portola mission that first brought the Spanish into contact with the indigenous peoples eased the way for the Spanish takeover of their prized bayshore homes. At the behest of Father Junipero Serra, the Spanish clergy oversaw the consolidation of villages and prime bayshore into missions. The land that became Stanford University was part of Mission Santa Clara, while others were co-opted into Mission San Jose, Mission Dolores and Mission Santa Cruz, drawing the outlines of counties and cities that remain intact today.

Contact with the Spanish started the Ohlone people on a century-long grind of trauma, dispersal and unstinting resilience. As Spanish, Mexican and white European settlers laid claim to the land in waves, the Ohlone people adapted and dispersed, but never disappeared.

Under the Spanish, many Ohlone people joined the missions as laborers, while others lingered outside the missions in smaller communities. Life in the missions entailed religious conversion — sometimes against the Ohlone people’s will — and assimilation into radically different ways of life.

Worse violations lay in store. Rape, forced labor and foreign diseases ravaged the indigenous peoples, so that only half of the total population in 1769 remained by 1832.

After the Spanish came the Mexican “rancheros.” Mexican independence from Spain in 1821 saw wealthy Mexican landowners take over the Bay in large parcels of ranch land grants. Again, the Ohlone bent but did not break. Some Ohlone became rancheria laborers, while others sought work in the cities. Some, like the Inigo family, even came to own ranches instead of working on them.

Baptism and assimilation aided Lupe Inigo’s ascent in mission society, yet he marked the land with his Ohlone heritage much as the early Spanish explorers had — with a name. He gave his ranch the name Posolmi, an Ohlone word in honor of a lost ancestral village.   

During the rancheria era, Ohlone laborers also worked the land that was to become Stanford University. Antonio Buelna, who later sold the land to Leland Stanford Sr., was granted the land that sweeps across the Oak Creek apartments and the rest of Stanford West in 1839. Under Buelna, some Ohlone people continued to tend the land they had once owned as ranch hands. They spoke their native Ohlone language among themselves till the 1930s and kept beads of a bright cerulean blue, an auspicious color. They got by.

The American annexation of California brought a new flavor of conquest. Ownership was staked by ink-and-paper deeds, and the settlers who came with the Gold Rush were often eager to clear the land of squatters, including the native peoples who had lived on the land before the invention of the written word. When Leland Stanford Sr. followed gold fever west and cobbled his stock farm out of nearly a dozen separate land purchases, he did the same.

“[Stanford] wanted to make sure that he was very clear about the land title. He would pay off people who squatted to make sure they had no claim and leave,” Jones said.

It is uncertain if any Ohlone people remained on the Stanford farm as workers. Many Ohlone peoples regrouped on other rancherias. The present-day Muwekma Ohlone tribe itself evolved from a group of families living on the same rancheria in Sunol, who kept in touch over the years and later formed the nucleus of their present-day tribal organization.

Rosemary Cambra, chairwoman of the Muwekma Ohlone, found cohesion in the choices that individual families made even as they scattered.

“They have made it a way of life to migrate within aboriginal lands,” Cambra said.

THE PAST AS PRESENT

But what Cambra calls a thriving “way of life” has been negated by many officials and scholars. Just three years after the discovery of Stanford Man I in burial repose, pioneering anthropologist Alfred Kroeber deemed the Ohlone people “extinct for all practical purposes.” The Ohlone tribal council has spent millions of dollars on genealogists and archaeologists in hopes of securing federal tribal status, which would offer, among other rights, land grants and protection for Ohlone graves. However, in 2011, after a 20-year battle for federal recognition, a U.S. District Court decision formally denied the Muwekma Ohlone tribal status.

One key problem is that the Muwekma Ohlone people and the courts conceive of a tribe in fundamentally different ways. Various Bay Area Ohlone leaders, such as the Muwekma Ohlone council and Mission Dolores museum director Andrew Galvan, promote the active practice of tribal culture through language revitalization, education and grave repatriation efforts.

Yet the 2011 ruling stated that the Muwekma Ohlone council failed to show that it “has maintained ‘political influence or authority’ over its members since 1927,” rendering void the federal recognition granted the Verona Band of Indians, of which the Muwekma Ohlone had been a part. Dissent within the Ohlone community has also been cited as reasons to doubt the Muwekma Ohlone’s authority and, by extension, their legal claim.

To archaeologists, however, the fluid, complex groupings of modern-day tribes are true to their ancestors’ mobile and intimately interconnected communities.

“Californian tribes were extremely gregarious,” Jones said. “You have lots of trading and intermarriage. There would be people in every village speaking [two or three] languages. Their communities are multicultural — they were more than 200 years ago, and they are today.”

The archaeological record makes it clear that tribes were as organic and adaptable as the human beings who comprised them. To Jones, the cultural, social and genealogical inheritance is clear — the specific change in political units and territories with time “doesn’t cause [her] very much stress.”

Despite the Muwekma Ohlone’s political disappointments, the Bay Area Ohlone tribes have achieved much in the last decades. Today, there are several dozen speakers of their native Chochenyo language, where there were almost none after the 1930s. It is now common, though not compulsory, practice to consult the Ohlone people when their ancestral graves are uncovered by construction workers or researchers.

Karen Biestman, who directs Stanford’s Native American Cultural Center, sees the Ohlone people’s story as one of survival rather than victimhood.

“The fact that they survived and rebuilt, reclaimed governance and perpetuated their language and culture, is really an incredible success story,” said Biestman.

IN WHOSE NAME

Each year, the Muwekma Ohlone tribe blesses the ground of the Stanford Powwow. The gesture has become a tradition in its own right, a recognition that the story of the Ohlone and the story of Stanford are rooted in the same land.

Biestman said, “One thing [that every student should know] is that we are all guests on ancestral, aboriginal Ohlone land.”

Far from extinct, Native American culture has been vitally present at Stanford since its early years. The Muwekma-Tah-Ruk house was named and dedicated for Native American-themed residential life in 1990, and the annual Powwow is warmly attended by some 35,000 people, from regional Native American community members to non-tribespeople. Even before the founding of Stanford, Leland Stanford Jr. collected the remnants of native arrowheads on the Stanford farm, and the University has hired a campus archaeologist since the 1890s to engage with the peoples who lived and worked on the rich land.

The land where Stanford now stands has always been contested. The diverse colonial and immigrant presence has always been a source of competing claims. In recent years, Father Junipero Serra’s name has become an emblem of California’s troubled relationship with colonization, religion and its indigenous peoples.

As the Spanish priest who proposed and oversaw the mission system that undeniably had an adverse effect on the Ohlone people, the landmarks that honor Serra’s name throughout Stanford and the rest of California raise old questions: Of all the peoples who have inhabited the land, who has the right to the land? Whose voice should be honored?

In his resolution in the undergraduate Senate, then-senator Leo Bird ’17 pinpointed Leland Stanford’s place as an occupier of the land, who, like Serra, is inevitably beholden to past occupants.

If nothing else, the story of Stanford so far shows that names and narratives are anything but trivial when it comes to the question of rights. As the Spanish soldiers traversed the bayshore, they had a compulsion to name. Whimsical travelers’ coinages such as “La Isla de los Alcatraces” (“island of the pelicans,” now Alcatraz), “Punta de los Lobos Marinos” (“point of the sea wolves,” now Point Lobos) correspond remarkably well to place names today, an indelible sign of their presence and power.

On their part, the Muwekma Ohlone recognize that their hope for political recognition today depends on their ability to trace, prove and stake a claim to their past. They do so through research, branding and, ultimately, narrative. And as Stanford grapples with the legacy of the place it inhabits, the history of the land is being written and revised to this day.

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Meghan Shea ’17 named Rhodes Scholar https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/21/meghan-shea-17-named-rhodes-scholar/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/21/meghan-shea-17-named-rhodes-scholar/#respond Tue, 22 Nov 2016 05:23:49 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1120286 Meghan Shea ’17 was named a 2017 Rhodes Scholar-elect on Nov. 19. Considered one of the oldest and most celebrated international fellowships, the Rhodes Scholarship funds two to three years of study at the University of Oxford for 32 outstanding students each year.

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Meghan Shea ’17 was named a 2017 Rhodes Scholar-elect on Nov. 19. Considered one of the oldest and most celebrated international fellowships, the Rhodes Scholarship funds two to three years of study at Oxford University for 32 outstanding students each year.

“It still hasn’t sunk in that I’m a recipient of this incredible scholarship,” Shea told the Stanford News Service. “I am so grateful for my extraordinary system of family, friends, teachers and mentors at Stanford and beyond who helped make this opportunity possible.”

Shea is currently finishing her degree in environmental systems engineering and aims to pursue a master’s degree in nature, society and environmental governance at Oxford. According to Shea, her fascination with the ocean began early. As a child, she aspired to become a marine biologist, and she developed a filter to remove E. Coli bacteria from water at the age of just 18.

At Stanford, Shea has a record of independent research and leadership. Through programs such as Stanford@SEA and Mentoring Undergraduates in Interdisciplinary Research (MUIR), Shea has conducted oceanographic research throughout the Pacific. Shea has also worked with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to analyze carbonate chemistry data from a shellfish hatchery near Seattle.

Shea’s passion for the environment extends beyond her research in science. As an environmental advocate, Shea has been active in Students for a Sustainable Stanford and reported on climate change resiliency in small-island developing states at the COP21 summit in Paris.

“She is never still for a moment, always seeking, questioning, innovating and thinking about the ocean that she loves so passionately,” Jeff Koseff, professor of civil and environmental engineering, told the Stanford News Service. “The very extensive set of activities that she has undertaken while at Stanford – from the coursework to the research to the leadership activities – are all focused strongly on Meghan’s overarching professional and social goals of making a lasting and meaningful impact in environmental stewardship, particularly in the ocean realm.”

Together with her fellow Rhodes Scholars, Shea will begin her studies at Oxford in October next year.  She eventually hopes to earn a doctorate in biological/chemical oceanography and pursue a career in research.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Targeting ‘super-emitters’ can cut natural gas leaks greatly, new study finds https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/27/targeting-super-emitters-can-cut-natural-gas-leaks-greatly-new-study-finds/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/27/targeting-super-emitters-can-cut-natural-gas-leaks-greatly-new-study-finds/#respond Thu, 27 Oct 2016 07:29:02 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1118696 According to a new study co-authored by Professor Adam Brandt, the greater part of methane emissions in the United States can be traced to a small number of “super emitting” natural gas wells.

