Op-Eds – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Wed, 14 Jun 2023 19:11:57 +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 Op-Eds – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Opinion | Gentrification Nation: How Stanford (and its students) contribute to Bay Area displacement https://stanforddaily.com/2023/05/25/opinion-gentrification-nation-how-stanford-and-its-students-contribute-to-bay-area-displacement/ https://stanforddaily.com/2023/05/25/opinion-gentrification-nation-how-stanford-and-its-students-contribute-to-bay-area-displacement/#respond Fri, 26 May 2023 03:10:29 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1227785 Author Kamilah Arteaga, raised in the East Bay Area, discusses the impact of Stanford students on Bay Area gentrification, and vice versa. She writes, "What we do need to do is make things more even. We need those in power (tech companies, political figures, Stanford) to care, and to try. That includes Stanford students, who directly contribute to the wealth gap and housing crisis just by moving into and getting jobs in the Bay."

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Back in July 2020, when the pandemic was just getting into full swing, the Daily released an opinion by Kiara Bacasen ’22 MS ’22 and Daniella Caluza ’22 summarizing their thoughts about Stanford students living off campus in the Bay Area during the pandemic and online classes. They highlighted how bad the housing crisis in the Bay Area is, and how Stanford students were contributing to it by moving into low-income housing that could have been reserved for local residents. Regardless of whether you were FLI or a person of color—as a Stanford student, that was gentrification at work. 

Sadly, Stanford’s online schooling wasn’t the first or last time Stanford students (soon-to-be techies, entrepreneurs, and consultants) would contribute to the displacement of locals in the Bay Area. The housing crisis ravaging America has long been driven by institutions and the wealthy white people who run them. This is something that’s been happening ever since Stanford set roots here, displacing the indigenous Ohlone people. It’s been happening since the destruction of the Fillmore in the 1960s, the subsequent white flight into the suburbs of the East Bay, the creation of BART and its destruction of West Oakland in the early 70s and the restrictive covenants placed around the Bay that made East Palo Alto one of the few places Black people could rent from in the until the 80s. Gentrification really picked up since Google, Facebook and venture capitalists implanted themselves into the Bay Area during the creation of the Silicon Valley and the peak of the dot-com boom in 1999. The effects of this are felt today, with Stanford and tech giants like Facebook still taking part in the housing mess they have contributed towards.

While the definition of gentrification—the “transformation of a poor neighborhood in cities by the process of middle- and upper-income groups buying properties in such neighborhoods and upgrading them”—was coined by Ruth Glass in 1964, it has evolved to mean something much more as the Bay’s housing crisis continues to grow and change. Definitions of gentrification now come with a more complex look at the wealth gap driven by not just the tech industry, but capitalism as a whole. 

As someone who was born and raised in the Bay Area, and is now a Stanford student, my personal experience with gentrification and the wealth gap here is a bit more unique. I grew up in Newark, CA, the small suburb directly across the Dumbarton Bridge from East Palo Alto. My parents, both immigrants from Mexico, moved our family here when I was two years old. They enrolled my sister and I in a private Catholic school, since the schools in Newark were terrible at the time. I didn’t really understand that I had a different learning experience from other kids in Newark until I was in 5th or 6th grade, when my soccer teammates told me how Newark Junior High (the only junior high in Newark) was full of teachers who didn’t care and lacked resources for all of the students. All problems of underfunded, POC-majority schools. 

I didn’t experience it myself until I went to high school. Newark Memorial High School wasn’t a great school, being half unwilling, half unable to give all their students what they needed. They had some smart kids that “made it out,” either going to four year colleges or finding a good job in tech. But most people didn’t get the attention, money and support they deserved. We were a poorer suburb—nothing like the neighboring cities of Fremont or Palo Alto (just thirty minutes away), where they had extensive infrastructure and stellar high schools. The city didn’t help eithe—six figure jobs in Newark went to city and school administration, all while classroom sizes grew and teachers and counselors were fired. The City of Newark also closed two elementary schools in 2020, citing a budget deficit of $6 million, while simultaneously building a new civic center for city administrators, police department, and library, with a budget of $72.3 million, created out of a sales tax increase. It was here, experiencing all this, that I started to understand how unfair the education and political system was in Newark. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how deep the roots ran. I figured that going into higher education was a way to not only get myself out of this situation, but come back and help my community as well. Stanford was my dream school—ever since my mom worked as a nanny for Stanford professors. Plus, Stanford was my only way of affording a four year university, with its policy to give full tuition scholarships to anyone under $120,000.  So when I did get in, with tuition fully paid for, I figured life was going up from there.

Unfortunately, while Stanford came with privileges and opportunities, it also came with socioeconomic discrimination, just by being a Latine from the Bay Area who wasn’t part of the wealthy majority of students. Before I was accepted, my family and I had to move out of our house, since the bank forcibly foreclosed it on us the summer before my junior year. We ended up moving to my dad’s childhood home in North Fair Oaks, an unincorporated area of San Mateo County. With my family there, and me at Stanford, I experienced for myself the enormous wealth gap that exists in the Silicon Valley. The top 10% of Silicon Valley earners hold 75% of its wealth. The average income for the region in 2021 was $170,000, but the average income for service workers in the Silicon Valley was $31,000.  Just two street lights away from my home in North Fair Oaks, is one of the wealthiest neighborhood in the United States: Atherton, with a median household income above $250,000, and a median home price of $6.3 million. The admissions, class differences, support systems, student culture, endowment: it was like nothing I had ever experienced in my life. The Peninsula was a whole other place, full of absurdly wealthy people. Stanford contributed to that—having direct ties to not only the Silicon Valley and its tech strongholdings, but political, economic and educational elites worldwide—creating the culture of wealth and elitism that is Stanford’s brand. I would like to note that we are privileged to have not moved out of the Bay Area. My grandparents have had that house since the 80s, and let us rent from them. Without them, we would have been like everyone else—moving to the Central Valley

When the pandemic hit, I was filled with even more disrespect for Stanford than I had before, witnessing students gentrifying the Mission and service workers being fired without a second thought. How could the University not protect the very workers that they relied on to keep the school running? Why doesn’t Stanford build subsidized, rent controlled and/or low-income housing for its service workers, instead of having them commute long hours almost every day, with some coming up to 75 miles away from the Central Valley? How was it that students rented out cheaper and low-income housing in the Bay when all the dorms stood empty? I don’t blame students so much—while they are complicit, most are aware of the privileges that they hold from the Stanford name. They shouldn’t be taking rental units, but it’s also not their fault there’s not enough affordable housing, or that Stanford kicked everyone out.  I blame Stanford as an institution, and capitalism as a whole. The system, and the institutions that uphold them, are the ones to blame. 

This is not simply just a conversation about gentrification. This is a conversation about wealth, and the huge gap between the top 0.1% and the rest of us. So despite my experience growing up in the Bay Area, I don’t think abolishing the tech industry, or putting a ban on “outsiders” is a solution to the issues. The reality is that the tech industry is here to stay in the Bay Area. It’s part of our everyday lives, with iPhones, the internet, computer programs. The Bay Area has always been a place of major commerce, and if we somehow took away the Silicon Valley, another industry will come to replace it. What we do need to do is make things more even. We need those in power (tech companies, political figures, Stanford) to care, and to try. That includes Stanford students, who directly contribute to the wealth gap and housing crisis just by moving into and getting jobs in the Bay. You aren’t the source, but you hold partial blame. You might not be purposefully displacing families, or raising the price of rent yourself or building luxury single family homes or apartments—but you are the market. You are the ones that these companies, these developers, are looking for, to “beautify” and “renovate” the neighborhoods they are “investing in.” I can’t stop you from buying homes and getting good jobs, but hopefully I can make you think about the ripples you are making as you do so.

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From the Community | Why I voted against a Committee on Academic Freedom https://stanforddaily.com/2023/02/14/from-the-community-why-i-voted-against-a-committee-on-academic-freedom/ https://stanforddaily.com/2023/02/14/from-the-community-why-i-voted-against-a-committee-on-academic-freedom/#respond Wed, 15 Feb 2023 01:52:33 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1221277 Professor David Palumbo-Liu discusses his skepticism surrounding the Faculty Senate’s motion to establish an Academic Freedom Committee. He writes, “I doubt I will go to any of the meetings which will discuss academic freedom at Stanford.”

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Who is against a committee on academic freedom? Probably no one. But after we get past the platitudes, it’s time to get real. The question that I wanted addressed in last Thursday’s discussion at the Faculty Senate — whose academic freedom seems to come first? — never got a hearing. Instead, I was told that this committee would be fair and impartial and that I should “trust the process.” These words are nearly always uttered by people who are the most protected by “the process,” and they are uttered to those most poorly served by the process. This essay explains the three reasons why I could not “trust the process” and thus why I voted against the motion to establish this committee.

First, at the start of the Senate meeting I asked President Tessier-Lavigne about a document that has been circulating for months in the media and on the Internet. It’s called the “Stanford Academic Freedom Declaration.” I asked him if he had authorized the use of the Stanford name. He said he had not, and that when he pointed this out to the people who had circulated the “Declaration” for signatures using the Stanford name, they removed the word “Stanford.” I replied, “So they violated Administrative Guide 1.5.4, Ownership and Use of Stanford Trademarks and Images; they let their fraudulent document misrepresenting Stanford circulate for months on national media; and it was only after I contacted you that they stopped doing so? And that’s it?”

This is in stark contrast to the reaction of the Senate when the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative sparked concern because of its supposed harm to the Stanford name, and its creators were called to the floor of the Senate to atone for their sins in what can only be described as an inquisitorial tribunal — these people had been found guilty in advance of unspecified charges. The fact that two professors from the Graduate School of Business and a fellow of the Hoover Institute (the same three individuals who created the closed conference on Academic Freedom in November) had perpetrated this fraud in the name of “academic freedom,” duplicitously using Stanford’s name, raised not a single eyebrow at the Senate. No concerns were expressed, no suggestion the miscreants appear before the Senate, not even a demand for an apology, despite the fact the actual authors of the document were in clear violation of University policy. That’s why I don’t trust the process. It is biased. 

The second reason I distrust the process—four of the people who introduced the original motion had signed and circulated the “Stanford Academic Freedom Declaration.” As I dug into its prose, I found some things that concerned me. Much of the content of the “Declaration” derives from the Manhattan Institute, one of the main sources Gov. Ron DeSantis is drawing on in his massive attack on the academic freedom of all public educators in the state of Florida. The Declaration asserts: “employment, promotion, and funding are … subject to … political litmus tests …  seeking to impose a social agenda such as specific views of social justice or DEI principles;” and that “university leaders … oversee and expand politicized bureaucracies that … enforce ideological conformity in hiring and promotion [my emphasis].”

I told the Senate — “I am concerned that once this committee is formed, it might be asked to investigate a very specific set of issues, programs and individuals. That would presumably include the new Race Institute, since the founding proposal for the RI is to do ‘racial justice’ work; the IDEAL program, which will likely be seen as giving preference in hiring based on racial identity and ‘ideological conformity’; and perhaps the School of Sustainability, given that John Cochrane — whose signature is the very first on the Declaration — has claimed in print that this School is engaged in ‘woke’ social justice work.”

I went on to say: “It would help address these concerns if we could add this amendment: ‘Whereas the Senate supports and applauds programs to improve diversity, equity and inclusion in the exchange of ideas at Stanford…’”  This amendment was promptly shot down — I should trust the process.  

But then Professor Larry Diamond actually spoke the truth that I had been trying to flush out all day, “I think there are many people that have some concerns about some specific [DEI] programs, one of which is what triggered this entire conversation [emphasis added].” That is to say, the entire convening of this Academic Freedom Committee is predicated on the hoopla over the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, and a fear of diversity initiatives which might force people to use different language (which the EHLI emphatically does not).