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According to a new study co-authored by energy resources engineering professor Adam Brandt, the greater part of methane emissions in the United States can be traced to a small number of “super-emitting” natural gas wells.

Published online in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, the findings suggests that companies can combat carbon emissions more effectively by focusing on tackling the biggest emitters among gas leaks, rather than searching for all leaks.

“We’re finding that when it comes to natural gas leaks, a 50/5 rule applies — that is, the largest 5 percent of leaks are typically responsible for more than 50 percent of the total volume of leakage,” said Brandt, an assistant professor at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.

Natural gas well leaks are so damaging because they consist largely of methane, which is about 30 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period. The problem is especially acute since natural gas is becoming increasingly important in meeting energy needs worldwide, and some think that natural gas could serve as a “bridge fuel” for countries during the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

In their study, Brandt and his colleagues applied a statistical technique called extreme value theory, which is able to analyze infrequent but highly impactful events, to some 15,000 measurements from 18 prior studies of natural gas leaks around the U.S.

“Extreme value theory has been used to study everything from major flood events to crop losses brought on by drought and stock market crashes,” Brandt said. “In all of these cases, infrequent events really drive a lot of decision-making and expenditure or have big economic consequences. We are the first to apply this technique in a formal and rigorous way to natural gas leaks.”

Their analysis revealed that a few outsized leaks caused between 40 and 90 percent of the emissions, showing that the effect of methane emissions is more prevalent and extreme than previously known. As a result, eliminating “super-emitters” that contribute disproportionately to emissions could be a useful strategy for reducing total methane emissions in the U.S.

“If companies can identify and fix the leaks in a small number of top emitters, that will go a long way toward reducing methane emissions in the U.S.,” Brandt said.

According to Brandt, the study suggests that the U.S. could potentially reduce emissions even without the use of expensive super-sensitive leak detectors, since large, more easily detectable leaks are the main target.

Brandt is a member of the campus-wide Natural Gas Initiative (NGI), which supports projects related to surge in natural gas production over the past decade. Garvin Heath, from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, and Daniel Cooley, from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, also contributed to the project, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Cantor Arts Center director Connie Wolf resigns https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/06/cantor-arts-center-director-connie-wolf-resigns/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/06/cantor-arts-center-director-connie-wolf-resigns/#respond Fri, 07 Oct 2016 03:54:54 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1117707 Connie Wolf ’81 abruptly announced that she was leaving her post as director of the Cantor Arts Center after four years in the role. In the meantime, Cantor has elected not to appoint an interim director, leaving the museum temporarily without a director.

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Connie Wolf ’81 abruptly announced that she is leaving her post as director of the Cantor Arts Center after four years in the role.

In the meantime, Cantor has elected not to appoint an interim director, leaving the museum temporarily without a director. The senior management team is taking over some directorial responsibilities in the meantime.

“There is a search committee, it’s at a very early stage, and we’ll be doing a national and international search,” said associate dean Matthew Tiews ’04.

The director of Cantor Arts Center resigned abruptly (ALISA ROYER/The Stanford Daily).
The director of Cantor Arts Center resigned abruptly after four years in the role (ALISA ROYER/The Stanford Daily).

Tiews added that more details on the search committee and process would become available later on. He declined to comment on the reasons behind Wolf’s resignation in the same interview.

According to KQED, Wolf “took the museum from a campus treat to a regional powerhouse.” Her departure made the news throughout the Bay Area art world in June.

Wolf told SFGate that her resignation was a personal decision and that she had accomplished what she set out to achieve for the Cantor — to “make the museum vibrant on campus.”

In a statement to friends and affiliates of the museum, Tiews wrote that Wolf increased museum attendance by 60 percent and made major additions to the museum, including Edward Hopper’s “New York Corner” and a collection of over 120,000 images by Andy Warhol. She is perhaps best remembered on campus as an arts administrator who engaged students through personal as well as programmatic means.

“For me, it was always extremely moving to hear her speak about what a university art museum was,” Ari Echt-Wilson ’17 said.

Echt-Wilson co-leads the Cantor Ambassadors, a museum internship for Stanford undergraduates who work with Cantor staff to promote the arts at Stanford. According to Echt-Wilson, Wolf’s vision of a university art museum is one that is deeply involved in academic life and student life. She advised undergraduates as a pre-major advisor and taught hands-on classes that gave students the chance to curate Cantor shows.

Tiews emphasized that the Cantor is in a strong position regardless of recent personnel changes, including the departure of two curators who he said left for unrelated reasons.

“The Cantor is in a transition period right now, and there are lots of wonderful things going on — the ‘Object Lessons’ show is a wonderful example,” Tiews said, referring to a reinstalled gallery exhibition tailor-made for the art history introductory sequence at Stanford.

Due to the long planning timelines for museum shows, many of the exhibitions that will be on display at the Cantor over the next year were realized during Wolf’s tenure.

Richard Saller, who serves as dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, told KQED, “In many ways, she’s leaving Cantor a stronger museum than she found it.”

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Abraham Verghese, MD, awarded the National Humanities Medal https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/03/abraham-verghese-md-awarded-the-national-humanities-medal/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/03/abraham-verghese-md-awarded-the-national-humanities-medal/#respond Tue, 04 Oct 2016 06:13:56 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1117489 Professor of medicine and writer Abraham Verghese was awarded the National Humanities Medal for the 2015 year at the White House on Sept. 22.

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Professor of medicine and writer Abraham Verghese was awarded the National Humanities Medal for the 2015 year at the White House on Sept. 22. Awarded annually to a maximum of 12 groups or individuals whose work has “deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities,” the Medal is regarded as one of the highest humanities accolades in the United States.

Verghese’s career might be called interdisciplinary, but his work as a doctor and as a writer converge naturally in his concern with the humanity at the heart of medicine. From a retelling of his personal experience as doctor in a small town suddenly stricken with AIDS to a fictional story about conjoined twin brothers who become doctors with radically different philosophies, Verghese’s writing draws from his intimate knowledge of and deep identification with the medical profession.

“I don’t really see [writing and medicine] as two different professions,” Verghese said in a 2011 interview with the Daily. “You listen to the patient’s story or history — and what is a history but a story? — and you learn to match stories with your repertoire of stories. When you do the physical, you’re looking at the body as though it’s a text, and you’re trying to read the words of the text.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which awards the medal, honored Verghese’s pervasive empathy in his medical practice and his writing.

According to the NEH website, Verghese received the medal “for reminding us that the patient is the center of the medical enterprise. His range of proficiency embodies the diversity of the humanities; from his efforts to emphasize empathy in medicine, to his imaginative renderings of the human drama.”

Inaugurated in 1997, the National Humanities Medal “honors individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the human experience, broadened citizens’ engagement with history, literature, languages, philosophy, and other humanities subjects.” 12 medals were awarded this year, including one to poet and visiting faculty member Louise Glück and another to religious historian Elaine Pagels ’64 M.A. ’65.

“Abraham Verghese is not only an exemplary clinician, he is an exemplary humanist,” said University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. “Every day in the classroom, he teaches his students that professions such as medicine benefit from an understanding of the human condition. We are so proud that his breadth of scholarship has been recognized with this honor.”

Like the twins in his bestselling novel “Cutting for Stone,” Verghese was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1995 to an Indian family. He began his medical training in Ethiopia, worked in the United States as a hospital orderly, then completed his education in India at Madras Medical College. Unlike many doctors, he also took time off to earn a Masters in Fine Arts from the prestigious Iowa Writing Workshop in 1991 before joining the Stanford School of Medicine in 2007.

Verghese said of his own work, “My ambition as a writer was to tell a great story, an old fashioned, truth-telling story. But, beyond that, my single goal was to portray an aspect of medicine that gets buried in the way television depicts the practice: I wanted the reader to see how entering medicine was a passionate quest, a romantic pursuit, a spiritual calling, a privileged yet hazardous undertaking.”

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Brown Institute showcase features tour guide drones, defense contract database https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/30/brown-institute-showcase-features-tour-guide-drones-defense-contract-database/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/30/brown-institute-showcase-features-tour-guide-drones-defense-contract-database/#respond Fri, 30 Sep 2016 07:39:12 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1117423 From drones acting as tour guides to mass-analyzed cookie recipes, the projects on display at the Brown Institute’s first ever media innovation showcase were anything but conventional. Funded by Brown’s year-long Magic Grants, interdisciplinary teams from Stanford and Columbia pioneered new techniques for every step of the storytelling process -- from research tools for journalists to new ways of telling a story.

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From drones acting as tour guides to mass-analyzed cookie recipes, the projects on display at the Brown Institute’s first ever Media Innovation Showcase were anything but conventional. Funded by Brown’s yearlong Magic Grants, interdisciplinary teams from Stanford and Columbia pioneered new techniques for every step of the storytelling process, from research tools for journalists to new ways of telling a story.

The Brown Institute was established in 2012 as a new collaboration between Stanford University and Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Longtime Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown endowed the institute so that students at her late husband David Brown’s alma maters — Stanford (’36) and Columbia — might work on new endeavors in media innovation.

Stanford Brown director Maneesh Agrawala said in his opening remarks: “Tonight, I am super excited to present the projects we supported over the past year. They feature lots of new technologies, new storytelling techniques, as well as new and interesting stories.”

G:Drone: the first companion drone

The team behind G:Drone envisioned a tour guide drone that went beyond surveilling human activity from above, getting up close and personal with users’ interests.

Jessica Cauchard Ph.D. ’13 explained that the project initially grew out of her team’s interest in drone cinematography. The project rapidly became a novel exploration of drone-human interaction, spanning questions in the social sciences and computer vision as well as human-computer interaction.

Cauchard said, “This is the only drone system I know of that does both input and output.”

The G:Drone hovers close to its users as they tour a foreign place, projecting a user interface on the surrounding pavement. Users are able to read maps, see interior views of buildings and read background information on the sights by simply pointing an arm at part of the interface, as though they had a larger-than-life touchscreen.

Piloting a drone is considered to be enough of an uphill task, let alone all the extra work of graphics and interacting with human beings that challenge even computers on the ground. Cauchard explained that the G:Drone’s petite frame has everything it needs to do its job, without the help of external computers.

“We embed a projection camera system on the drone, so there’s no computer controlling the system. The 3D sensor and pico-projector are all on the drone itself.”

Cauchard’s team hopes to develop the G:Drone to help journalists document inaccessible or unmapped areas, such as Syrian cities destroyed by the ongoing civil war.

Recipe Mining: What’s in a cookie?

A “deconstructed cookie” might sound more like an entry on a fine dining menu than a computer science project, but Brown Fellow Juho Kim M.S. ’10 found the perfect natural language dataset in the glut of chocolate chip cookie recipes on the Internet.

Using natural language processing techniques, Kim distilled hundreds of thousands of cookie recipes into their simplest form to uncover the “median chocolate chip cookie.”

“My question was, ‘what makes a cookie a cookie?’” Kim quipped.

In one sense, every chocolate cookie recipe is a set of standard processes and ingredients. Yet each formulation also varies just enough from the rest to be storied in its own right, so that someone somewhere swears by it as the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Kim’s visualization aims to capture both the essentials of every cookie recipe and the differences that make each iteration of a basic step unique.

Kim eventually hopes to extend his current project to sets of simultaneous baking videos “to capture the practice and culture behind cooking” — his own form of storytelling.

Open Contractors visualize defense contracts

Through their Open Contractors project, Allison McCartney M.A. ’15 and Alex Gonçalvez strove to make famously opaque defense contract data accessible for journalists.

The user interface they created lists of every Department of Defense contract from a comprehensive table from a few years ago, broken down by contractor and contracting agency. Users can search for specific companies’ defense contract records and find their parent companies, subsidiaries and aliases with the click of a button.

With a quip at the Packard building where the showcase was held, McCartney said, “You can look up everything from nuclear bombs to Hewlett Packard — or search for every contract related to Hurricane Katrina, for instance.”

But if Open Contractors’ user interface is maximally intuitive, the original data certainly was not, Gonçalvez said. He explained that the single table they started out with had to be broken down into roughly 100 new tables to make more sense of the numbers. The bulk of their work went into providing the context and consistency to give users real sense of the correlations behind the figures.

“Most importantly, we have a plain-text explanation of what’s going on with each contract,” McCartney added to cheers from the audience.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Stanford endowment grows modestly despite poor investment climate https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/29/stanford-endowment-grows-modestly-despite-poor-investment-climate/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/29/stanford-endowment-grows-modestly-despite-poor-investment-climate/#respond Thu, 29 Sep 2016 07:23:50 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1117353 Stanford’s endowment grew 0.8 percent to $22.4 billion over the past fiscal year that ended Aug. 31 2016, Stanford Management Company announced.

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Stanford’s endowment grew 0.8 percent to $22.4 billion over the past fiscal year that ended Aug. 31, 2016, Stanford Management Company announced. The figure combines investment gains and losses, endowment gifts and other funds transferred into the endowment, offset by the annual payout for University operations.

Endowment growth occurred despite a -0.4 percent investment return net of fees from the Merged Pool, which nonetheless outperformed the -2.9 percent median preliminary return of U.S. colleges and universities and the portfolio’s -0.6 percent composite benchmark return. The Merged Pool is Stanford’s main investment vehicle, including most of the University’s endowment and expendable funds as well as capital reserves from Stanford Health Care and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.

Randy Livingston, vice president for business affairs and chief financial officer, told the Stanford Report that the endowment growth helps to support student financial aid, research and education programs.

“We are proud that a Stanford education is affordable for our middle-class admitted students,” Livingston said.

In fiscal year 2016, Stanford spent $450 million of University funds on student financial aid. Families living in the U.S. with incomes below $125,000 pay no undergraduate tuition. Over 75 percent of Stanford undergraduates graduate with no debt, while median debt among students who borrow was $16,417 in 2015.

The University’s endowment payout for the past fiscal year 2016 was $1.13 billion, or 5.1 percent of the beginning-of-year endowment value, representing about 22 percent of total operating revenue. Budgeted endowment payout for fiscal year 2017 is $1.18 billion.

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Senate discusses Full Moon on the Quad report in first meeting of school year https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/28/senate-discusses-full-moon-on-the-quad-report-in-first-meeting/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/28/senate-discusses-full-moon-on-the-quad-report-in-first-meeting/#respond Wed, 28 Sep 2016 07:21:03 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1117333 In their first meeting of the current school year, the 18th Undergraduate Senate announced an upcoming University report on Full Moon on the Quad (FMOTQ) and debated a resolution on a Santa Clara County public transportation measure.

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In their first meeting of the current school year, the 18th Undergraduate Senate announced an upcoming University report on Full Moon on the Quad (FMOTQ) and debated a resolution on a Santa Clara County public transportation measure.

Senators also gave routine reports on their personal projects and heard funding requests from the Stanford Gaming Society and the International Justice Mission at Stanford.

FMOTQ working group report slated for Thursday release

Senate Chair Shanta Katipamula ’19 and Senator Carson Smith ’19 announced that the working group report on FMOTQ would be released on Thursday.

Senators discussed Full Moon on the Quad and a Santa Clara County public transportation measure in their first meeting of the 2016-17 school year (FANGZHOU LIU/The Stanford Daily).
Senators discussed FMOTQ and a Santa Clara County public transportation measure in their first meeting of the 2016-17 school year. (FANGZHOU LIU/The Stanford Daily)

The working group was formed after student outcry at news that the Office for Student Affairs was considering whether to defund FMOTQ. In March, Vice Provost for Student Affairs Greg Boardman had written a letter to the student body president and vice-president that cast doubt over the administration’s future support for the event.

Both the Senate and the student body protested at the move itself as well as the perceived lack of student input, with a student referendum showing 88.55 percent support for continued University sponsorship for FMOTQ. In response, the University convened a working group consisting of student, faculty and staff representatives to discuss the future of FMOTQ.

Smith, as the Senate representative on the working group, expressed her satisfaction with the process and the outcome.

“I’m extremely happy with the result and how we were able to bring people together from a variety of different areas on campus,” Smith said.

While she could not discuss the content of the report, she stressed that the students on the panel were included in the discussion.

Debating Measure B and the Senate’s role

Carl Guardino, who serves as President and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, presented his organization’s proposal to improve transportation in Santa Clara County during the meeting. Guardino was seeking a Senate resolution in support of the so-called Measure B, which Santa Clara County voters will vote on in a Nov. 8 ballot.

Measures included extending the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system to better serve lower-income communities such as East San Jose, as well as building level boarding platforms at Caltrain stations for passengers with physical disabilities.

While Senators largely agreed that the measure was a step forward for the county, they worried that supporting an external political cause might violate the ASSU constitution.

Senator Junwon Park ’19 commented, “I personally appreciate and wholeheartedly support the measures to increase the safety of drivers here and in the community around us.”

However, Park went on to question whether the measure could be said to “directly [affect] Stanford students,” a condition stipulated in Article I, Section 5B of the ASSU constitution.

Senators TG Sido ’18 and Khaled Aounallah ’19 raised students, faculty and staff members who commute to campus as examples to show that the student body — and by extension, the Senate — should indeed be concerned with the issue.

Meanwhile, Senator Hattie Gawande ’18 argued that the debate on constitutionality was skirting the core issue of the Senate’s role as the representative of the student body.

“I think that a lot of the squeamishness about the measure is less about any special affection we have for the constitution,” Gawande said. “[It’s] more of us using the constitution to justify the fact that we’re uncomfortable with this is new role we’re taking on… to encourage the student body to be involved in electoral politics.”

“But if we as a Senate got into the role of encouraging students to do the right thing, it seems like a good role to me,” she concluded to applause from fellow Senators.

The Senate agreed to reopen their conversation on the measure at their next meeting.

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Public and private sector must work together to fight extremism, says Secretary of State John Kerry https://stanforddaily.com/2016/06/24/public-and-private-sector-must-work-together-to-fight-extremism-says-secretary-of-state-john-kerry/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/06/24/public-and-private-sector-must-work-together-to-fight-extremism-says-secretary-of-state-john-kerry/#respond Fri, 24 Jun 2016 07:42:27 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1116214 In his opening remarks Thursday at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2016, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry charged today’s entrepreneurs with the task of tackling violent extremism, climate change and government corruption around the world.

“You provide a highly visible and very effective rebuttal to the propaganda of violent extremist groups,” Kerry said to the crowd of entrepreneurs. “Your optimism provides an alternative to their nihilism.”

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In his opening remarks Thursday at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2016, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry charged today’s entrepreneurs with the task of tackling violent extremism, climate change and government corruption around the world.

“You provide a highly visible and very effective rebuttal to the propaganda of violent extremist groups,” Kerry said to the crowd of entrepreneurs. “Your optimism provides an alternative to their nihilism.”

The summit’s 700 entrepreneurs were chosen from over 5,000 applicants worldwide with the aim of connecting public-spirited entrepreneurs from all over the world with the capital to impact their communities. While the 2016 summit launched on Wednesday with an exclusive daylong session for 150 of the top applicants, the full program began on Thursday morning with Kerry’s address.

Opening speaker Patricia Nzolantima’s story exemplified the mixture of enterprise and social responsibility that Kerry saw in today’s entrepreneurs. A born businesswoman, Nzolantima was raising the money to buy her own sewing machine and running a dressmaking business even as a schoolgirl in her hometown in the Congo. Since then, she has come to run a Pan-African marketing agency, a magazine focusing on working women and a microcredit program exclusively for women.

Throughout her speech, Nzolantima stressed her social mission above all else.

“[My aim is] to pierce the highest and hardest glass ceiling—to see women become entrepreneurs and community leaders themselves,” Nzolantima said.

Uber founder Travis Kalanick and Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky followed Kerry and Nzolantima’s opening addresses with their own stories. Like Nzolantima’s story, their journeys combined the themes of hard-won personal success and social good.

Chesky emphasized that his ubiquitous home rental startup Airbnb began with an idea at which others laughed.

“I was telling a friend about this idea I had, and he pauses, gives me that look, and he says, ‘Brian, I hope that’s not the only idea you’re working on,’” Chesky quipped.

Chesky recounted the three launches and relaunches that Airbnb went through before it finally secured a double-digit guest count, reminding his audience that the best ideas often appear unbelievable at first.

Kalanick discussed his social vision for Uber as a labor market revolution as much as a successful moneymaking business.

“Uber is inclusive,” Kalanick claimed. “Anybody can work, and that means that in many ways, we look at Uber as being a safety net for a city–imagine if a manufacturing plant goes out of business and lays people off… This work is here for everybody.”

Kalanick’s remarks echoed Kerry’s vision of the inextricable links between the public and private sectors when it comes to dealing with global issues.