The fact that the Senate effectively erased that history is the second reason I don’t trust the process. It is biased. The presenters of the original motion were and are using “Academic Freedom” as a Trojan horse to “investigate” diversity initiatives.

No other supposed violation of academic freedom has triggered a Faculty Senate discussion, and that includes the violation of my own academic freedom, which brings me to my final reason for not trusting the process.

In 2017, I was the subject of a national campaign of harassment. I received so many violent and credible death threats from across the country that Stanford offered me police protection. During that whole ugly process, no one who originally proposed the committee on academic freedom said anything, even though a bipartisan group of Stanford law professors wrote an opinion piece saying: “We are concerned that the article [that sparked the attacks] advocates for the resignation of a professor based on his constitutionally protected speech regarding issues of public concern.”

Indeed, several years later, the Policy and Planning Board Subcommittee on Campus Climate reported the existence on campus of a chapter of Turning Point USA, home of the infamous “Professor Watchlist.” The Watchlist asks students and professors to “report” liberal professors and instructors, whose names and pictures are then placed on a national database. While it mostly targets liberal and progressive professors, in the past several years it has started to target climate scientists, epidemiologists and those who argue that the 2020 elections were fair. When we raised concerns about Turning Point USA at Stanford, one of the sponsors of the Academic Freedom Committee questioned the need for the Senate action we proposed: “Free speech protects minorities. Speech [sic] protects a minority opinion. It protects people of color. It protects diversity.”

But let one faint possibility that some in-house diversity initiative might affect the academic freedom of this particular set of people, and this “triggers” action to create this committee — because apparently the existing protections are good enough for women and minorities, but they are not good enough for any other groups.

In fact, “free speech” did not protect Hakeem Jefferson, a Black untenured professor, when he was placed on the Professor Watchlist — hate mail and harassment did not cease; “free speech” did not protect Emily Wilder, a Jewish Stanford undergraduate, who was fired from her job for exercising her free speech rights; and it did not protect me when I was subject to that virulent hate campaign.

So, again, whose academic freedom actually counts?

I don’t trust a process that ignores these real harms when they fall upon one group of people and then with alacrity and near unanimity creates a Senate committee solely on the basis of hypothetical harms which might possibly fall upon another group of people — people that the members of the Senate apparently identify and empathize with.

After the Senate meeting, which left most everyone feeling very warm and content, I went to have dinner at a nearby restaurant.  Two colleagues passed by and one of them said to me, “Hey man, I saw you at the meeting. At the end you seemed to go into deep Zen meditation.” I didn’t know it was so apparent. Yes, it’s true. I tuned out because once the liberal feel-good train starts rolling, the destination is pretty clear.

I doubt I will go to any of the meetings which will discuss academic freedom at Stanford — it’s clear that my opinion is in the extreme minority and unlikely to have any effect whatsoever, besides just ruffling feathers and using up important time. So during those meetings, I will do my research and teaching and be with people I trust, because they have proven themselves to be trustworthy.

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Opinion | Some faculty urge caution in rushing to judgment on MTL case https://stanforddaily.com/2022/12/24/opinion-faculty-urge-caution-in-rushing-to-judgment-on-mtl-case/ https://stanforddaily.com/2022/12/24/opinion-faculty-urge-caution-in-rushing-to-judgment-on-mtl-case/#respond Sat, 24 Dec 2022 16:25:02 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1216471 Several Stanford University faculty members explain their perspective on allegations of research misconduct against President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. "Core discoveries made by his laboratory have not only stood the test of time after validation by laboratories around the globe, but have also... revolutionized our understanding of how the brain is wired," they write.

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To Members of the Stanford Community:

In light of the publicity and discussions surrounding papers published by President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, and as Stanford faculty members who conduct biological and biomedical research, we would like to provide our Stanford community of faculty, staff, and students with our perspective on these issues. Scientific integrity and data reproducibility are paramount to what we do.  Nevertheless, errors do occur in science — and when they do, there are several options for making corrections, depending on the severity of the error. Questioning a researcher’s scientific integrity is a very serious allegation that should not be confounded with the detection of errors in a few papers, particularly against a backdrop of work that has been widely replicated by others. Indeed, the scientific process is inherently error-correcting as researchers test the validity of published work and construct robust fields based on foundational discoveries.

As faculty members and principal investigators in contemporary biological laboratories, we work closely with our graduate students and postdoctoral trainees to ensure the accuracy of our experimental work. However, advancing scientific frontiers increasingly requires larger teams of scientists who bring distinct sets of expertise to a study. In science, as in all realms of life, mistakes are inevitable. We strive to build a culture that aims not to punish mistakes made by trainees or one another, but instead encourages criticism and provides authors the opportunity to correct errors. Our scientific contributions will ultimately be tested by colleagues who examine our discoveries and extend them into new domains.

The Stanford Daily has published a series of articles in recent weeks raising concerns about several papers related to President Tessier-Lavigne that contain possibly digitally altered or partially duplicated figures. Among these papers, President Tessier-Lavigne was listed as the corresponding author (also known as the senior author) on three (papers published in 1999 and 2001). We believe that a formal review is appropriate for these three papers. President Tessier-Lavigne has stated (and each journal has confirmed) that after problems with the figures were spotted many years ago, he contacted the journals’ editors to resolve these issues, but that the journals failed to publish the corrections or take further action. In addition, new concerns have been raised with two of the papers. We feel that it is appropriate to investigate the questioned images and communications with the editors of the journals. We hope that the Board of Trustees and experts in the field will be able to resolve the questions about these papers and identify an appropriate course of action to address any errors.

Regarding the other papers, the figures in question were generated in the labs of the senior authors and not in President Tessier-Lavigne’s laboratory. Six of the corresponding authors stated on PubPeer that the data in question were from their own laboratories and have taken responsibility for any errors. The authors of five of the papers have already offered explanations for these errors. In one, alterations to figures were made by the publisher (who changed the font of the panel labels) and not by any of the authors.

As scientists, our greatest fear is that we might publish a paper that contains errors. That said, in the case of collaborations between multiple laboratories, and especially for international collaborations, it is not always possible for collaborators to see all the primary data, which might include X-ray films of biochemical gels showing proteins or nucleic acids of different sizes and abundance, sections of tissue visualized and photographed under a microscope, or analyses of the physiological responses or behavior of living cells or animals. In our opinion, it is unfair to question a scientist’s integrity based on images produced from a collaborator’s laboratory. Holding every author to an identical standard of responsibility would require a level of scrutiny of primary data that could stifle scientific collaboration and productivity.

In the case of President Tessier-Lavigne, core discoveries made by his laboratory have not only stood the test of time after validation by laboratories around the globe, but have also served as a foundation for the field of axon guidance. President Tessier-Lavigne’s discovery of families of axon guidance molecules and their receptors has revolutionized our understanding of how the brain is wired. These accomplishments do not guarantee that every paper he has authored is free of errors, but collectively they demonstrate a high level of scientific rigor and reproducibility. We hope that the investigation of the three articles under question will be balanced, fair, and informed by an understanding of how scientific collaborations are conducted. We also hope that members of our community will not rush to judgment until the review is completed.

Sincerely yours (in alphabetical order),

Aaron D. Gitler (Professor of Genetics)

Liqun Luo (Professor of Biology and Member, National Academy of Sciences)

Robert Malenka (Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Member, National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine)

Susan K. McConnell (Professor of Biology and Member, National Academy of Sciences)

William T. Newsome (Professor of Neurobiology and Member, National Academy of Sciences)

Carla J. Shatz (Professor of Biology and Neurobiology and Member, National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine)

Kang Shen (Professor of Biology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator)

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Do sheep dream of electric androids? https://stanforddaily.com/2022/04/29/do-sheep-dream-of-electric-androids/ https://stanforddaily.com/2022/04/29/do-sheep-dream-of-electric-androids/#respond Sat, 30 Apr 2022 05:34:19 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1199243 We’re constantly told by University administration that we are here for a reason. We were given this education for a reason: to create daring and moving art; to bring communities together; to contribute fresh ideas to a shrinking field of study. It is our choice whether to deliver on that reason. 

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“What’s your major?” 

This is the question that every Stanford student is asked as often as what their own name is. Over the past 10 years, the most likely answer has become Computer Science (CS), or one of its close relatives such as Symbolic Systems (SymSys) or Mathematical and Computational Science (MCS). These three majors made up over a quarter of all undergraduate degrees conferred in 2019-2020 and are still drawing students year on year.

Despite the university’s apparent emphasis on a liberal arts education, students and faculty across all academic disciplines feel that Stanford is a tech school. This is unsurprising: Stanford alumni and faculty have built many of Silicon Valley’s giants, and this symbiotic relationship with the tech industry forms the basis for Stanford’s prestige. 

Many students come to Stanford precisely for its famed entrepreneurial culture, groundbreaking CS research, and direct route to Silicon Valley; these students very well may find their co-founders here, conduct research with a professor pioneering a field of artificial intelligence and walk out of Stanford with a slew of Big Tech job offers (Stanford is the 2nd largest feeder into Silicon Valley jobs, after UC Berkeley). 

But there are other, less desirable phenomena happening here: the metamorphoses of humanities and arts majors into computer science majors, and the industrial pipeline that shuttles CS majors directly into Big Tech. 

The Big Switch

Sherry Xie ’25 came to Stanford intending to major in History. She has since switched to CS.

“What really changed me was taking Math 51 and CS 106A first quarter,” Xie said.  Unlike the intimidating philosophical discussions in SLE — the residential freshman humanities intensive that Xie also took — “the CS intro classes really make you feel like you can do them. And that’s the spell which means I keep going with it.” 

The messaging of introductory CS courses strongly encourages students to continue with CS regardless of their final grade. Lecturers frequently emphasize the real-world applications of every skill taught, as well as a clear path forward with the major. The 106 series in particular offers extensive student support through the section leading program and additional LaIR office hours, creating an inclusive and exciting learning environment. 

Professor Mehran Sahami, the Associate Chair for Education in the CS department, attributes the rate of major-switching in part to the fact that many students don’t have the opportunity to learn computer science before they get to college – these students may be wary of declaring their interest before coming to Stanford.

The ability to quickly see results is also a motivator for pursuing CS, according to Nahum Maru ’25, also a CS major. “After just 106A or 106B, you’re able to create something significant, and you see how much people around you can do just five miles down the road,” he said.

Some of Maru’s friends — also freshmen — are in seed-funding rounds for their blockchain startup, and others are making significant contributions at burgeoning companies. “So I think there’s definitely a culture where the most successful people [at Stanford] now seem to be CS majors,” he said. 

But as a result of this support and encouragement to pursue CS, Sahami said the Big Switch has created “capacity challenges for faculty” — nevertheless, he reiterated the department’s commitment to not institute a cap on the number of CS majors. 

The CS student to teaching faculty ratio which was nearly 20:1 as of 2019, almost five times the University-wide student-faculty ratio – means that CS students have far less direct contact with faculty and tend to not have an intimate classroom experience. Instead of getting to know your peers or their ideas through discussion, you spend most of your time listening to lectures and completing p-sets, often on your own. 

What does this mean for other majors? 

“The most encouragement I received at the beginning was to do CS 106A and Math 51,” Xie said. “I don’t think I see that big of a push toward humanities intro classes.” She noted that overflowing waitlists for introductory humanities courses, in contrast to capless intro STEM classes, discouraged interested students from pursuing that discipline.

Some underclassmen also recount being advised by upperclassmen to just “get through” PoliSci 1 in order to access higher-level classes. One prospective International Relations (IR) major felt that the Introduction to International Relations (PoliSci 101) mostly involved learning specific jargon and theories from the textbook without much understanding of their context or real-world applications. This experience discouraged him from taking further IR classes, not wanting to “risk” the 5-unit commitment and miss out on taking classes that seem more applicable. 