“There is a really close connection between what you do as entrepreneurs and investors, and what I do as Secretary of State,” Kerry said. “In our world today, there is an intimate connection between the creation of economic opportunity and the potential for political stability, between economic policy and foreign policy, which have long been two sides of the same coin.”

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2016 seeks to empower women and youth https://stanforddaily.com/2016/06/23/global-entrepreneurship-summit-2016-seeks-to-empower-women-and-youth/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/06/23/global-entrepreneurship-summit-2016-seeks-to-empower-women-and-youth/#respond Thu, 23 Jun 2016 07:16:46 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1116208 The Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2016, which kicked off today at Stanford, is geared to give youth and women a leg up in the entrepreneurial scene. Half of the elite entrepreneurs present were women, while the youngest participant was an 11-year-old.

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The Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2016, which kicked off today at Stanford, is geared to give youth and women a leg up in the entrepreneurial scene. Half of the elite entrepreneurs present were women, while the youngest participant was an 11-year-old.

Those numbers contrasted starkly with other demographic measurements of the business world, such as the mere 37 percent of U.S. businesses founded by women in 2014. However, U.S. Under Secretary of State Richard Stengel pointed out during his opening remarks that the Summit’s makeup is a realistic representation of the world population, which is half women and 44 percent youth — which for Stengel means those under 35.

“People always say, ‘youth are the future,’ and they’re wrong — youth are the present, and that’s why you’re here today,” Stengel said.

The Summit’s twin goals of bringing women entrepreneurs to boardrooms and building businesses in developing countries highlighted the event’s strong emphasis on social responsibility. Organized around a series of talks and panels by leading entrepreneurs, the summit also brings investors and entrepreneurs together to give promising social good startups a boost.

Opening speaker Rahama Wright began her startup journey in her early 20s with a mere $6,000 to her name. Founded in 2005, her company, Shea Yeleen, helps women to run their own shea butter-making cooperatives in West Africa. Since then, the company has expanded to Burkina Faso and Mali.

“We’re showing that women can increase their income to five times the minimum wage in the country, in northern Ghana,” Wright said. “Having that income helps women have access to healthcare services, send their children to school, access land ownership and do things they haven’t been able to do before.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry pointed out that economic development and opportunity is spurred by energetic small- and medium-sized enterprises from people like those present at the summit.

“Most jobs don’t come from the Fortune 500 companies,” Kerry said. “Jobs come from someone who has an idea, who works out of a basement to build something from one person, two people [and then] three.”

In line with Kerry’s remarks, opening session panelist Leila Janah criticized the traditional mentality that the private sector must maximize profit to the exclusion of a more public-spirited mission.

“[We’re used to thinking] that the free hand of the market will solve all problems and it hasn’t,” Janah explained. “We can’t rely on underfunded NGOs to do all of the really important work in the world — to fix massive social problems single-handedly.”

Janah has made headlines and magazine covers as the founder and CEO of two companies, Sama and Laxmi, that link the world’s poorest people with steady jobs.

Janah said that her first company, Sama, has managed to break even this year despite its nonprofit status; for Janah, this is remarkable evidence of the potential of sustainable private sector solutions to solve global problems.

“When the organization isn’t reliant entirely on charity or donations but on the revenue line as well, there are such huge opportunities in the middle ground,” she said.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

Photo Gallery: Day One of GES 2016

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Hennessy’s term as President comes to close https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/31/hennessys-term-as-president-comes-to-close/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/31/hennessys-term-as-president-comes-to-close/#respond Tue, 31 May 2016 07:57:17 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1115931 During his tenure as University President, John Hennessy has not been immune from criticism. Yet, implicit in every criticism is the belief that Hennessy has shaped Stanford indelibly.

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In his 16 years as the University’s executive-in-chief, President John L. Hennessy has overseen landmarks and milestones for the University. His tenure brought Stanford the Engineering Quad, more than tripled Stanford’s endowment, and made Stanford the most selective school in the United States. ASSU Vice President Brandon Hill ’16 called Hennessy the “most effective President in Stanford history.”

Beyond his role as lead administrator, Hennessy is a public figure in his own right. Major news sources have critiqued him, student activists address themselves to him, and Hennessy himself is a Silicon Valley heavyweight with active industry links. Outside Stanford, he is perhaps best known for his fundraising and his Silicon Valley credentials, and not without controversy. Yet implicit in every criticism is the belief that Hennessy has indelibly shaped Stanford.

Financial aid, finances and Stanford, Inc.

Hennessy counts financial aid as his single most important achievement as President, beating the $1.6 billion he raised just last year and the construction of the entire Engineering Quad.

“Net tuition after financial aid has gone up farther in public institutions than in private ones, mostly because they don’t have resources to provide financial aid,” remarked Hennessy. “As the state reduces subsidies, tuitions have gone up.”

The average net cost of attendance for students receiving financial aid was $17,952 in the 2013-2014 school year, a decrease from the 2012-2013 year even as the sticker price of attending Stanford rose.

“A lot of students wouldn’t actually be at Stanford if not for Stanford’s generous financial aid program, [myself] included,” Hill said.

Out of 6,980 undergraduates at Stanford, 4,284 received financial aid in the 2013-2014 school year. Financial aid has not only made the cost of attending Stanford comparable with public schools for aid recipients, but placed Stanford on par with peer institutions like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and MIT.

Yet Stanford’s growth as a research institution may also make affordable payments more difficult to sustain. In February, Daily columnist Winston Shi ’16 wrote about the pressure of rising per unit cost of expanding the Stanford enterprise. Keeping pace as a premier research institution, he argued, meant that funding would have to expand constantly to keep net prices at the same level for students.

Still, for the past few years, Stanford has managed to keep net prices down, in part by prioritizing financial aid. Hennessy took pride in Stanford’s decision to keep financial aid while making other cuts during the 2007 financial crisis, when students were most sorely in need of aid. He recalled it as a time in which the University had stuck to its “core value,” but the end of his tenure raises the question: Just what are the University’s values?

The ‘moral mission’

One answer to the question is moral leadership. Inequality has come into Hennessy’s public role within the university as campus activist movements address Hennessy directly. In the past school year, Fossil Free Stanford (FFS) and Who’s Teaching Us (WTU) took up their causes with Hennessy himself. Whether with climate change or faculty diversity, the idea behind the placards was one and the same: The University should be as much of a moral leader as it is an exemplar in teaching and research.

Pablo Haake ’19 was one of dozens of students who joined FFS during its five-day sit-in outside Hennessy’s office to protest Stanford’s investment in oil and natural gas. He explained his commitment as a moral question.

“If Stanford is invested in an industry that is perpetuating harm, then it is our duty to be a moral leader in opposing that and also to not be complicit in moral harm,” Haake said.

The five-day sit-in took on a confrontational tone as activists, frustrated with what they saw as Hennessy’s inaction, called him out on social media and, memorably, shared photos of him during his appointment at Stanford Hair in Tresidder Union.

Faced with student causes that plant themselves outside his office, Hennessy is understanding.

“Let me say first that the rise of student activism reflects actually, in some way, a healthy impatience about the rate of change in our country,” said Hennessy.

In an attempt to explain student activists’ sometimes combative fervor, he cited the generation gap. His peers “grew up doubting that America would ever have a black President,” while current students grew up in Obama’s administration but found that racial injustice remained devastatingly present. He offered his understanding that students were looking to their “home institution” as the first place to make change.

However, all this is to say that Hennessy fundamentally disagrees on the subject. For him, the University’s moral imperative is achieved through its intellectual mission.

“[The aim of doing] good in the world, we see that as primarily focused around teaching and research,” he explained. To the extent that there are other opportunities that are aligned with research and teaching missions that make sense, [we’ll] do that, but research and teaching are the focus.”

And Hennessy has evidence. Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Engineering (Y2E2) Building, conceived during his term, became the catalyst for the interdisciplinary Stanford Energy System Innovations program (SESI). The scheme is on track to cut Stanford’s carbon emissions in half and reduce water use by 15 percent.

Beyond the question of Hennessy’s personal impact, the fact is that teaching and research is the foundation of most institutions of higher education. Hennessy’s predecessor, constitutional lawyer Gerhard Casper, cited “Stanford’s vitality and good spirits, the University’s clear focus on teaching and research, and undergraduate education” as his greatest achievements in a farewell interview. Like Hennessy, Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust justified the University’s refusal to divest from fossil fuels by pointing to its contribution to carbon reductions and clean energy research. Harvard’s service to the community, she said, was “in addition to teaching and research.”

Building Stanford

When it comes to education and research, Stanford has undoubtedly grown under Hennessy. The campus has expanded along with the range of academic offerings and interdisciplinary collaborations.

Where Stanford started off with one Main Quad, Hennessy is pushing for original architect Frederick Olmsted’s vision of four quads in architectural unity.

“We’ve followed the model of using buildings to catalyze different ways to organize the university, so that’s been important in supporting the research and teaching mission,” he commented, pointing to the interdisciplinary collaborations made possible by the new buildings.

He raises Y2E2 as an example of a research space that went beyond the boundaries of traditional departments to innovate in sustainable energy and environmental research.

Yet Hennessy has become synonymous with Stanford’s rise in computer science enrollment and entrepreneurship in short, moving ever closer to Silicon Valley. Students are alternately deemed too cautiously pre-professional and too entrepreneurial, taking the University away from its liberal arts core.

Hennessy points out that engineering has not so much expanded as much as it has extended into every discipline.

Citing the field of bioengineering, Hennessy said, “There is a shift that has occurred with the rise of big data and data intensive analysis as a way to look at the world. Fields that we might have called biomedicine are drawing more from engineering and statistics.”

In an interview with longtime colleague and friend David Patterson, Hennessy also dismissed the claim that the University encouraged undergraduates to drop out and found startups in droves. He described grants from StartX, the University-funded startup incubator, as merely “enough money to eat beans for the summer and try out their idea.”

Meanwhile, the tech rush at Stanford has seen the creation of Google and Instagram whose founders had completed their undergraduate education by the time they started their companies  as well as newer social good initiatives such as CS + Mental Health, which is run by current students.

Nevertheless, Hennessy’s positions on the board of Google and Cisco have raised eyebrows. A 2012 New Yorker article suggested that potential conflicts of interest abound when faculty invest in student startups, and the President has interests in industry. The piece included comments from senior associate dean Debra Satz and former history professor Philippe Buc, who both worried about the symbiotic ties between industry and University.

Apart from risk-taking entrepreneurs, the other side of pre-professional CS culture is risk aversion.

Although his name is synonymous with the burgeoning role of Silicon Valley in Stanford, Hennessy appears as confounded on the matter as anyone else.

“I don’t think we did anything to contribute in particular,” said Hennessy. “We did not anticipate the rapid rise in engineering enrollments. We never thought it would get this high this fast… It’s left us scrambling in some cases to balance teaching resources, to get enough support.”

Hennessy reckons that students’ risk-aversion and effective teaching on the CS department’s part are part of the equation. And it’s true: Millennials are plagued by some of the most daunting employment figures in history, even as college education rates continue to increase.

Hennessy’s assessment echoes the eager-to-please, risk-averse “excellent sheep” William Deresiewicz saw at Harvard, Yale and other top liberal arts institutions. Deresiewicz portrayed the popularity of CS at Stanford and economics at Harvard simply as the price of excellence. In the past decade, Stanford has risen to join the ranks.

The Office of the President

The core of Hennessy’s job is to make Camp Stanford a better place for its residents, on the premise that Stanford’s success will be valuable to the world.

Looking back on his 16 years as President, Hennessy said, “I’d say [Stanford] has become [of greater value to the world]. The quality of the institution, of faculty, of research they’re doing, and the quality of students especially.”

He added, “We get the best students from around the world now, and that’s remarkable.”

In Hennessy’s view, the demons of education inequality and fossil fuel investment are not the President’s to slay.

Although he is a stalwart of the fast-moving tech scene, Hennessy is a traditionalist among revolutionaries. A read through his commencement speeches saw him muse on the institution’s founding values and one inspirational alum each year. His addresses are neither as idiosyncratic nor as vividly personal as those of his predecessor, Gerhard Casper.

Comparing Hennessy to Casper, Hill noted, “Historically, Hennessy hasn’t been as connected to the ASSU as the previous President, Gerhard Casper. [Casper] was actually a constitutional legal scholar by training, and would regularly correspond with the ASSU [such as] when the GSC and undergraduate students split.”

Besides advisory letters to student government, Casper also wrote scathing personal ones to the U.S. News & World Report on the subject of college rankings. Hennessy has been a quiet administrator in comparison.

When asked about the least-understood part of the President’s job, Hennessy had a prompt response.

“How little power the President has to do things,” he said with a laugh.

The University, he explained, can only spend 0.25 percent of its resources each year on new initiatives. On investment decisions and curriculum changes, the President has to go through the Board of Trustees and the Faculty Senate.

As an administrator, Hennessy has done a great deal with relatively little. The recent budgetary report from Provost John Etchemendy shows just how tricky it is to keep an university even one that is raking in the donations and is famously linked to industry on the upswing. The outlook of the President is inevitably monetized.

The University is a gridlock of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff, alumni, trustees and investors. The “administration” is larger than one man, and the University is greater than its President. Hennessy has managed the mass of interlocking interests to transform Stanford, and its enhanced status has come with new issues. In the process, Hennessy says he has been altered by Stanford.

“It completely changed my life,” he said, “I came to California as a young assistant professor, and it completely changed my life, and provided me with opportunities to pursue research and teaching, that I never would have had otherwise.”

Stanford shaped Hennessy, and Hennessy then shaped Stanford as it is today. 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

 

Quick take with President Hennessy

The Stanford Daily (TSD): What’s your favorite memory in your role as President?

John Hennessy (JH): Probably going to freshman dorms on opening day.

TSD: What vegetable would you be, if you had a choice?

JH: Broccoli rabe – it’s an Italian vegetable that goes very well with pasta.

TSD: Would that be organic, home-grown, pesticide free…?

JH: It would be organic.

TSD: What are your thoughts on the Stanford band?

JH: I think they’re zany. They’re unpredictable.

TSD: What do you want to say to average student reading this?

JH: I’d say Stanford is a great university and you should view being here as a real opportunity and privilege and make the most out of it.

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Senate talks individual senate projects, funding https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/24/senate-talks-individual-senate-projects-funding/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/24/senate-talks-individual-senate-projects-funding/#respond Wed, 25 May 2016 06:41:36 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1115649 In their last meeting of the year, the 18th Undergraduate Senate for scrutinized funding bills, reported on personal projects and heard a pitch for a new Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) event for the whole student body.

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In their last meeting of the year, the 18th Undergraduate Senate for scrutinized funding bills, reported on personal projects and heard a pitch for a new Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) event for the whole student body.

The 19th Undergraduate Senate met yesterday to discuss individual projects and funding (ROBERT SHI/The Stanford Daily).
The 19th Undergraduate Senate met yesterday to discuss individual projects and funding (ROBERT SHI/The Stanford Daily).

Black Graduation funding

The Senate approved a bill to appropriate some $42,000 in funds for the Black Graduation Celebration this year. The funding bill went through a lengthy debate as Senators raised concerns about the amount of money and the precedent the bill might set.

Black Community Services Center (BCSC) Program Coordinator Benjamin Williams ’18 explained that a complicated leadership transition process had made the last-minute funding request necessary.

Williams explained, “The result [of the transition] was that the usual process to get funds for the Black Graduation Celebration didn’t happen, so basically we’re asking for money to make the ceremony happen this year.”

Appropriations committee chair Cenobio Hernandez ’18 recommended that the Senate fund the bill due to the urgency and importance of the event.

However, Senate chair Shanta Katipamula ’19 pointed out that the burden for funding seemed to fall unduly on the Undergraduate Senate.

“I’m a little irked that we’re being asked to fund the whole thing when we haven’t been asked to in the past,” Katipamula remarked. “Have you talked to the University or The Stanford Fund (TSF)? It just doesn’t add up to me, why the whole burden is falling on us.”

Williams explained that the leadership transition period had drastically shortened the timeline to fulfill the requirements for TSF or special funding.

ASSU assistant financial manager Luka Fatuesi ’17 recalled that the BCSC had raised the same request at the Senate during his stint as a senator in the 2014-2015 school year. On his recommendation, Hernandez told Williams that the funding request would not be approved if it was taken to the Senate in the coming year.

Fatuesi also suggested that the Senate negotiate for University funding for similar community events in future.

“For those of you interested in getting more University funding for community centers, getting funding for events like [Black Graduation] is a concrete way to do it,” said Fatuesi. “The graduation ceremony benefits more than the ASSU and Stanford students. It also benefits parents and alumni, so the administration could have a part in it.”

The Senate eventually approved the funding bill with the stipulation that Senator Khaled Aounallah ’19 would approach the University administration to explore the possibility of University funding for similar events. Fatuesi was also appointed to work with the BCSC to ensure that they would seek funding from other sources in future.

Senator reports

Individual senators also made their mandatory bi-weekly reports on their personal projects as well as their action plans over the summer.

Student Life committee chair Carson Smith ’19 told the Senate that she had conducted focus groups with fellow frosh council members on Full Moon on the Quad (FMOTQ). Smith is serving on an advisory group consisting of both staff and students that will make recommendations to the Office of Student Affairs on the future of FMOTQ.  

Carson added, “We had a student-staff meeting to talk about how we want to handle information-sharing with [Vice Provost for Student Life] Greg Boardman, and I will be writing up the notes from the focus group and meeting with [Boardman] as well.”

Administration and Rules committee chair Kathryn Treder ’18 also reported that she is working on achieving University recognition for Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which Brown University has already recognized in the past year.

Treder said, “I know of a few people who know students who worked [on Brown’s decision to recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day], so I plan on getting in contact with them as well as faculty here to see what recognition would look like, what’s feasible.”

Senator Jayaram Ravi ’19 updated the Senate on the administrative changes in Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), with the possibility of pay increases for residential Peer Health Educators (PHEs).

Finally, the Senate approved the Nominations Commission’s (NomCom) 17-page list of student representatives in various university councils. Fatuesi pitched an idea that the ASSU jointly fund a weekly event at Meyer Green for students to enjoy themselves. Many senators responded enthusiastically and looked forward to fleshing out the scheme.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Q&A with Ambassador Arnold Chacon, Director General of U.S. Foreign Service https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/24/qa-with-ambassador-arnold-chacon-direct-general-of-u-s-foreign-service/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/24/qa-with-ambassador-arnold-chacon-direct-general-of-u-s-foreign-service/#respond Tue, 24 May 2016 07:02:02 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1115627 As part of a drive to increase diversity among foreign service officers, Ambassador Arnold Chacon, Director General of the United States Foreign Service, is coming to El Centro on Tuesday afternoon to reach out to students and affinity groups on Department of State careers. Born and raised in Colorado, Ambassador Chacon emphasized that his upbringing did not foreshadow a career that would take him to Guatemala and Spain. The Stanford Daily took the chance to ask the Ambassador for his take on the Foreign Service recruitment process, the diversity focus and the greatest misconceptions about the job.

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As part of a drive to increase diversity among foreign service officers, Ambassador Arnold Chacon, Director General of the United States Foreign Service, is coming to El Centro on Tuesday afternoon to reach out to students and affinity groups on Department of State careers. Born and raised in Colorado, Ambassador Chacon emphasized that his upbringing did not foreshadow a career that would take him to Guatemala and Spain. The Stanford Daily took the chance to ask the Ambassador for his take on the Foreign Service recruitment process, the diversity focus and the greatest misconceptions about the job.

The Stanford Daily (TSD): Could you give us a brief outline about your career, including some of the places you have been and some of the work you have been involved in?

Arnold Chacon (AC): I entered the United States Foreign Service in the early 1980s. Actually, at that time, it was against the backdrop of the Cold War. I chose what we call the political cone, or the political career track. Foreign Service officers are divided into five tracks — political, economic, public diplomacy, management and consulate.

I came into the Foreign Service because I was very much interested in an international career, in making a difference. I initially thought I wanted to be a medical doctor, so I did volunteer public health work in Central and South America. That’s where I met U.S. diplomats and aid workers. I was very intrigued by the work they did.

My career’s taken me to the United Nations, Latin America and Europe. We change jobs every three years, so before I came back to Washington, I was U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala for three years. And again, we have a very interesting agenda there — promoting democratic institutions and inclusive economic development.

TSD: What do you think is the single most important quality in a foreign service officer? What qualities, training or experiences does the Foreign Service look out for?

AC: When we look for candidates, we assess for knowledge, intelligence and other skills like judgment, integrity, resourcefulness and especially written communication skills — kind of a well-rounded person, very curious and very good at interpersonal skills. It helps if you have overseas experience, and speaking as a former Ambassador, we have diverse teams.