To counteract the pull of the CS department, other departments could benefit from making their introductory classes more welcoming, accessible and exciting. Sahami pointed out that the CS department, particularly in the 106 series, expends great resources considering how to teach material in the most useful and engaging way possible. “Our courses are constantly under revision, and our pedagogy is always being re-examined,” he said. 

Do sheep dream of electric androids?
Source: http://txti.es/stanford-grades-2020/images (JOYCE CHEN/The Stanford Daily)

Introductory classes across all departments might be enhanced by increasing the network of TAs to support more students, or employing more faculty in that specific domain. If lecturers for introductory courses are especially charismatic and passionate about teaching, students might be more encouraged to take further classes. Finally, there should be a clearer sense of what classes suit what level of experience. For instance, there is no explicit introductory class for History or English. Another student majoring in IR said that she was frustrated that she hadn’t felt challenged by any of her classes yet, so she is taking CS 106A this quarter. If she had been told to take a specific higher-level course to begin with —  as CS majors are told to skip to 106B or 107 and beyond depending on their experience — she may have found academic fulfillment outside of the CS department.

An Interdisciplinary Education 

These concerns over the growing imbalance in undergraduate majors should not be answered by any cap on the number of CS majors. Instead, we should focus on encouraging students of all backgrounds to be more interdisciplinary. 

“I don’t think anyone, including the Computer Science department, wants to see Stanford become the Stanford Institute of Technology,” Sahami told me. 

Andrew Benson is a CS Master’s student who teaches two classes (CS 107A and CS 9) while also being a full-time senior software engineer at Google. His view is that we should focus CS education towards non-CS majors. “It’s more beneficial for society for people of other disciplines to have the tools of CS, to help them do better in their disciplines,” he said. “Because CS is preparation for CS. But other disciplines will make society better.”

In an effort to help CS majors expand their worldview beyond the tech bubble, Sahami co-founded CS 182: Ethics, Public Policy, and Technological Change with Rob Reich and Jeremy Weinstein, both of whom teach in the Political Science department. 

He explained that the university, although theoretically supportive of multidisciplinary work, still needs to recognise the greater effort faculty across departments must put in to effectively teach together. Many departments only offer faculty partial credit for co-taught classes. 

The CS 182 professors managed to negotiate more appropriate credit from the University. “If those kinds of things were more actively encouraged across the university, we might see more collaboration along those lines,” Sahami said. 

In 2018, Marc Tessier-Levigne announced three presidential initiatives. The first, recognising Stanford’s outsized responsibility in shaping the technology of tomorrow, is named Ethics, Society & Technology. In response, the CS department has in recent years placed growing emphasis on integrating an ethical education into its courses. 

However, student reception has not always matched the faculty’s well-intentioned efforts. Ethics lectures are emptier than programming content ones, and homework questions are often seen as too undirected, leading to the perception that ethics is simply an accessory to the core of the class. One CS major who did not want to be named said that “[ethics] is an important feature, I guess, but not what I enjoy.”

A Pipeline into Big Tech?

The second presidential initiative is for Purposeful Engagement with Our Region, Nation & World. What do we consider purposeful engagement?

pie chart showing the proportion of Stanford alumni (classes 2010 through 2014) working in various industries
Source: Stanford Alumni Association (JOYCE CHEN/The Stanford Daily)
pie chart showing the proportion of Stanford alumni working in the same industries in 2016/17, noting a significant decrease in non-profit/public sector work and a significant increase in finance, consulting, investing, and VC work
Source: BEAM (JOYCE CHEN/The Stanford Daily)

In 2019, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and several other major newspapers covered Stanford students’ #NoTechForICE protests, which criticized Palantir for providing technology to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. According to the NYT, a campus activist group called “Students for the Liberation of All People” hung a banner reading “Our software is so powerful it separates families” at Palantir’s offices. 

I asked 15 freshmen majoring in CS whether they were aware of this protest, or the activist group. None of them had heard of either. The sentiment of these protests certainly lingers on campus, but the movement seems to have lost momentum among newer students, especially considering how the pandemic fractured outgoing classes from incoming ones. 

And it’s all too easy to ignore that cognitive dissonance: in the competitive spirit that got many of us here in the first place, students compare salaries and name-recognition, prestige and exit options – in Sahami’s words,  “trying to optimize their careers.” We’re already immersed in the landscape of lucrative tech jobs by geographic proximity alone. Then factor in information and recruiting sessions, career fairs, vast internship programs, conversations and endless LinkedIn stalking. All of which help make Big Tech “the default,” according to Nadin Tamer, a junior majoring in CS and minoring in Education, who is co-president of Code the Change and interned at Facebook last summer.“You wouldn’t know about these non-profit jobs unless you actually went looking for them,” she said. “Whereas you do get a lot of exposure to Big Tech stuff, just by being here and listening to people’s conversations.”

So what about ethics? In 2022, you’d have to be woefully under-informed to believe that Big Tech companies are forces for pure good in the world. But there remains a contentious debate over whether it is better to effect change from within or outside of those companies. 

Some members of the Stanford community believe it’s possible to generate ethical change from within a company, and some say that individuals are essentially neutral, as their work cannot significantly contribute to nor change the operations of a massive corporation like Meta. 

Benson argued that change is possible when many potential employees coordinate. “Collectively, you can say ‘okay, let’s try to encourage software engineers on the whole to not work for certain companies’ if we think that will help them change their practices. Or we can encourage students to form new companies that will be more talented and through competition try to change their policies, ” he said. On the other hand, an individual would likely have to “rise the ranks in leadership to be privy to decisions being made at a high level and influence them.” 

Many entering Big Tech say that they only plan to work there for a few years, then leave to found a startup, do non-profit work, or pursue their real passion. Some do. Some also grow accustomed to the lifestyle associated with that job and forget what they originally had planned for themselves – much as many students entering Stanford forget the passions and ambitions they had as fresh-faced first-years. 

It is, no doubt, an immense privilege to be able to reject a six-figure job. “Working in industry, especially the software industry, provides you with the opportunity to live very comfortably because the pay is so good, and there are many benefits in terms of quality of life,” Benson said. But it would be dishonest to characterize our career options as simply Big Tech or non-profit public service work, with nothing that is more value-aligned in between. 

Maru described how, as a CS student from a low-income background, he was initially “enamored” by the starting salaries at the Big Five companies, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft. “I was trying to optimize prestige to eventually get more money to help my family,” he said.  However, his viewpoint began to change after seeing how passionate some friends were in pursuing their own projects beyond classes. “If I’m going to go into industry, I’d very much want to work on problems I think are intellectually interesting,” he said. “I also have to think, are they going to use what I’m doing ethically?”

One student may be the main breadwinner for their family; another may need to pay off bills and loans; some may simply, and reasonably, want the financial security and quality of life. Working for Big Tech, as one interviewee put it, is like a “rubber stamp on your resume”; much like the stamp of attending Stanford University, it automatically deems you smart, successful and worthy of further opportunities. The extra credibility conferred by working at Big Tech is no small thing. But are we purely seeking to leverage our education to build clout for our professional lives?

A University Education

We don’t owe it to Stanford to do everything we said we would do on campus. But don’t we owe it to our past selves to not abandon those causes we so strongly advocated for, those passions that we spent so much of our lives cultivating? 

We’re constantly told by University administration that we are here for a reason. We were given this education for a reason: to create daring and moving art; to bring communities together; to contribute fresh ideas to a shrinking field of study. It is our choice whether to deliver on that reason. 

For recipients of a name-brand “elite” education, getting a job in finance, consulting, or Big Tech is a comfortable route. The actual process of completing the major, writing applications, and undergoing endless rounds of interviews may be painstaking, but you never have to make active decisions: you simply follow the four-year-plan, the corporate flowchart. 

Being at Stanford makes it extremely easy for us to default to the safety of the pipeline, but being at Stanford also means we are in the rare position to not do that and still live comfortably. Nobody I talked to for this article or in casual conversation around Stanford cited excitement — let alone doing good in the world —as a reason to work for Big Tech. 

How can Stanford balance their commitment to enable students to have agency in their careers with their responsibility to shape the “leaders of tomorrow”? 

If Stanford wishes to truly protect a culture of creative and academic freedom, the University must make a greater effort to separate its undergraduate education from the influences of Silicon Valley. Our intellectual freedom to stroll or sprint down different academic avenues should be equal – if so many students who were previously unexposed to CS discover a passion for it, shouldn’t other students who gain similar access to film studies or femgen at Stanford be encouraged to fall in love with that discipline and pursue it through Stanford and beyond?

We must also make an individual effort to change the cultural narrative around these fields of study. One student I talked to in the course of this article told me he was considering several majors: “double E, math, physics, they’re all awesome. But you know, for you they’re probably the same majors.” I’m a prospective MCS major, but in my capacity as a reporter, he assumed that I wouldn’t even understand distinctions between STEM disciplines. There is a common perception among some techies that humanities, social sciences and arts majors are easier and less intellectually rigorous. 

Stanford has several possible strategies they could pursue if they want to facilitate a more open-minded and interdisciplinary academic culture, particularly within the world of CS. Classes such as CS 182W, which is dedicated to exploring the ethical and political implications of CS innovations, could be bumped up in the order of required classes — say around when students are taking CS 107, the majority of whom plan to study a CS-related major or minor. 

This would help students engage deeply and early on with the ways that technologies they create may affect the world, and have that in mind as they continue developing their technical skills. Currently, such classes, including exploratory WAYS requirements, are notoriously backloaded to senior year where students scramble to fulfill them all in order to graduate. A more consistent integration of this liberal arts education would expose students to new fields of study while they still have ample time to explore them further.  

Stanford could even join the ranks of some of its peer institutions in actively encouraging its students to reject the pipeline – and I mean at the highest level of messaging, as when Harvard’s President Faust urged graduating students to eschew the “all but irresistible recruiting juggernaut” in 2008. This may be biting the hand that feeds you, but perhaps we could all benefit from a bolder institutional stance. 


What I’m advocating for is intentionality and self-awareness. We are students at Stanford. I’m guessing that most of us chose to come here partly due to the weight that name carries: the prestige, power, and wealth of opportunity associated with our education. Despite pressures from parents and peers, we shouldn’t simply chase – or worse, fall into – the next most “prestigious” thing, believing that everyone around us is doing the same. We have more agency than we think, and our choices become our friends’ choices, our community’s choices. Campus culture is ultimately composed of the sum of our individual decisions. 

And we can take a step back to realize that being here has already given us an enormous amount of security. As people with this privilege, we should never sleepwalk through our careers; if you choose to “sell out”— as many students refer to working for Big Tech, finance, or consulting — it should be with the same intentionality and consideration as those who choose a non-traditional route. Life is long, and 2 to 3 years at a Big Tech company certainly wouldn’t define our entire careers — but the choice itself is a signal to others that our personal prestige is more important than our values.

This is not about rejecting CS or Big Tech. It’s about approaching our precious last years of formal education with academic curiosity and intentionality, and remembering that our lives are our own. We own our academic and industrial labor. We own our beliefs and dreams, and have the power to influence the beliefs and dreams of those around us. Let’s act accordingly.

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Letter from the editors: Surveying The Daily’s newest class of recruits https://stanforddaily.com/2021/11/11/letter-from-the-editors-surveying-the-dailys-newest-class-of-recruits/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/11/11/letter-from-the-editors-surveying-the-dailys-newest-class-of-recruits/#respond Fri, 12 Nov 2021 06:22:37 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1187524 We hope these data, when combined with the results of the end-of-volume demographic survey we plan to conduct in January, will allow us to track both recruitment and retention efforts.

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This fall, The Daily’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) team surveyed The Daily’s fall recruitment class to better understand the demographics of who joins our organization. We hope these data, when combined with the results of the end-of-volume demographic survey we plan to conduct in January, will allow us to track both recruitment and retention efforts.

As part of our commitment to transparency, we are sharing the results of this survey (and you can find the results from our past two end-of-volume demographic surveys here). Of the 462 students who applied to join The Daily this fall, 109 filled out the survey. Though the data are not fully representative of our recruitment class, they still offer important insight into diversity, equity and inclusion at The Daily.

Our goal in recruitment was for the ​​demographics of our fall recruitment class to either meet or exceed Stanford’s regarding the representation of staffers from underrepresented backgrounds, which we generally achieved.

The majority of respondents identifed as cisgender women, with this category making up 53.2% of all survey participants. 42.2% of staffers who filled out the survey identified as cisgender males, while transgender and nonbinary individuals made up 1% and 3% of participants, respectively. 

A majority of participants also identified as straight and non-disabled. 12.8% of participants identified as international students, and 53% of students are receiving some form of need-based financial aid from Stanford. While data from the 2020-21 school year are not yet available, in the 2019-20 school year, 47% of all undergraduates received need-based aid from the University, according to the University’s Financial Aid website.

In terms of the racial and ethnic breakdown of Daily staffers, The Daily’s demographics are somewhat in alignment with data collected by Stanford’s IDEAL (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in a Learning Environment) initiative. Black and Latinx recruits who filled out the survey make up 12% and 24% of all participants, respectively, in comparison with 7% and 17% of Stanford students. 

Finally, prior to coming to Stanford, 58% of participants had no journalism experience.

While not a perfect measure of equity and diversity within our organization, these results will inform our work moving forward as we strive to foster an inclusive and diverse environment at The Daily. However, recruitment is only half the battle. Right now, staffers and the DEI team are working to ensure that we retain students from underrepresented backgrounds at similar rates.

To work toward this goal, this summer, The Daily held our inaugural Summer Journalism Institute (SJI), a two-week internship program for incoming frosh from backgrounds underrepresented in journalism. We have also been working on designing and implementing a mentorship program for underrepresented staffers and have launched affinity groups for staffers who share particular identities. This year, the DEI team will work towards more transparency when making important decisions about DEI and will strive to increase accessibility at The Daily for people of all different backgrounds and identities. 

We hope that these measures will help us bolster diversity, equity and inclusion at The Daily and beyond so that our readership can see themselves represented and consume a diverse range of content. 

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From the community | “The Biggest Concern” is Khattar on campus https://stanforddaily.com/2021/10/30/from-the-community-the-biggest-concern-is-khattar-on-campus/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/10/30/from-the-community-the-biggest-concern-is-khattar-on-campus/#respond Sun, 31 Oct 2021 00:15:36 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1186920 "To have Mr. Khattar speak under the banner of this University now is a part of a trend of members of India’s ruling party attempting to regain some of their lost international credibility. We must not let that happen," writes Abeer Dahiya.

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This event has already taken place. This article was published on October 30, 2021.

This article contains comments made by a politician that reference and/or endorse sexual assault, violence and ethnic cleansing, which may be disturbing for some readers.

Earlier this week, the Stanford India Policy and Economics Club (SIPEC), a VSO founded last academic year, announced a Zoom event with Manohar Lal Khattar, the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Chief Minister (the Indian equivalent of a US governor) of the northern state of Haryana. The event, titled “Haryana: Powering India’s Growth Story’” is set to take place this weekend, in collaboration with groups at Princeton and Berkeley.

While Khattar is not a well-known figure internationally, domestically, his administration is widely seen as inept, and he himself has been associated with inflammatory rhetoric against women and minorities.

Let’s start with economics, since the event aims to promote the purported miracle that is Khattar’s Haryana. In fact, his administration has presided over some of the worst economic depressions in the history of the state. Before his election in 2014, Haryana was hailed as a bright spot in India’s flagging economy. Under Khattar’s leadership, Haryana has attained the unenviable distinction of the highest unemployment rate in the country, with an estimated 35.7% of people unemployed as of August as per the CMIE, an independent think-tank. 

But Khattar has disputed those numbers, citing government figures that are a fraction of that percentage. Under the Modi regime, India’s national economic statistics have come under fire by independent observers and experts for being prone to distortion or outright fabrication. To have Khattar speak on economic growth is akin to having Lil Nas X lecture us on defense policy.

In any case, rising unemployment figures are not Khattar’s only concern. Haryana is a traditionally agricultural state, making it one of the epicenters of the farmers’ protest movement in response to the deregulation of public markets for crops. Those laws were similarly passed by the far-right Hindu majoritarian Modi regime without much debate in Parliament. Among other things, the new farm laws would strip the right to legal recourse from affected farmers suing against public agents or private corporations. 

The laws have drawn fierce and sustained opposition from India’s millions of small farmers (65% are ‘marginal farmers’ that own less than one acre, and the average holding is around 3 acres) who would be most heavily affected by the entry of large corporates that could exercise control over markets that their livelihoods depend on. Protesters have received support from international rights organizations, 87 farmers’ unions in the United States and even Rihanna, while they have been vilified by India’s media as “traitors” and “terrorist sympathisers”. 

Khattar’s government has arrested and imprisoned thousands, doused peaceful protestors with freezing water cannons, and led police brutality on an unprecedented scale, resulting in dozens killed. On Oct. 3, he exhorted his supporters to “treat” protesting farmers with violence. His words have had an impact: on Thursday, three women were killed by a hit-and-run at a protest site. A minister in his Cabinet has publicly stated that farmers killed while protesting would have “died anyway”.

Furthermore, Khattar has publicly stated that men from his state should “bring back Kashmiri women” in a despicable reference to the stripping of Indian-administered Kashmir’s constitutional autonomy clause. His comments echo the rising rhetoric of ethnic cleansing that is popular among his brand of Hindu nationalist politicians, many of which hold high office in India today.

Haryana has one of the worst gender ratios of any subdivision in the world, with just 911 female births per 1000 male births. In recent years, women’s safety has deteriorated in the state, with four rapes being reported daily and an increase of 68.9% in cases involving minors as per the National Crime Records Bureau. Confronted with this issue, Khattar has blamed victims for wearing revealing attire, and has claimed that the “biggest concern” is not the abject failure of police and legal authorities in his state to protect women, but that many cases are false reports, comments that are antithetical to the oath that defines his office, and bring shame to his state- my state.

To me, Haryana stands as an achievement of the Indian experiment in liberal democracy- a multilingual society carved out of refugees from a bloody Partition (of which Khattar traces his ancestry to) and native citizenry, as well as a champion of industrial agriculture and market liberalization. Despite a deeply patriarchal society, Haryana has produced remarkable female talent, including astronaut Kalpana Chawla, foreign affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and a plurality of Indian female Olympic medalists. Khattar is an anathema to that narrative of progress.

To have Khattar speak under the banner of this University now is a part of a trend of members of India’s ruling party attempting to regain some of their lost international credibility. We must not let that happen. A past event organized by SIPEC involving Union Cabinet Minister Piyush Goyal did not permit unmoderated questions, and neither will the one featuring Khattar. If a representative of a foreign government- let alone one that is single-handedly associated with the collapse of democratic institutions in India- comes to Stanford, they must expect and be prepared to meet the dissent they have tried so egregiously to suppress at home. Stanford cannot, and will not, become a bully pulpit for would-be authoritarians.

Twenty-one months ago, in January 2020, students at this University and hundreds of other institutions around the world demonstrated in solidarity with thousands of students in India against the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) by the Modi regime. Taken together, both would have effectively introduced a religious test for citizenship in a constitutionally secular democracy, under the guise of opening citizenship to refugees fleeing religious persecution. Nearly two years after domestic and international outcry over the laws, they are yet to be completely rolled out in many parts of the country, effectively abandoned by the ruling BJP as a policy priority. It is worth remembering that Khattar has spent his political career as part of that same machine.

Our experience as protestors then taught us a significant lesson: that the Modi government was ultimately sensitive to foreign criticism, criticism that it is unable to monitor or effectively control. Unlike in India, where journalists and academics are regularly arrested on flimsy charges and detained for years without trial, we at Stanford enjoy the enormous luxury of the First Amendment, as well as our University’s name: both powerful weapons in inspiring progressive change around the world. We carry with that great power a great responsibility to the societies we inhabit.

The Fundamental Standard that governs student behaviour at this University since 1896 states that students at Stanford are “expected to show both within and without the University such respect for order, morality, personal honor and the rights of others as is demanded of good citizens.”  I have yet to understand how an organization of Stanford students such as SIPEC can reconcile those foundational values with the invitation of a figure as repugnant as Khattar to address our campus community.

As a Haryanvi, I am enraged that the misamanager-in-chief of my state is given ill-deserved validation. As an Indian, I am ashamed that voices like those of Prof. Anand Teltumbde or Sudha Bharadwaj, which have spent their careers fighting for democracy and justice are silenced while those entirely unworthy of a platform are given several. And as a Stanford student, I am devastated that my University could be co-opted by the very movement I’ve dedicated myself to fighting in its unrelenting drive to rob my homeland of its democratic institutions.

The irony is stark: Stanford is set to celebrate its first-ever Democracy Day on Tuesday, two days after it hosts a denier of it to millions.

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From the Community | Anti-racism requires facing our privilege, not litigating it https://stanforddaily.com/2021/06/28/from-the-community-anti-racism-requires-facing-our-privilege-not-litigating-it/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/06/28/from-the-community-anti-racism-requires-facing-our-privilege-not-litigating-it/#respond Mon, 28 Jun 2021 22:50:39 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1183747 Jason Solomon of the Law School critiques the discrimination complaint filed by two Jewish CAPS counselors.

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A few months ago, two Jewish counselors in Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) Ronald Albucher and Sheila Levin — filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, arguing that the anti-racism training in CAPS had created a hostile environment for them as Jews. As a Jew who works elsewhere at Stanford, I wish they hadn’t filed this complaint — and hope that others on campus will join me in asking them to withdraw it.

According to their complaint, CAPS undertook a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiative similar to many underways at workplaces around the country, including universities. As part of this effort, they had groups of white people and people of color talk separately, which is common and recommended by many experts.

Levin complains that she was pressured to join the white group despite not identifying as white. I understand and share her perspective to a certain extent. Though my skin is white, I’ve never identified as such.

In my mind, I’m still an outsider like my grandparents, immigrant kids who grew up in Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. But society sees me differently.

I first learned this when I was 19. Home from college, I went to protest then-Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, who was speaking to a small crowd in my NJ hometown. I started yelling at him, asking why he thought Haitian refugees on boats should be barred from our shores and was able to get fairly close.

A few well-dressed men with earpieces asked me to step away from the candidate. Thinking they were private security, I did not comply. Only when they flashed their badges and ushered me into the back of a van did I realize they were Secret Service.

They took me to the local police station, where they started the booking process and took my mug shot. Then my dad showed up. He explained that I was a “bright young man” going to a fancy college, and they would not want to ruin my future. They released me to my dad with no arrest, no record. They saw me as white and therefore both safe and worth saving.

Two years earlier and just twenty miles away, several other bright young men around my age had been taken to the police station after a jogger was raped in Central Park. Unlike me, they had done nothing to attract law enforcement attention, but at a time when the media was filled with stories of young Black men committing crimes, their parents were not allowed to take them home. Their lives were damaged forever.

Several of the key events described in Albucher and Levin’s complaint take place in May 2020. But they leave out an important event from that time: on May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered. And the nation accelerated a long-overdue reckoning with the ongoing damage that racism is doing to our society.

Albucher and Levin complain that two incidents of anti-Semitism at Stanford were ignored by the DEI committee. To be sure, the rise of anti-Semitism in the U.S., including on college campuses, is real and disturbing. But it is different in kind than the racism that people of color have to navigate every day.