And we’re diverse in every sense of the word — not only ethnicity and race, but academic tracks. We have lawyers and journalists and scientists in the Department of State; some went on to have second careers, some just changed early on. But what we have in common is emotional intelligence, curiosity and resilience.

TSD: Would you say that the Foreign Service is actively seeking to increase the diversity among its officers?

AC: Absolutely. That’s a big part of the reason why I’m here [in the Bay Area]. It’s simple — I’m head of Human Resources, and what we try to do is recruit people from a wide variety of backgrounds. We are the face of the United States to the world, and we want our department to represent us in all our richness. In Guatemala, people looked at us very closely in terms of values and what we’re promoting — our message resonated more clearly because we had a diverse team.

It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do — diversity engenders creativity.

TSD: What sorts of underrepresented groups are you reaching out to specifically?

AC: Ethnic, gender, LGBT, disabled — really any underrepresented group. We’re also certainly looking for academic diversity as well; we’re looking for a variety of different talents.

TSD: Which groups would you say are currently underrepresented in the Foreign Service?

AC: The traditionally underrepresented groups, such as Hispanics, African-Americans. We’re certainly not happy with where we are in terms of percentages of workforce, but our hiring has more than doubled in the last 10 years of those particular groups. Our hiring in 2004 was at the rate of about 4.5 percent; we’ve doubled that to 9 to 10 percent [for Hispanics], and even more for African-Americans. That is a key part of the demystifying we’re doing, which involves going out and talking about the fact that minorities have options, and we want to encourage them to consider public service careers.

TSD: What would you say is the biggest misconception about the Foreign Service?

AC: The biggest misconception about us is we’re an elitist country club, mostly white males and pinstriped suits and cocktail parties. I’m not sure that was ever the case, definitely not the case now. People are very strategic and operational. We work in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan. Over 1,000 Foreign Service employees at any given time are working in unaccompanied posts that are too dangerous for them to take their families with them. It’s increasingly expeditionary, but it’s evolving all the  time. It’s not what it might have been 20 years ago, and that’s the most interesting part of it. You’re constantly growing and facing new challenges and developing skill sets.

TSD: What exactly is the Foreign Service’s relationship with the political side of affairs? For example, how would the upcoming elections affect things on the ground?

AC: We’re a professional core; we serve whatever administration that is elected by the American people. It’s hard to guess what a different perspective might be from a new administration, but suffice to say that in my experience, there is not a lot of variation in foreign policy and approaches to foreign policy by different administration.

For example, we need Portuguese speakers because, starting in 2009 or so, an incredible number of Brazilians wanted to visit the U.S., and because of [our increasing trade relationships with] China there is more demand for Mandarin. These things are all pretty constant through administrations, but certainly the world is more and more global and we hope to take advantage of that.

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Senate agrees to subsidize student group fees for low-income students https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/17/senate-agrees-to-subsidise-student-group-fees-for-low-income-students/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/17/senate-agrees-to-subsidise-student-group-fees-for-low-income-students/#respond Wed, 18 May 2016 06:58:11 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1115302 The 18th Undergraduate Senate approved a bill to commit a maximum of $35,000 to a new program to subsidize student group dues for low-income students, pending a comprehensive fund allocation plan.

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The 18th Undergraduate Senate approved a bill to commit a maximum of $35,000 to a new program to subsidize student group dues for low-income students, pending a comprehensive fund allocation plan. First proposed to the last Senate by Joshua Seawell ’18, the bill was stalled due to concerns about the exclusive nature of the student organizations involved and the lack of details on fund use.

The Senate also heard a student complaint on the lack of transparency in the selection process for student representatives to the Stanford Board of Trustees.

Student group fee subsidy for low-income students

Seawell took the bill to subsidize dues for low-income students before the 18th Senate for the second time, following the Senate’s refusal to approve the requested $30,000 in funds upfront. Instead, the Senate had voted to establish a working group to first design a detailed budgeting plan before deciding on funds.

While Seawell hoped that the Senate would appropriate the funds immediately, the Senate was reluctant to commit without a detailed scheme. The hour-long debate focused on the urgency of the fund transfer, the Senate’s political process as well as the financial implications of the different funding timelines.

“I’m frustrated by your criticism of our evolving bill when we keep evolving and responding to your feedback,” Seawell said. “Every form of the bill seems to be unacceptable for whatever reasons are convenient at that time.”

He explained that he was reluctant for the Senate to vote on the funds alongside the working group’s budgeting proposal lest the working group feel pressured to propose a popular solution rather than a practical one.

“We have certain funding guidelines and principles in the Senate, and one of those is that we don’t give money away unless you have a detailed explanation of how it’s going to be spent,” Senator Matthew Cohen ’18 argued. “Every group is held to the same standard, and I don’t think we should see it any differently.”

Cohen and Senator Hattie Gawande ’18 also quoted Dr. Joseph Brown, associate director of the Diversity and First-Gen Office (DGen), as saying that the funds were not urgently needed.

However, Senator Khaled Auonallah ’19 pointed out that delaying funding until next quarter could mean that Greek organizations with fall quarter pledge seasons might see the earlier pledge class miss out on aid.

Senator Jasmin Espinosa ’18 ultimately offered a solution to the long debate by proposing that the Senate commit to a maximum funding cap of $35,000, although they would also vote on the exact funds along with the working group’s concrete plan.

Espinosa has had experience working with DGen to pilot a meal subsidy scheme for low-income students staying on campus over spring break.

“Even if we don’t transfer the money right now, DGen has the money to front [the funds] in fall. They have their opportunity fund,” She pointed out. “However, I do think it will be hard for a pilot project like this to have exact numbers upfront.”

During their open forum, the Senate heard a complaint from Yasmin Bashirova ’17, who sought reform in the Nominations Commission (NomCom) selection process to better represent the full range of student concerns.

Each year, the Nomination Commission (NomCom) nominates two student representatives to the Board of Trustees, while a Board committee decides whether to accept the nominations. Bashirova claimed that she had made it past the first round of interviews, but was never contacted for the second round.

Senators Gawande and Cenobio Hernandez ’18 decided to follow up with Bashirova to clarify and consider further action on hre claims.

Finally, the Senate passed a bill to appoint Ben Gaiarin ’19 as sophomore class president after a member of the elected team decided to take a leave of absence for personal reasons.

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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ASSU Senate discusses funding and projects https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/12/assu-senate-discusses-funding-and-projects/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/12/assu-senate-discusses-funding-and-projects/#respond Thu, 12 May 2016 07:16:56 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1115007 The 18th Undergraduate Senate focused on a bill to spend $30,000 on student organization fee subsidies for low-income students. Individual Senators also reported on their personal projects and approved Ben Schwartz ’18 as the proxy for Senator Matthew Cohen '18 while Cohen studies abroad in the fall.

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The 18th Undergraduate Senate focused on a bill to spend $30,000 on student organization fee subsidies for low-income students. Individual Senators also reported on their personal projects and approved Ben Schwartz ’18 as the proxy for Senator Matthew Cohen ’18 while Cohen studies abroad in the fall.

Senate scrutinizes fee subsidy bill, frustrate authors

Senators remained ambivalent about Joshua Seawell’s ’18 bill to subsidize student group membership dues for low-income students, despite the amendments Seawell made to the bill since it was first presented to the 17th Undergraduate Senate.

Many Senators voiced concern about the lack of a fund allocation scheme or statistics on student needs. Senator Matthew Cohen ’18 suggested that the Senate divide the bill, establishing a working group to devise specific plans before committing to a figure for funds.

“The best way is to approve a working group rather than approve the money straight away, so we can get the ball rolling,” Cohen said.

While the Senate was in favor of Cohen’s suggestion, Seawell and Alizabeth McGowan ’16 expressed disappointment that the funds could not be approved in full.

Seawell explained that he did not want to see the working group’s plans hamstrung by a popular vote.

“I hesitate to ask a group of experts to come up with a solution that is popular,” Seawell said. “We only wanted to have them checked by [the student body President and Vice President], who are committed but freer from the political pressures of the Senate.”

Seawell and McGowan, who heads the Stanford chapter of the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority, pressed the Senate to commit to funding. They cited the number of changes the bill had undergone based on Senate feedback, such as the change from a Greek life-only subsidy scheme to one that included other due-requiring student groups.

Elections commissioner Eric Wilson ’16 supported the Senate’s decision to wait for more concrete details before appropriating funds.

“This is the new Senate’s first time seeing this bill,” Wilson said. “Just having a kind of system where we work towards some consistency before deciding on the money is a good thing.”

As the debate between the Senate and the supporters of the bill grew heated, Senator Kathryn Treder ’18 said, “I don’t really like how we are talking to each other now. I think our character is being mischaracterized.

“We have a big responsibility to be fair and responsible right now, and I do think we deserve a little bit more respect for wanting to see a working group before we approve funding,” she added.

The 90-minute discussion ended with the Senate approving the working group without committing to funding on paper. Senators Mylan Gray ’19 and Khaled Auonallah ’19 agreed to serve as the Senate representatives in the working group.

Senators on individual projects

Senators reported on their progress on the personal projects they first proposed two weeks ago. Senate Chair Shanta Katipamula ’19 said that she has been working with the Office of Sexual Assault & Relationship Abuse (SARA) to bring a sexual assault reporting app, Callisto, to Stanford.

“I’m working on building that partnership [with SARA] now, and reaching out to Pomona [College], which currently has that online system to see what process they have,” Katipamula said.

Some Senators have modified their focus. Upon finding that the University has yet to take concrete action on renaming buildings named after Junipero Serra, Senator Carson Smith ’19 has decided to tackle the University’s future support for Full Moon on the Quad (FMOTQ) instead.

“I will be part of that group of both faculty and students to come up with recommendations for [Vice Provost of Student Affairs] Greg Boardman by end of the quarter to say what we believe should happen,” Smith said.

Boardman had announced previously that the University might end funding and administrative support for FMOTQ due to worries about sexual assault and alcohol overconsumption.

Other Senators are working on a diverse range of projects ranging from support for community centers to a wider range of language tutoring opportunities.

“My first project is to get the budget for cultural and community centers to pre-2008 levels,” Gray said. “I have been in touch with one member of Who’s Teaching Us, who is also working on the same initiative.”

Senator Gabe Rosen ’19, who chairs the Academic Affairs committee, stated that he is interested in extending language tutoring opportunities to students who are not enrolled in language classes.

“It’s a big issue for international students, who may not have the same language interactions that they used to before they came to Stanford,” Rosen said.