It is frankly embarrassing for Albucher and Levin to double down on their complaints — even after George Floyd’s death — by saying they don’t feel “safe” having these discussions with their colleagues. Talk to a Black Stanford parent or student about their safety concerns, and then think again about the use of that word to describe your own experience. My son just started driving, but I don’t have to worry whether if pulled over, he will make it out alive. Jewish students at Stanford don’t have to worry about being targeted by campus police.

To be sure, the adoption of Palestinian rights as a cause by people and groups dedicated to combatting anti-Black racism in the U.S. can make things uncomfortable for Jews on campus. It’s wrong to hold individual American Jews responsible for policies of the Israeli government or think of Jews as racist for supporting the idea of a Jewish state. But nor can we simply equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, or point to uncomfortable questions about how Zionism has played out in Israel as reason for immunity from facing our white privilege in the U.S.

As an elite educational institution, Stanford is soaked in white privilege and needs to work to attract people of color as faculty, students and staff. But now Albucher and Levin have invited a national organization — through their lawyers — to turn Stanford into a cause célèbre for resistance to anti-racism training. Not exactly a great signal to send to people of color who might be considering making Stanford their home.

I don’t know if Albucher and Levin understand the irony of filing this complaint about a training that began with Robin DiAngelo’s book “White Fragility.” But their response is textbook. As DiAngelo explains, one of the unspoken “rules of engagement” she has learned in discussing racism with white people is this: “Highlighting my racial privilege invalidates the form of oppression that I experience…We will then need to turn our attention to how you oppressed me.”

Perhaps the CAPS DEI program could have been run or framed in a way that was more appealing to people of all backgrounds. But I suspect that most Jews will have a less fragile response to anti-racism training than Albucher and Levin did. After all, we’ve been oppressed for thousands of years, but today — in 21st century America, in the Bay Area — we’re doing OK. We can handle it. And I imagine many Jews at Stanford are willing to face our privilege and try to make things better.

Jason Solomon is the executive director of the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession and a lecturer at Stanford Law School. The views he expresses here are his own.

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From the Community | “Unworthy of Stanford”: Malicious and Organized Harassment https://stanforddaily.com/2021/06/08/from-the-community-unworthy-of-stanford-malicious-and-organized-harassment/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/06/08/from-the-community-unworthy-of-stanford-malicious-and-organized-harassment/#respond Tue, 08 Jun 2021 22:29:18 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1183481 Malicious, purposefully hurtful use of social media, by anyone or any organization, should be condemned, and fall under some disciplinary process.

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More than a quarter of a century ago, on February 7, 1992, then-President of Stanford University Donald Kennedy wrote an op-ed in the Stanford Daily addressing a set of disturbing incidents on campus:

“During recent weeks, students and organizations that claim to be ‘conservative’ have issued a series of challenges to the Stanford community … Our respect for freedom of speech may stop us short of formal sanctions in this disturbing case. But it need not prevent us from naming the behavior for what it is: vile, vicious and unworthy of Stanford. Nor need it prevent us from discerning and deploring its purpose, which is to damage our community by sowing mistrust.”

One “challenge” referred to the actions of Keith Rabois, then a student at Stanford Law School, who wanted to challenge Stanford’s commitment to free speech. His method was to inflict emotional harm, shouting “Die, die you faggot, I hope you all get AIDS and die!” outside the faculty member’s apartment.

Many things have changed since 1992; some have not. We are now “integrated” into the Internet, social media and an environment that can make malice viral nearly instantly. One does not just stand outside a residence and scream insults — one films it and uploads it to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter.  And then feeds that to large scale media outlets to blast it out even further. Or, better yet, individuals hide behind the anonymity of a student organization, which issues hateful messages through its Facebook account and feeds it to right-wing channels.

In the face of this, our administrators seem paralyzed. Is it from lack of skill or lack of will?

We have heard that conservative faculty and students feel out-numbered and attacked for their views, and that they also need protection. Certainly, gratuitous attacks on people solely on the basis of a political point of view is unacceptable. But the “both sides” argument is based on the belief that the relatively small number of conservatives on campus are powerless against a majority that holds power, and that this majority wields its power in the same way and in the same spirit as do some “conservative” groups. However, neither of these beliefs is based on any empirical fact. 

Something is happening at Stanford that continues the toxic legacy of 1992 — in fact, that legacy has thrived. When a group of faculty brought it to the attention of the Stanford Faculty Senate that, among other things, at least two Hoover fellows wrote for the alt-right publication The Daily Caller, and used the Hoover landing page to advertise those articles, and pointed out that the fact the Hoover displays the banner of Stanford University at the top of its page means Stanford is giving its imprimatur to an alt-right media platform, no one cared. 

When we suggested a faculty committee be formed to look into the relationship between Stanford and the Hoover Institution, former Provost John Etchemendy, current Provost Persis Drell, and former Provost and current Director of the Hoover Institution Condoleezza Rice all argued against the notion that faculty could do that. Etchemendy instead proposed that the investigation could be undertaken by — Persis Drell and Condoleezza Rice.  That’s sheer power embodied.

When Stanford Colleges Republicans (SCR) doxxed Stanford alum Emily Wilder, and fed years-old tweets to the rightwing media, the smear was in turn fed to Senator Tom Cotton, who picked up the message and broadcasted it on his platform. Shortly after, Ms. Wilder’s employer, the Associated Press, fired her. The Stanford administration has been silent — it has refused to condemn the attack.  That is a decisive act not to the power of one’s office.

Now in this last, sad, episode, the Stanford Federalist Society initiated what can only be called a frivolous lawsuit — demanding that a 3rd year law student be investigated for circulating a satirical poster. The ridiculousness of the Federalist Society — staunch defenders of free speech and critics of “cancel culture” — moving to cancel someone for making fun of them has taken up a lot of media space, trending for several hours on Twitter, and the name of our great university has been shamefully tethered to it. 

As we learned from the Trump administration and others, frivolous lawsuits are meant to tie up energy and resources and to warn people not to do or say anything that might offend people with plentiful resources and networks. They are not meant to be won, they are meant to warn people not to use their free speech rights. And our administration has again remained silent, meaning there is absolutely no disincentive for this kind of behavior.

The fact that after intense media scrutiny Stanford dropped the investigation and let the student graduate on time should not be seen as a vindication of the system. Rather the reverse — what this episode and Emily Wilder’s and others show is that we have a broken system.

We see this administration protect the free speech rights of COVID mis-informer Scott Atlas, but when Atlas tried to “cancel” faculty who used their free speech rights to criticize him, Stanford did not defend their rights; we see SCR’s malicious attacks on an alum go without comment, and we see a law student’s graduation held up so that our legal counsel could muddle through a frivolous complaint. Who is in power, and who is benefiting, and who is really being harmed, in real ways?

Three years ago I spoke at an event at the Faculty Senate. A panel that included our current dean of H&S, Debra Satz, and our current Law School dean, Jenny Martinez, as well as School of Graduate Education professor Eamonn Callan gave excellent presentations on academic freedom and free speech. When I spoke, I commended them, but I also pointed out the documents they had us read were from the 1990s. I urged the Senate to realize that since that time, the field of play had changed. I passed out reports from the American Association of University Professors, which had already begun to track the kinds of online tactics I mentioned above. I have met with and written to our leadership many times about this.

These sorts of attacks are nothing new, and we have had more than ample time to create a way that malicious, purposefully hurtful use of social media, by anyone or any organization, should be condemned, and fall under some disciplinary process. Without it, as one student said when our subcommittee on campus climate met with President Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Drell, “I am reluctant to say or write anything — I do not want to be the next Emily Wilder.” How can any educational institution live with that?  The sad truth is that SCR and the Federalist Society and perhaps others in the making are playing Stanford like a fiddle. 

In the absence of any robust action from the administration, many students, staff, faculty, and alumni are planning to do the only other thing left open to us — develop a broad, visible and loud network of mutual support. Since the current Stanford administration cannot find it within its power to say anything as heartfelt and precise as the words Donald Kennedy said, we will say it ourselves — the actions we have seen from these organizations, who put their interest before the interest of the Stanford community, are “vile, vicious and unworthy of Stanford.”

— David Palumbo-Liu

Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor
Professor of Comparative Literature and, by courtesy, of English

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From the Community | No new chapters, no new housing (for now) https://stanforddaily.com/2021/06/06/from-the-community-no-new-chapters-no-new-housing-for-now/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/06/06/from-the-community-no-new-chapters-no-new-housing-for-now/#respond Sun, 06 Jun 2021 20:14:55 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1183449 Given the results of April’s Greek life survey, which found that about 60% of Stanford undergrads favor abolishing or unhousing historically white Greek organizations, now is not the time to reintroduce or rehouse suspended chapters on campus.

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On January 12, 2018, seven Stanford students were suspected of being drugged at a Sigma Chi fraternity house party by a non-Stanford student. Two of the victims were members of the men’s rowing team, while the other five were members of the Pi Beta Phi sorority. 

On the night of the party, one of the male rowers developed symptoms resembling alcohol poisoning and was taken to the hospital. However, his blood alcohol content level was much lower than typical transport levels, suggesting he was drugged. The other victims also reported being unable to remember what happened the night of the attack.

Both of the men (one of whom was a member of Sigma Chi) tested positive for benzodiazepine. Rohypnol, commonly known as “roofies,” is a type of benzodiazepine that functions as a minor tranquilizer and is often used as a date rape drug. One of the Pi Beta Phi victims also had Benzodiazepine in her system (the other sorority members chose not to be tested).

Sigma Chi had just been relieved of yet another university-issued probation at the time. That May, Sigma Chi’s International Fraternity’s Executive Committee — a board of directors that makes recommendations concerning chapter problems amongst other administrative tasks — suspended Stanford’s chapter for its history of mismanagement and lack of accountability stretching back multiple years before the drugging incident. In an official statement regarding the suspension, the Executive Committee cited “risk management concerns and accountability issues within the chapter” for its decision and barred all initiated members from engaging in any Sigma Chi activity until 2021. 

Now, three years later, Sigma Chi alums are vying for the fraternity’s reinstatement on campus. The former Sigma Chi residence located at 550 Lasuen Street is currently reserved for co-ed housing as part of ResX Neighborhood D this fall. However, the fraternity’s suspension expires on June 6, and former Sigma Chi members are already pushing for reinstatement.

Given the results of April’s Associated Students of Stanford University Greek Life Survey, which found that about 60% of Stanford undergrads favor abolishing or unhousing historically white Greek organizations, now is not the time to reintroduce or rehouse suspended chapters on campus.

Proponents of Sigma Chi’s reactivation cite the fraternity’s legacy of desegregation as what sets it apart from other Greek organizations on campus. However, the alumni pushing this “we’re not like other frats” narrative conveniently ignore Sigma Chi’s recent patterns of systemic abuse of power, intimidation and lack of respect for themselves or others. In 2017, for example, a Stanford administration official suggested taking down a potentially alienating and intimidating flag from the front of the frat house to help Sigma Chi improve its image while on probation. Instead, Sigma Chi did the opposite: purchasing an even larger version of the flag to fly outside of the house and framing the original to display inside. 

During its time on campus, Sigma Chi existed on the fringes of active status — so much so that it invited University officials over for dinner in an attempt to improve its image and up its chances of survival after the eventual lifting of one of its many probations. 

If Sigma Chi wants to leverage its history with the civil rights movement to warrant its reinstatement now, it can not gloss over its more recent troubled past — especially the events prompting its suspensions in the first place. In addition to the deployment of date rape drugs on men and women in 2018, Sigma Chi was put on social probation for serving alcohol to minors in 2015. 