Bill to fund the Senate

The Senate also approved bills to streamline the process for selecting a new secretary and appointing a proxy for Senators studying abroad. The Senate voted unanimously to appoint Ben Schwartz ’18 as proxy for Cohen.

“After hearing Matthew tell me so much about the Senate, I do have some knowledge of what goes on, and hope I will be able to contribute,” Schwartz said.

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Q&A with Harry Elliott, editor-in-chief of the Stanford Review https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/05/qa-with-harry-elliot-editor-in-chief-of-the-stanford-review/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/05/qa-with-harry-elliot-editor-in-chief-of-the-stanford-review/#comments Thu, 05 May 2016 07:50:43 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1114679 The Daily sat down with The Stanford Review’s editor-in-chief Harry Elliott ’18 to talk Review controversy, campus politics and his possibly contrarian tendencies.

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The Stanford Review’s editor-in-chief Harry Elliott ’18 is no stranger to conflict. Under his leadership, the Review has butted heads with campus activists on all manner of issues, ranging from a serious proposal to revive a Western Civilization requirement at Stanford to a satirical article aimed at curriculum diversity advocates Who’s Teaching Us. The Daily sat down with Elliott to talk Review controversy, campus politics and his possibly contrarian tendencies.

The Stanford Daily (TSD): Why did you join the Review in the first place?

(JACOB NIERENBERG/The Stanford Daily).
(JACOB NIERENBERG/The Stanford Daily).

Harry Elliott (HE): That’s a toughie. I first saw the Review booth at Admit Weekend and thought it was quite interesting. I was involved in high school journalism – though it was more of commentary and not really in a journalistic way – and thought that was a more fun way to go. I also thought Stanford, as compared to the East Coast schools, was a place where you could speak your mind more, and I wanted to be part of something with impact.

TSD: How would you describe the Review’s impact?

HE: In a word, substantial. I don’t know if you’re looking for a value judgment, but, putting a positive spin on it, the impact is just so strong nowadays. The traffic we see is significant, the number of people who read each article is in 4 figures at this point, people care about and listen to what we say.

TSD: What would you say to criticisms that the Review deliberately provokes rather than sparks reasonable debate?

HE: I’m always suspicious of people whose main criticism of the Review is that we’re provocative. There are lots of things we can do to annoy lots of people, and I don’t think we traditionally do all of that. In other campuses the kinds of campus uproar that contrarian or conservative papers cause is very different. I’m proud to say the Review is one of the most constructive conservative papers on campus.

TSD: What about when it alienates a large swathe of groups on campus?

HE: I’m guessing you’re alluding to the April Fools’ article at this point. I think a lot of us believed that Who’s Teaching Us (WTU) is a group so divergent from the accepted median of where people and groups are allowed to stand, and the way they’re allowed to advocate for change, that the only way to convey the absurdity of it was essentially to satirize the way they operate.

I just think it is abhorrent to say, “We demand these 25 things or else we’ll start setting stuff on fire and getting angry.” I think demand culture is unacceptable when there are clear political steps they could have taken instead of being modern day anarchists.

Also, I think the reaction to the piece was somewhat overblown. In reality, [those who disagreed with the article] were a small cabal of a few dozen people. The article was received very well by a large number of Stanford students who thought it was quite funny. In the worst case scenario, if people were willing to be supportive of WTU, at least they could question the way [WTU] advocates change.

TSD: Could you elaborate on your beef with WTU’s method of advocacy?

HE: Here’s the crucial difference. Matthew Cohen in the ASSU Senate, whom I admire, put forward a Senate-run petition to hold a new Campus Climate Survey on sexual assault. When Stanford refused, the student body can take very clear action to say, “we democratically upheld the option and you’re failing to uphold the will of the student body.” But [with WTU], when the President and Provost don’t show up and send a letter that they see as placatory rather than meaningful, there’s not really much you can do.

TSD: What opinion or group on campus do you disagree with most strongly?

HE: I’ve already conveyed my principled objection to WTU methods. Actually, I’m much more neutral on some of the policies they talk about, but the way they advocate is not acceptable.  Otherwise I think there are no other groups on campus I think of as particularly objectively bad.

If there’s one kind of prevailing campus viewpoint that does annoy me, it’s the idea that either you win or you stay silent. One reason why they don’t speak out about viewpoints is that Stanford students think that the average Stanford student is far more liberal than the average Stanford student actually is. We found that in a survey we did last year, and I think lots of people just aren’t willing to talk about the large number of issues unless it’s [with people they know] they’ll agree with anyway.

TSD: Do the criticisms that the Review is full of privileged white men get to you?

HE: You know, I went to Eton… anarchists used to march around campus furiously, endlessly screaming at all of us and I was 13 years old at that time. Most of my educational life has involved people screaming at me one way or another.

The Review obviously has a history of opposing campus activism. It rose out of opposing campus activism to decolonize our education, ironically enough. There will always be a small cabal of people who see everything we do as hostile. There’s a reason why a couple dozen people who submitted acts of intolerance over our news article are the exact same people who comment on every Facebook post we’ve ever made and do their best to waste time rather than spend it productively.

Judging people on history is a ridiculous way to understand how people operate. I have no connection ideologically, personally, familially with the people who started the Review 20 years ago or the way it looked even three years ago.

TSD: How reflective would you say your articles are of your personal views?

HE: It depends. I agree with lots of things we stand for, I was a big instigator in the Western Civilization requirement. On removing Serra’s name, I was not 100 percent sure where I stand. One thing Stanford can’t seem to understand is that it’s possible to have an open mind and not argue for any particular thing, that people don’t seem to take any position in between.

I object when people have viewpoints and don’t rationally represent them – [the Undergraduate Senate resolution on removing Serra’s name] happened in seven days flat with very little consultation with the Catholic community, with lots of people who have lived in Serra. The Senate didn’t talk about how what made it so important to remove Serra, but not to remove some names that the Senate seemed uneager to remove, such as Tresidder or Jordan, who was prominent in the eugenecist movement.

TSD: How would you place the Review on the political spectrum? Is this consistent, or do you try to represent all views as far as possible?

HE: I’m centrist, obviously there are a few people who would identify with the Republican Party, and also large numbers who identify as Libertarian but who wouldn’t realistically vote Libertarian in an election.

I think the Review is probably center-right in Stanford, which is center-center. The Review is further to the left than some Americans, but Stanford forgets that when they leave the bubble they can’t expect everyone to hold the same political viewpoints universally. It’s absurd.

Some Stanford grads are shocked by the way people in mainstream society hold much more conservative viewpoints than they do, but that’s part of the campus bubble. And we’re happy to be somewhat to the right of campus media.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Latest Senate meeting examines individual projects, funding for partisan events https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/04/latest-senate-meeting-examines-individual-projects-funding-for-partisan-events/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/04/latest-senate-meeting-examines-individual-projects-funding-for-partisan-events/#respond Wed, 04 May 2016 07:09:05 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1114625 The third meeting of the 18th Undergraduate Senate featured bills to amend the bylaws for Senate proxy and secretary nominations, as well as individual Senators’ reports.

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The third meeting of the 18th Undergraduate Senate featured bills to amend the bylaws for Senate proxy and secretary nominations, as well as individual Senators’ reports.

Individual projects: from resources for undocumented students to Senate transparency

Senators who had yet to present their individual projects to the Senate outlined their plans briefly. The full list of proposals ranges from familiar issues such as sexual assault prevention and Senate transparency, to providing public information for undocumented students at Stanford.

Senate Chair Shanta Katipamula ’19 and returning Senator Matthew Cohen ’18 are both tackling campus sexual misconduct. Katipamula has proposed an online sexual harassment reporting system, while Cohen is continuing his previous work on disclosing the results of the controversial campus climate survey.

Cohen explained, “[Getting the administration to disclose more specific statistics] takes care of the problem where there are different definitions of what sexual assault and misconduct look like. You can just look at the individual responses to certain questions and say if the number should be tallied differently.”

Senators Jayaram Ravi ’19 and Alpha Hernandez ’19 are focusing on campus mental health. Hernandez is interested in reaching out to upperclassmen on mental health issues they may face, while Ravi has set up a meeting with the director of Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) to discuss potential collaboration.

Other Senators chose to work on subsidizing low-income students for fee-paying classes and spring break meals, and providing more public information for undocumented students.

The new bi-weekly project reports were mandated during the previous Senate’s term as part of a bill to boost Senate accountability. According to Katipamula, full list of projects will soon be posted on the public Senate website.

Speaking to all Senators, Senator Hattie Gawande ’18 suggested, “I’m seeing a lot of ideas that are good first steps, like reaching out to individuals or a Faculty Senate committee … but maybe giving us an end-goal for these steps would be best so the rest of the Senators can follow up on that.”

Stricter funding guidelines for partisan activity

Appropriations Chair Cenobio Hernandez ’18 announced that the committee had decided to follow stricter policy on funding partisan events in light of legal concerns.

Hernandez said, “We’ve made a tentative decision to fund only meeting food for events that may be partisan.”

Last week, the Stanford College Republicans’ request for travel subsidies roused concerns that the ASSU would violate its non-profit status by funding partisan activity. After consulting legal advisors, the Senate voted unanimously against the funding bill since it violated federal tax codes on non-profits.

Finally, the Senate heard two bills to amend the bylaws on secretary and Senate proxy nominations. Previous ASSU Executive Cabinet member Joshua Seawell ’18 also stopped in on the meeting to pitch a proposed Greek life dues subsidy for low-income students and said a more detailed proposal would be available next week.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Q&A with Bob Harlow, a Stanford student running for Congress https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/04/qa-with-bob-harlow-a-stanford-student-running-for-congress/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/04/qa-with-bob-harlow-a-stanford-student-running-for-congress/#comments Wed, 04 May 2016 07:08:52 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1114629 The Daily sat down with 24-year-old Bob Harlow ’16, who is running for Congress in the 18th district of California, to find out about him in his own words.

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Twenty-four-year-old Bob Harlow ’16 is running for Congress in California’s 18th district after having completed his physics degree just last quarter. At Stanford, he played in the orchestra before taking the time to write music and explore the outdoors on his own. He is as much his own person when it comes to politics, denouncing corporate lobbyists and declining to identify on the political spectrum. The Daily sat down with Harlow to find out about him and his political ambitions.

(Courtesy of Bob Harlow)
(Courtesy of Bob Harlow)

The Stanford Daily (TSD): First things first: What made you want to run at the age of 24?