As a freshman whose college experience has yet to be distorted by the power structures of Greek Life, I do not want to live on a campus where date rape drugs are a risk at parties. By reactivating the Sigma Chi chapter, the University invites this environment back to campus and increases the possibility of another attack. Stanford Inter-Sorority Council/Inter-Fraternity CounciI (ISC/IFC)—historically white Greek Life—is not exceptional. Sigma Chi is not exceptional.

We deserve to live on campus without the fear of being drugged at a party. We also deserve the opportunity to form close in-person friendships that won’t be torn apart by sororities and fraternities every spring during rush season. I want to experience what college is like without the looming influence of Greek organizations and build relationships based on common interests. Stanford can’t fully celebrate the diversity of its student body as long as ISC/IFC organizations are allowed to require payment for membership and administer a recruitment process that self-segregates students by class, race, size, appearance, sexuality, and gender identity. 

Reinstating chapters now confuses the University’s decision-making process on abolition or dehousing by implying that these organizations are welcome on campus. The Associated Students of Stanford University survey shows that this is not the case. 

In the midst of analyzing student feedback to determine what the future of ISC/IFC Greek Life at Stanford will be, it’s inappropriate to bring back deactivated chapters. Sigma Chi’s return to campus would put the potential benefits of a gendered and discriminatory social life above real threats to students’ physical safety. Now is not the time for reinstatement of the chapter on campus.

The Daily is committed to publishing a diversity of op-eds and letters to the editor. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Email letters to the editor to eic ‘at’ stanforddaily.com and op-ed submissions to opinions ‘at’ stanforddaily.com. 

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From the Community | Jews call ‘antisemitism’ while new atrocities unfold in our name https://stanforddaily.com/2021/06/02/from-the-community-jews-call-antisemitism-while-new-atrocities-unfold-in-our-name/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/06/02/from-the-community-jews-call-antisemitism-while-new-atrocities-unfold-in-our-name/#respond Thu, 03 Jun 2021 06:11:48 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1183195 It is not within our rights to condemn any means the Palestinians use to defend themselves and preserve their dignity.

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Referring to someone as a shanda fur die Goyim — literally, “a shame before the goyim [non-Jews],” is not to be taken lightly. Jews use the Yiddish phrase to describe other Jews that reflect poorly on the Jewish people, who reaffirm the most harmful stereotypes about us and give ammunition to those who would see us destroyed. It is not a phrase that I use or think about frequently, though it best describes what I have heard from some of my fellow Jews over the past two weeks regarding the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Most of us by now have seen the footage of the Israeli Defense Forces firing stun grenades and water cannons on Palestinian protestors at Al Aqsa, also known as the Temple Mount, one of the holiest and most significant sites in Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Or you may have seen images from two days later on Eid, the Muslim day of celebration upon breaking the Ramadan fast, of Israeli airstrikes leveling entire buildings and refugee camps in Gaza City. But do not mistake these details as evidence that the “conflict” in Israel/Palestine is part of some inscrutable, thousand-year-long religious war. Instead, the truth is much simpler: The timing and location of these attacks is meant to inflict maximum fear, pain and terror on the Palestinians. It is terrorism done in the name of securing stolen land. 

In 1917, during World War I, the British Empire issued the Balfour Declaration, voicing its support for the establishment of a sovereign state for the Jewish people in the then-Ottoman Empire. After the defeat of the Ottomans, the Levant was partitioned between the victorious French and British Empires, and the British Mandate of Palestine was created. Following the Holocaust and the Second World War, the Mandate was formally turned into the State of Israel. Jews had been making their way to Palestine since the late 19th century, where a significant number of us were already living relatively peacefully alongside the native Palestinians. But the issuance of the Balfour declaration and establishment of the State of Israel began the nationalist conflict and systematic dispossession of Palestinian land that continues to this day. Studying the history shows us a painful truth that we can no longer ignore: Israel’s founding, and continued existence, has necessitated crimes against humanity.

Palestinians have their own words for the atrocities done to them during this time, just as we do for those done to us only a few years earlier. The forced expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948 is known to them as the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe.” The Biblical Hebrew word for catastrophe, “Shoah,” is what we call the Holocaust. There are more disturbing similarities: The 1948 Lydda Death March, in which Israeli forces led 50,000 Arabs from their homes at gunpoint, many to their deaths, has uncanny echoes of the brutal treks our own ancestors suffered. In our own time, the story is much the same: #Kristallnacht was trending on Twitter recently, a reference not to the tragic evening in our own history, but the one going on in Israeli neighborhoods that very night, with Jewish mobs destroying Israeli Arab-owned storefronts.

But where did this idea come from that the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people, have an inherent right to their own sovereign nation on someone else’s land? Even if this was not the intention of the founders, Zionism has grown into European ethnonationalism for Jews. Zionism began in Europe in the 19th century as an ideology that could offer an alternative to the choice given to Jews at the time: Face persecution, or assimilate. Now there was an appealing third option: Leave, and return to the putative Biblical homeland of our people. But in proposing self-exile from European society as a solution to “the Jewish question,” Zionism bought into the same premise as the antisemites: that we were biologically racially distinct and were better off somewhere else. As Polish-Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell summarizes, “At the beginning of the century, the views of those who sought Jewish political independence and those who sought to purge their countries of the Jewish presence were often quite similar.”

Early Zionist literature itself is not always easily distinguishable from antisemitic propaganda, inveighing against the physical, mental and moral deficiencies of the effete European Jew. Writing in 1920, notable Russian Zionist A.D. Gordon put it in no uncertain terms: “We are parasites.” Zionists were particularly concerned with the racial “degeneracy” of Diaspora Jews, ascribing the most vicious tropes about us (e.g. grotesque appearance, cowardice) to our displacement. For this strain of Jewish thought — shlilat ha-golah, “the negation of the diaspora” — the only hope for Jews was to be reunited with their spiritual home in Israel, where they could be made whole. This alternative vision of the hale and hearty Jew in Palestine became known as “Muscular Judaism.” Jewish American cartoonist Eli Valley plays on this legacy in his cartoon series, Israel Man and Diaspora Boy.

We do not need to look hard to see that today, the state of Israel is still in league with the very antisemites from which it was theoretically meant to protect us, such as Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. As more and more young American Jews, and Americans in general, see the righteousness of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, American Zionism’s real base of support has become clearer: Evangelical Christians, whose only interest in Israel is to bring about the rapture in which all of us Jews will die anyway. It is for this reason that I find it particularly cynical, even shameful, to see other American Jews decry the “antisemitism” of even the mildest criticism of Zionist crimes. Hiding behind our own history of persecution to cover for the atrocities done in our name is in bad faith and bad taste, and it is bad for the Jews.

All of us in the United States are living through an extraordinary moment, one in which the old Israeli propaganda playbook just isn’t working anymore. Zionists know this, and they are left to their last tactic: victimhood. Energized by the Black Lives Matter movement and growing support for decolonial struggles everywhere, a critical mass of people is rallying to the Palestinian cause. Fewer and fewer people find themselves able to pretend that it is one particular right-wing politician or party, and not Israel itself, that is the driver of all this death and destruction. The Jewish people of America have a double responsibility to stand with the Palestinian people: as members of the ethnic group for whom this violence is theoretically committed, and as citizens of the country that plies this apartheid regime with billions in military aid. The Palestinian cause now must have a home and a future in American Jewry.

It is not within our rights to condemn any means the Palestinians use to defend themselves and preserve their dignity, just as we would not condemn our ancestors for doing the same. There is no shame in making this obvious connection between our own history of persecution and the persecutions we see around us today. The only shanda is for us to let it continue in our name.

Aaron Neiman is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department.

The Daily is committed to publishing a diversity of op-eds and letters to the editor. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Email letters to the editor to eic ‘at’ stanforddaily.com and op-ed submissions to opinions ‘at’ stanforddaily.com. 

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From the Community | Facing the facts: Abolish Stanford on SUDPS https://stanforddaily.com/2021/06/01/from-the-community-facing-the-facts-abolish-stanford-on-sudps/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/06/01/from-the-community-facing-the-facts-abolish-stanford-on-sudps/#respond Wed, 02 Jun 2021 05:35:19 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1183193 Abolish Stanford responds to former Provost John Etchemendy's May 20 letter to the editor.

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Recently, former Provost John Etchemendy sent a letter to the editor in which he made several false and misleading claims criticizing Abolish Stanford and defending the Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS). Throughout the letter, Etchemendy demonstrated an ignorance of both student demands and abolitionist principles, arguing for a misleading position of “community safety” that relies fundamentally on carceral solutions. 

The former Provost’s comments — which argue that we should “promulgate the standards and style of SUDPS nationwide” — are alarming in the context of SUDPS’s violent history. Etchemendy consistently positions SUDPS as an exception to the long history of police violence, but it was during his tenure as Provost that an SUDPS Deputy was involved in the murder of East Palo Alto resident Pedro Calderon at the base of Stanford foothills. No reparations were ever made to Calderon’s family, and Stanford — as Etchemendy’s own comments indicate — seldom acknowledges that the event occurred. 

Etchemendy’s letter is part of a larger pattern to which we’ve grown accustomed: Administrators pay lip service to ideas of “equality” and “justice” while actively refusing to take any concrete steps to realize these ideals. 

Last week, on the one-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd by the racist Minneapolis Police Department, students received an email from four Vice Provosts that “thank[ed] our community centers, student leaders and student organizations for continuing a legacy of activism focused on the most vulnerable,” citing the Black Lives Matter memorial Abolish Stanford helped construct on the Oval last June, and recognizing “those creating change after so much unconscionable loss.” Conveniently, their email omitted the fact that when the BLM memorial was actually up on the Oval, we were repeatedly informed that we had to take it down, or the administration would take it down for us.

Acknowledging the importance of scrutinizing University messaging and uplifting the truth, we at Abolish Stanford would like to take the opportunity to respond to some of the wildy deceptive claims advanced in Etchemendy’s May 20 letter to the editor. 

Etchemendy opens with the misleading assertion that a previous Daily article covering our Abolition May rally “does not recount any complaints” about SUDPS because the department “provides a blueprint of community policing.” His suggestion is that the Stanford community simply has no complaints about SUDPS. But as many, many, many op-eds in the Daily have already noted, this is categorically false. 

Despite Etchemendy’s assertions that SUDPS officers are “familiar” with the needs of the student community, interactions between Stanford cops and students have routinely proven otherwise. Stanford police are not waiting in the shadows on Santa Teresa to get to know the community better; they are racially profiling and terrorizing Black students where they live. And when Stanford allows its police to respond to a student mental health call armed with guns holding rubber bullets — which can cause fatal nerve damage despite their label as “non-lethal weapons” — they prove that they have ignored the demands of the student community, who have consistently called for non-punitive, non-carceral responses to mental health crises. Regardless of Etchemendy’s perception, SUDPS police do not know nor support the needs of the student community. 

Etchemendy’s misconception of “community policing” is not at all unique. Stanford is one of the over 95% of four-year colleges with a student population greater than 2,500 that has their own law enforcement agency; these schools justify the existence of their police forces with similar arguments. But, there are countless instances of racial profiling, brutality, sexual assault and murder by these supposedly exceptional police forces. Thus, when Etchemendy asserts that SUDPS officers are somehow more dedicated to ideas of community safety than the “swaggering big city cop,” he relies on an already-debunked myth of campus cop exceptionalism so as to disregard the violence that SUDPS has inflicted on countless communities on and off campus. 

For a professor whose research interests include logic, Etchemendy’s characterizations of our demands are startlingly illogical. From day one, Abolish has advocated not only for defunding SUDPS, but abolition everywhere. Etchemendy only manages to make one correct observation: “Stanford does not have to maintain its own police force.” 

As we revealed at our rally, of the 1,015 incidents SUDPS responded to in 2020, 89.7% were “nonviolent”, and 64% were simply closed with no action. Even in the 10.3% of incidents which were deemed “violent,” police were and continue to be incapable of preventing harm; they do nothing, or they escalate the situation. And yet, as Etchemendy indicates, it is an active administrative choice to funnel resources into this false form of “public safety.” 

We are not advocating, as Etchemendy suggests, for a “utopian” solution. Abolition takes work. We understand that it does not happen in a vacuum, and that liberation must extend across the peninsula and center the demands of those who have been most heavily victimized by police violence. 

Many students on campus already have no need for campus policing, an institution that serves mainly to protect the financial interests of the University and abuse and surveil communities of color. Public safety results not from million-dollar police budgets and capital projects, but by addressing the social roots of inequality and mental health, and by paying reparations to the surrounding communities that Stanford continues to gentrify, police and vilify. 

This is the work we at Abolish Stanford are committed to doing, together. We have no need for policing because the police do not keep us safe; we keep us safe. 

Abolish Stanford

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From the Community | American Vultures and the conflict in Israel and Palestine https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/31/from-the-community-american-vultures-and-the-conflict-in-israel-and-palestine/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/31/from-the-community-american-vultures-and-the-conflict-in-israel-and-palestine/#respond Tue, 01 Jun 2021 02:30:39 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1183183 Omer Reingold critiques opportunistic rhetoric in the U.S. around conflict in Israel and Palestine.

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In Isaac Asimov’s story “The Gentle Vultures,” an advanced species of vegetarian aliens is waiting for humans to start a nuclear war before they step in, rebuild and profit in the process. A human, abducted by those aliens, equates them with vultures for not helping prevent the war but rather waiting on the sidelines to profit from it.

In the U.S., every crisis is an opportunity and the suffering of others should never prevent you from turning a quick buck. The recent round of fighting in Israel and Palestine is no different. Conservative and progressive politicians are fundraising with passionate speeches and snappy tweets, celebrities are reminding us that they are still relevant, and others are expressing their innate violence on social media and in the physical world.

During the recent round of war, I found myself in useless and endless arguments on social media with right-wing Israelis who long ago gave up on the prospects of peace in the Middle East. At the same time, I was worried for my family and friends still in Israel and about the prospects of escalation. I was also disappointed by the superficial response from the progressive political side in the U.S., with which I usually identify.

I found myself envying the conservatives who are convinced of their truth: that Jews had been slaughtered by Muslims in Palestine for decades before the state of Israel was established. The conflict, wars and violence are and always have been the result of Palestinians’ refusal to accept any compromise short of the annihilation of Israel. Palestinians are led by a murderous terrorist organization that throws political opponents and gay men off rooftops. Similarly, I found myself envying the progressives who are convinced that Israel is a blood-thirsty power-grabbing apartheid state, the vanguard of white colonialism in the Middle East, the worst offender of human rights in the world.

The ones I don’t envy are Israelis and Palestinians living this deadly conflict for generations with no end in sight. I also don’t envy Jews and Muslims suffering from hate crimes and plain antisemitism in the U.S. I don’t even envy “small” expressions of anti-Muslim and antisemitic sentiments: the Muslim man that is suspected a terrorist for his looks, the young Jewish kid being ghosted by her classmates for the actions of adults, oceans away. While conservatives and progressives make political and other gains (including on university campuses), I doubt that they are helping those that are directly affected by the conflict, and both are contributing to the rise of antisemitic and anti-Muslim crimes in the U.S.

I used to sneer at those who found antisemitism in criticism of Israel. But I changed my mind. The obsessive focus on Israel out of all the evils and suffering in the world, the ignorance about the situation, the tendency for one-sidedness and hyperbole left no doubt in my mind. It may not be as obvious as neo-Nazis in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us!” But just like racism, antisemitism can be unaware of itself and the result of ignorance and lazy yearning for social capital. Once again, Jews are serving their traditional role as the great unifiers. Since Jews were the ultimate “others” of the Christian and Muslim world, hatred of Jews served as the commonality between Christians and Muslims, between the Soviet Union and the United States and here in the U.S. between conservatives and progressives. Those who assigned some of the blame for the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting to the speech of a Republican president should also assign, for intellectual integrity, some of the blame for the recent rise in antisemitic incidents to the speech of progressive politicians.

You may be saying to yourself: This guy is telling us to back down, and this will leave the Palestinians, the weaker party, defenseless. But this is the opposite of what I wish for. I’d like you to be agents of positive and effective change. For that you need to go much deeper and familiarize yourselves with the complicated reality of the Middle East. 

I’m not asking you to learn decades or even centuries of history in useless attempts to assign blame, but history can teach us important lessons. What are the global (political and economic) interests that kept this conflict alive for so long? (This may hit a bit closer to home than you imagine.) Which of those are still in effect today? Which are the parties within Israel and Palestine that have an interest in prolonging the conflict? How can I support those who still believe that a peaceful solution is possible?

Back to Asimov’s story, while the aliens rejected the image of vultures at first, it was so powerful that it affected their actions. So please excuse me for using such blunt imagery, but answer me this: Is it working?

Omer Reingold is a faculty member of the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. The opinions expressed are solely his own.

The Daily is committed to publishing a diversity of op-eds and letters to the editor. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Email letters to the editor to eic ‘at’ stanforddaily.com and op-ed submissions to opinions ‘at’ stanforddaily.com. 

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Letter to the Community: A fundamental double standard https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/24/letter-to-the-community-a-fundamental-double-standard/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/24/letter-to-the-community-a-fundamental-double-standard/#respond Tue, 25 May 2021 06:24:55 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1182961 As students, alumni, faculty and staff of Stanford University, we write to express our disappointment, outrage and concern regarding the recent attacks on Emily Wilder ‘20 and other students by the Stanford College Republicans (SCR), and to demand that the University issue a strong and unequivocal statement on community standards as well as initiate an investigation to determine whether SCR’s actions constitute a violation of the Fundamental Standard.

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As students, alumni, faculty and staff of Stanford University, we write to express our disappointment, outrage and concern regarding the recent attacks on Emily Wilder ‘20 and other students by the Stanford College Republicans (SCR), and to demand that the University issue a strong and unequivocal statement on community standards as well as initiate an investigation to determine whether SCR’s actions constitute a violation of the Fundamental Standard.

Beginning on May 17, and following Ms. Wilder’s April 10 announcement on Twitter that she had been hired by the Associated Press (AP) to cover local news in Arizona, SCR took to Twitter and Facebook to publish years-old screenshots of social media posts and Stanford Daily articles that Ms. Wilder published while an undergraduate at Stanford. These posts, which related to Ms. Wilder’s opinions on the Israeli occupation of Palestine, falsely accused her, a Jewish woman who attended an Orthodox Jewish high school for girls, of promoting “blood libel”, of “fomenting” anti-Semitic violence by “leftist-Islamist thugs,” and of “[defending] students who threatened violence against Jews.” In addition to describing Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as a “terrorist-affiliated” organization, SCR described Ms. Wilder as “unhinged,” as a “Marxist agitator” and as a “militant anti-Israel agitator.” Finally, the organization retweeted posts that described her as part of a cadre of “hate-filled terrorists” and as indicative of the AP’s “Hamas connection” and levied attacks against Stanford professors who defended her on Twitter. SCR presented this libelous and defamatory campaign against Ms. Wilder as an effort to “expose” the Associated Press and to “[hold] the media accountable” for what SCR deemed its “egregious anti-Israel bias,” thereby taking direct aim at Emily’s new job. As part of this presentation, SCR promoted the unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that the AP has collaborated with Hamas.

SCR’s social media posts were amplified and re-posted by prominent right-wing politicians and commentators. Before long, The Washington Free Beacon and The Federalist, both conservative publications, had posted articles about Ms. Wilder’s hiring by the AP, and she was besieged by vicious online harassment and bullying. The AP initially expressed support for her, offered to help her manage the harassment and bullying she was experiencing, and assured her that she would not be fired for her past campus activism. On May 19, however, the AP fired Emily for purported violations of the news agency’s social media policy between the time of her hiring and May 19, refused to tell her which posts had been in violation of this policy, and acknowledged that the news agency’s review of her social media accounts was precipitated by SCR’s campaign. Many prominent journalists, politicians, academics and activists on both sides of the political spectrum have since expressed support for Ms. Wilder, argued that none of her tweets in that three-week period merited dismissal, criticized the double standard to which media organizations are held regarding alleged conflicts of interest on the issue of Israel and Palestine and noted that Ms. Wilder would not have been contributing in any way to the AP’s coverage of the Israeli occupation of Palestine in her capacity as an Arizona-based news associate. SCR, meanwhile, has celebrated Ms. Wilder’s firing and publicly claimed credit for her dismissal from the AP.

The campaign targeting Emily leaves us, as members of the Stanford community, with the task of reckoning with how SCR’s actions reflect upon our university, our community, and our campus culture. It is transparent that SCR’s campaign was made in bad faith and was rooted in malicious intent: The aim of this campaign was not to engage in debate or to voice disagreement with something Ms. Wilder had written or said, but rather, to defame her and derail her career. These types of actions by SCR, which are designed to intimidate and suppress campus activists with whom SCR disagrees, are fundamentally antithetical to a campus culture grounded in the principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech. How are we to feel safe expressing a range of different opinions on controversial and polemical topics if we fear retaliation by our own peers? How are we to trust Stanford as a forum for public debate if our own university implicitly condones the activities of Voluntary Student Organizations (VSOs) that systematically target fellow students’ reputations and livelihoods on the basis of their political opinions? Ultimately, SCR’s actions foster a vicious, violent campus culture that is far from the welcoming, convivial, and collegial atmosphere to which we, the undersigned, aspire. 

On this subject, current Stanford student Maxwell Meyer asserts in a recent article in the Stanford Review, “Free exchange of ideas without reprisal? I call BS. SCR’s words in their ‘vision statement’ say one thing, but their actions when they encounter another student with strong disagreements say another,” noting that SCR’s attack on Ms. Wilder crosses a line and has compelled him, a fellow conservative and a supporter of Israel, to speak out against the organization. Thus we see that SCR’s smear campaigns misrepresent the views of conservative students at Stanford, and that the organization’s pattern of behavior also reflects poorly on the state of civil discourse at our university. In the end, SCR functions less as a representative student organization than as a feeder for the right-wing media.

The University’s failure to hold SCR accountable for past actions, furthermore, has created a culture of mistrust in Stanford’s commitment to uphold its own community standards and stated ideals of diversity and inclusion. Many students fundamentally do not trust the Organization Conduct Board (OCB) and other relevant authorities to uphold community values, given the historical impunity of SCR from disciplinary processes. The smear campaign against Ms. Wilder, after all, forms part of a larger and deeply disturbing pattern of behavior by SCR. While this may be one of the most high-profile instances of efforts by SCR to destroy particular students’ reputations and academic as well as professional pursuits, it is not the first. In fact, SCR has launched smear campaigns against individual students several times in the past year alone, exposing these students to vicious and dangerous online harassment and bullying. SCR’s campaigns disproportionately impact women and people of color, thereby exacerbating racial and gender inequities at Stanford. These campaigns have also increased in ferocity and sophistication, particularly in this academic year, and Stanford’s reticence in holding the group accountable has given SCR license to intensify its attacks.

We want to be clear: Though we, the undersigned, may hold differing opinions on a range of issues, including that of Israel and Palestine, we condemn SCR’s tactics and support Ms. Wilder as well as every other Stanford community member who has been victim to attacks by SCR. We oppose a campus culture in which students intentionally undermine each other’s careers, subject each other to violent harassment and intimidate each other over differences of political opinion. We have been gratified to witness the wave of support for Emily from Stanford students, alumni and faculty, including many who disagree with her stance on the Israeli occupation of Palestine and who have still spoken up about their respect for her and for her work. We urge the Stanford community to continue showing support for Ms. Wilder and the other community members who have been attacked by SCR in recent months and years. Though unacknowledged by the university at large, the group’s pattern of abuse has not gone unnoticed.