Bob Harlow (BH): I don’t really think the age has anything to do with it, but I can tell you why I’m running – and that’s because I believe in what America can be. I think that in the past decades, in the middle of the century, we achieved a society that worked for everyone and a system that led to huge economic growth that was felt by every citizen in the country. We’ve turned away from that, but we can get back to it and what it requires is an awakening of what America is and how we can shape policy to return to the successes of the previous century.

TSD: Which specific presidencies do you see as successful?

BH: That would be from [Franklin D. Roosevelt] up through Carter. Reagan is when the country really started to go downhill.

TSD: What are some of the things you hope to do as Congressman?

BH: I have a few particular things in mind. One main thing is the Affordable Care Act. I think the Affordable Care Act took us a step forward in some ways, to make sure people can’t be discriminated against for health insurance based on existing conditions, but American people are getting the short end of the stick… And the reason we don’t [have the public option now] is that the political system is very corrupt and inappropriate lobbying is going on. So I would like to raise $100 billion to create a subsidized public option in the Affordable Care Act.

I would also stand by a 10 percent increase in the tax of Americans making more than $1 million a year in what would result in a highest marginal tax rate of 40 percent for that bracket. In the 1950s under Eisenhower, it was 91 percent. Another thing is to raise $1 billion to send 20,000 students to public colleges and universities with free tuition, room and board.

The third item is to have high-speed rail lines from city centers to parts of the Bay Area and the surrounding area that are currently underdeveloped. In particular, I’m thinking of a train from downtown San Jose to the Central Valley – a 40-mile track, assuming it’s a straight line… It’ll generate lots of development [in the Central Valley], lots of increases in housing supply, and significantly lower prices everywhere.

TSD: Where do you identify on the political spectrum?

BH: I don’t think I exist on the current political spectrum. The one thing that almost everyone in Congress has in common is that their chief loyalty is to the people who back their campaigns. And if you look across everybody, that mostly means wealthy donors. You have an economic system that’s not designed these days to work for the American people.

I don’t think American people want to live in society where the average American can’t get a house right now. Unfortunately, we’re living a society where the real wages haven’t gone up for 40 years.

TSD: How did you engage in politics at Stanford, especially since it wasn’t exactly your field of study?

BH: I didn’t become interested in politics at Stanford. I became interested before that. It’s hard to say why we have the interests we do, some of us just tick in different ways. Policies and tangibly trying to improve how we can promote prosperity and freedom for everyone ticks for me.

I would say my interest grew when I worked for the Obama campaign. I enjoyed talking to people, going door to door, and having a conversation about policy with real people.

TSD: As a Democratic candidate yourself, what do you make of the race for the Democratic nomination?

BH: I like Bernie a lot, I think that his vision for America and the proposal he outlined would be really good, [it would be really good] to head in that direction. I think if it came down to implementing it, we would have to take more incremental steps.

I really don’t know what Hillary Clinton thinks, and I don’t think anyone really does. I think Hillary Clinton will be good for the country she’ll move us forward.

I think that I feel like I’m more on the same wavelength as Bernie Sanders. I do think that Hillary Clinton is very knowledgeable about policy and she is generally in the right place in the sense of carrying on the legacy of Obama and moving the nation further back towards a place where there is justice for its people.

TSD: What do you plan to do in the longer run?

BH: I plan to run again if I don’t succeed this year. I have some pretty strong interests, and I will definitely pursue some other things career-wise, but I still have my focus on the election two years from now.

Of course, I’d have to support myself during that time, so I’ll do something in that realm. I do compose music too, and every once in a while on Friday, that’s when I’ll sit down in front of a piano and enter that world, and I really treasure that.

TSD: What sort of music would that be?

BH: I write music that is, I think, a pretty solid extension of the symphonic tradition that doesn’t necessarily try to be anything. But it draws on the colors and textures and rhythms from the soundscape of music existing today and synthesizes that into something that continues in the tradition of all these great works for orchestra of the past couple centuries.

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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A look back on the 17th ASSU Undergraduate Senate https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/28/a-look-back-on-the-17th-assu-undergraduate-senate/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/28/a-look-back-on-the-17th-assu-undergraduate-senate/#comments Fri, 29 Apr 2016 06:52:34 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1114401 The 17th Undergraduate Senate ended its tenure last Tuesday after dealing with campus controversy, community initiatives and day-to-day funding requests over the past school year.

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The 17th Undergraduate Senate ended its tenure last Tuesday after dealing with campus controversy, community initiatives and day-to-day funding requests over the past school year. From the campus climate survey on sexual violence to the bill against anti-Semitism, the Senate has been in the thick of some the most heated debates on campus. It has produced both strong symbolic resolutions on these issues and worked with administrators to seek longer-term change.

Yet this Senate has also met with its share of criticism. ASSU President John-Lancaster Finley ’16 personally criticized the Senate for alleged bylaw violations and poorly handling the Stanford Student Enterprises (SSE) hiring process in the last weeks of the the Senate’s term.

“Basically, I think we’ve done better than most recent Senates,” said Senate chair Sina Javidan-Nejad ’17 in response to recent criticisms by ASSU assistant financial manager Sean Means ’18. “As for our track record, we’ve done great things for the communities we wanted to help, and that should speak to how our legacy should be.”

Representing student voices

Part of the Senate’s work was to mediate some of the larger conflicts the University has faced over the past year. Senators strove to represent student voices on contentious issues such as the campus climate survey and accused the University of producing inaccurate statistics about sexual violence on campus using heavily limited and misleading survey methods.

Senators Hattie Gawande ’18 and Matthew Cohen ’18 tackled the controversy head on, discussing the issue directly with vice provost John Etchemendy and writing a resolution that called on the University to re-administer its campus climate survey based on Association of American Universities (AAU) standards.

The Senate also approved and will work with the Graduate Student Council (GSC) on a program to enhance education on sexual violence prevention for graduate and undergraduate students.

“The Senate is limited to an advisory role to the administration, and I’m the first person to admit that the role is kind of weak,” Gawande said. “As a result, we need to be choosy about what resolutions we pass; we need to be willing to follow through.”

Gawande added that Etchemendy has agreed to release more detailed statistics from the original survey as a first step in increasing transparency. Both Gawande and Cohen have returned to serve on the current Senate and say that sexual assault prevention remains one of their top priorities.

Senator Molly Horwitz ’16 authored a bill against anti-Semitism that sparked debate within the Senate about straddling the line between student groups with divergent and sometimes conflicting views. At its height, Senator Gabriel Knight ’17 was asked to resign for making allegedly anti-Semitic remarks. Knight eventually dropped out of the re-election race.

However, the bill was eventually passed after copious discussion and amendments that extended beyond the weekly Senate meetings. Horwitz and Gawande reached out to J Street U and the Jewish Students’ Association, finally passing the bill in their last meeting.

Changes under the hood: Senate bylaws and funding

This past Senate has also extensively debated ASSU bylaws and funding guidelines that define its inner workings. Some of these amendments have drawn controversy, with Finley and Means criticizing the Senate for amending the bylaws to allow a Senator to take a leave of absence.

The Senate voted to allow Gawande to return from a last-minute absence despite bylaws that allegedly mandated expulsion of Senators on leaves of absence. Gawande had taken a leave of absence for a work opportunity in Boston in fall 2015, which left the Senate debating whether to expel her or to appoint a proxy in her stead.

In response to the Senate allowing Gawande to stay on the Senate, Means proposed a bill to censure the 17th Senate at its last meeting and eventually presented a bill to censure Gawande at the first meeting of the 18th Senate.

They could’ve sued us in the Constitutional Council,” said Cohen in the first meeting of the 18th Undergraduate Senate, responding to the allegations of bylaw violations. “As for the [student population], they voted already. We just had an election and five members [of the Senate] who were part of that decision are sitting here.”

The incoming Senate unanimously rejected the bill to censure Gawande, though some Senators considered the possibility of censuring the 17th Senate as a whole for retroactively amending the bylaws.

Finley also criticized the 17th Senate for voting against the Stanford Student Enterprises (SSE) board of directors’ pick for the next SSE financial manager. In emails to the Senate and the Stanford Review, he criticized the Senate for failing to take part in the selection process for the new financial manager candidate before voting unanimously to reject the nominee chosen by the board of directors on grounds of possible corruption.

Cohen admitted that the Senate could have maintained stronger relationships with the ASSU Executives and that it “should have played a greater role in the SSE financial manager selection process.”

Other changes to Senate proceedings occurred with less fanfare. Appropriations chair Justice Tention ’18 started implementing office hours for clubs seeking funding. Each Appropriations Committee member now spends an hour meeting with clubs to discuss their funding concerns on a rotational basis.

“Justice was probably the best Appropriations chair we’ve had in a long time,” Gawande said.

Some of these structural changes have carried on to the next Senate. Cohen wrote an initially controversial bill to abolish Senate committees in favor of individual projects for which Senators would be held accountable. The Senate eventually passed Cohen’s bill with significant amendments, and the next Senate will require Senators to make biweekly reports of their personal projects even as they continue to serve on traditional committees.

Personal initiatives

Besides tackling the hot-button issues, Senators also took on personal initiatives that tangibly affected communities they knew well.

Several Senators lauded Senator Jasmin Espinosa ’18 for her work with the Diversity and First-Gen Office (DGen) to launch a spring break food stipend program for low-income students. Espinosa viewed her position on the Senate as a chance to achieve clear goals for communities in need.

“I was proud of my ability to represent communities on the Senate,” Espinosa said. “I was able to leverage my position as a Senator to get into conversations with DGen that I wouldn’t otherwise [have] been able to.”

Senator Leo Bird ’17 also successfully pushed the University to start a new committee on renaming landmarks that bear Junipero Serra’s name, due to allegations of genocide.

While drafting the Senate bill on the issue, Bird reached out to the communities involved and secured the support of the ASSU Executives. The bill has now been approved by the Undergraduate Senate, the Faculty Senate and the Graduate Student Council, and a joint commission to discuss the renaming process is in the works.

“It’s about Senators such as Leo Bird with the Native community, who have deep roots in community groups, who have passed important initiatives that students care about,” Gawande said.

In the 17th Undergraduate Senate’s last meeting, the Senate took five minutes to comment on their work for the past year. Senator Eni Asebiomo ’18, who chose not to run for re-election, addressed the new Senators waiting to be sworn in at the end of the meeting.

“I think that this Senate went through a lot to put you guys in a position to do really well,” he said with a laugh. “So I expect great things from you guys.”

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96@stanford.edu.

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