In light of SCR’s actions, we demand that Stanford:

  1. Immediately issue an unambiguous, strongly worded statement reiterating the community standards to which Stanford students are held and affirming the University’s commitment to enforcing these standards.
  1. Initiate an investigation of SCR’s attacks on Emily Wilder and other community members with respect to the Fundamental Standard. If SCR is found to have violated the Fundamental Standard, which we believe it has, we demand that SCR face disciplinary action and receive, at minimum, a strong warning explaining expectations for future activities sponsored by the organization and outlining the consequences for not meeting these expectations.

SCR’s behavior is unconscionable, shameful, and dangerous. The University is responsible for ensuring our safety and our academic freedom at Stanford, and we expect the University to fulfill this obligation to its community.

Link to the petition form here.

See the full list of signatories here.

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From the Community | A case for rural studies at Stanford https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/19/op-ed-a-case-for-rural-studies-at-stanford/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/19/op-ed-a-case-for-rural-studies-at-stanford/#respond Thu, 20 May 2021 04:26:56 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1182711 Rural students deserve the opportunity to learn about their own communities in an academic context; non-rural students deserve the opportunity to learn about rurality and its impacts.

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When you keyword search for “rural” on ExploreCourses, 26 results appear for the 2020-21 school year, and most of these results are cross-listings. Rural areas in the present-day United States are the core focus of zero classes taught any year since 2016. As one of the less than 5% of Stanford students from a rural area, staring at these results left me saddened, but unsurprised. Rurality has been a defining feature in my life, but it is nearly invisible on campus. The Farm’s nickname masks its lack of inquiry into the lives of the almost 20% of the country residing in rural areas. 

Admittedly, ExploreCourses keyword searches are an imperfect metric. However, even considering the margin-of-error on this measure, it is clear that there is a disparity between urban and rural studies here at Stanford. Searching “urban” in ExploreCourses yields 207 results, almost 8 times the number of hits for “rural.” Stanford also has a program dedicated entirely to urban studies. I want to be clear: Urban areas deserve to be studied and understood in all of their complexity. But urban studies does not preclude rural studies. In fact, they can complement each other, illuminating opposite sides of the ever-growing urban-rural divide. But to do that, class offerings cannot be so disproportionate.

Growing up and living in rural areas presents unique circumstances that change the way rural people see and interact with the world. Smaller, more isolated communities can foster strong community bond. For others, it can also instill a sense of self-sufficiency that comes from distance and lack of access. People from rural areas also have unique access to nature. Obviously, these are rough generalizations, ones that should be deconstructed and examined further. Rurality’s impacts can be varied, but they deserve recognition, attention and investigation.

The different conditions in rural communities create unique challenges that require familiarity and understanding to solve. Rural areas in the US have higher unemployment, higher rates of poverty, poorer education quality as well as less access to affordable housing, healthcare and mental healthcare. A quarter of rural people, a third of those on tribal lands, lack access to broadband internet. These are fundamental policy challenges that often go unaddressed in Stanford coursework. 

Many Stanford students will go on to be leaders in government, the private sector and civil society. While not every student would take a rural issues course if more were offered the chance, Stanford’s current catalog hinders students from fully engaging with these communities and stops many from being able to learn about rurality. Almost none of those rising leaders will have any idea what rural America is like, what its challenges and strengths are and what can be done to fix its problems. Stanford has a responsibility to change this. 

More in-depth inquiry into rurality is needed because stereotypes and misunderstandings are common at and beyond Stanford. Rural communities are commonly seen as exclusively white, straight, Christian, uneducated, poor and traditional. These stereotypes are not harmless. The idea that rural America is exclusively white, for example, obscures the experiences of the 20% of rural Americans who are people of color, including rural Black communities in the South, half of the nation’s Native population, rural Latinx communities in the West and Southwest and rural Native Hawaiian communities in Hawai’i. Millions of people of color live in majority white rural communities as well. 

The effects of racial discrimination already present throughout the United States are compounded by rurality, doubly isolating these individuals and communities. The effects of racism in healthcare, education, infrastructure and more are exacerbated by the distance from urban centers that defines rurality. Black and Native mothers in rural areas have the highest maternal mortality and poverty rates of any group in the nation. Many Native communities still lack access to clean drinking water or running water at all. 

Other questions of identity and status also intersect with rurality. For instance, rurality is often seen as hostile to queerness. As a gay man, I am well aware of the queerphobia that exists in rural areas, but erasure of our existence is harmful. Queerness and rurality, for me and for many others, interact with each other as identities and statuses — they are not mutually exclusive. Viewing all rural people as cisgender and straight only further isolates our queer siblings living in rural areas, whether they live there by choice or by necessity. Rural areas also have the highest disabled population by percentage of any geographic classification. Accessibility necessarily takes a different shape in rural communities, and the aforementioned healthcare and mental healthcare access problems complicate rural disabled people’s lives unnecessarily and unjustly.

International contexts are important too.  Many of the current rural-focused courses are indeed centered on international rural areas. Here, though, Stanford’s slim rural course catalog is even more worrisome. Of the world population, 44% is rural. The study of other countries, regions, cultures and peoples needs to include rural perspectives.

Rurality is not monolithic. Rural areas are complex; rural people are multifaceted; rural communities are dynamic and complicated. Ignoring these facts erases marginalized people in already underserved communities. Rurality’s impact needs to be considered in depth, but right now Stanford offers precious few ways to do so.

Stanford must study rurality more meaningfully. As a political science student, I focus mainly on policy issues, but rural areas and people have something to offer every discipline. Rural arts and music have long and important histories — just look at the blues, folk, bluegrass, country or any of the books or films with rural settings and/or creators. Rural communities are on the frontlines of the fight against climate change. Medicine, science, politics, ethnic studies, linguistics, economics and more could all have meaningful, impactful research in and connections with rural communities. Both students and faculty would benefit from deeper understandings and commitments to rural scholarship and engagement. 

Studying rural areas would provide students with a fuller picture of this country and help dispel harmful stereotypes. Rural students deserve the opportunity to learn about their own communities in an academic context; non-rural students deserve the opportunity to learn about rurality and its impacts. Most of all, rural communities deserve visibility and understanding. If Stanford wants to seriously engage with rural students and rural communities, it should start by sowing seeds of scholarship here on the Farm. 

Zac Stoor is a junior majoring in political science. He is from Crystal Falls, a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

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Opinion | The invisibility of the woman with ADHD https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/13/opinion-the-invisibility-of-the-woman-with-adhd/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/13/opinion-the-invisibility-of-the-woman-with-adhd/#respond Fri, 14 May 2021 03:47:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1182351 Psychologists must develop a more complex diagnostic criteria for ADHD and bolstering research that is based on a range of patient demographics.

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My brother Aaron was nine years old when I was born. That year, he was mostly occupied by retrieving Huggies for my mother and rolling me around in a squeaky laundry basket. 

He also happened to be participating in a clinical trial for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder medications after his recent ADHD diagnosis. The trial was meant to determine the correct combination of medication and cognitive-behavioral methods for him. After a couple months, the trial terminated, and Aaron was prescribed Adderall. Honestly, it was too easy; he was a hyper kid with shaggy hair and a penchant for fidgeting with his pencils — the poster child for ADHD. 

Aaron was no anomaly. Throughout the 2000s, class clowns and problem children were detected and dosed left and right. Clinicians went so far as to say ADHD had become dangerously over-diagnosed. The catch is, they were only diagnosing boys.

This is because ADHD was defined based on the behaviors of hyperactive, young boys. For over 50 years, until 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual classified ADHD as a “Disruptive Behavior Disorder,” its diagnostic criteria pertaining dominantly to external behaviors. This conceptual model left no room for girls with ADHD, who often internalize their symptoms, exhibiting more inattention than hyperactivity. More importantly, this external-behaviors model prevails. According to Duke Psychology Professor David Rabiner, research on ADHD comes dominantly from scientific literature that is based on male subjects. The research serves the archetype, and the archetype serves the research.

So what of the undiagnosed girl?

She blames herself for executive function deficits, develops comorbid mood or anxiety disorders, and compensates with hypervigilance. She may be misdiagnosed and have a brief rendezvous with an antidepressant or beta-blocker that changes nothing. Again, she blames herself. Her self-esteem plummets, and she is alienated by her peers. She is told to not make a fuss and figure it out. All the while, her debilitating internalized symptoms are left unseen and even downplayed by her parents, teachers and knowledgeable informants because, clearly, she is doing just fine in school.

And she does fine.

I did fine. Until the rules and routines of precollegiate education disappeared. Until I realized I’d been expending half my energy just weathering my disorder. I finally went on Vyvanse at 19, and despite having wasted so much of my life on painfully unnecessary coping behaviors, I am still one of the lucky ones. 

The cards are relentlessly stacked against women with ADHD. As ADHD Clinical Psychologist Dr. Ellen Littman writes, “The idealized women’s role as home manager requires multiple task coordination in a highly distracting and often unpredictable environment.” Societal expectations that they be organized and tactful cause women with ADHD such psychological distress that they forsake their own wellbeing, constantly taking on more than they can manage and self-medicating when they inevitably realize it is too much. 

On top of their own self-defeating practices, women with ADHD also carry the historical burden of not being believed by medical professionals. For centuries, female hysteria was a blanket diagnosis for physical ailments from fevers to insomnia; psychiatrists theorized hysteria as a sex-selective disorder, affecting only those with a uterus. The disorder was named after the Greek “hysterikos,” meaning “suffering in the womb,” and was weaponized to trivialize women’s claims of mental illness. For many, a misdiagnosis of depression or anxiety is merely a hysteria diagnosis in new clothes. Because the scientific literature on ADHD bolsters the archetype of the hyperactive young boy, ADHD is not thought of as an emotional disorder. Thus, the woman experiencing emotional dysregulation is diagnosed as depressed long before ADHD is even considered. Worse, the frustration of misdiagnoses may actually result in comorbid secondary depression. Dr. Littman explains that clinicians’ inability to recognize or quantify the emotional side of ADHD causes women to “hide their differences, second guess themselves, and retreat when their credibility is questioned.” Thus, they remain unseen, suffer unidentified symptoms and perpetuate the invisibility of the woman with ADHD. 

In response to a complex interplay of genetic, environmental and situational factors, psychologists must develop a more complex diagnostic criteria for ADHD and bolstering research that is based on a range of patient demographics. Especially with the onslaught of virtual learning that has often neglected those with attention and learning disorders, these research lacunae can no longer be ignored. With an expanded conceptual framework for ADHD diagnosis and treatment, psychologists can intervene early, support women’s personal and professional success and deconstruct ADHD stereotypes that alienate those whose symptoms present themselves differently. 

Berkeley psychology professor Stephen Hinshaw asserts that girls with ADHD are at higher risk for depression, suicide attempts, self-injuring behavior, eating disorders and substance abuse. He recognizes the flawed research that landed us here, but he also believes in the transformative potential of future research that centers marginalized demographics with ADHD. 

Until then, as a previously undiagnosed girl, I urge you to reject the constricting archetype of the hyperactive young boy and promote the visibility of the woman with ADHD. 

And if you are the woman with ADHD, here is your reminder that all your hypersensitivity, all your inattention and all your dysregulation is valid. Your ADHD experience is valid. And I hope that you will grow to feel seen and welcomed as the world learns this. 

The Daily is committed to publishing a diversity of op-eds and letters to the editor. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Email letters to the editor to eic ‘at’ stanforddaily.com and op-ed submissions to opinions ‘at’ stanforddaily.com. 

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From the Community | Listen to Black, Latinx and Indigenous scholars in this pandemic https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/13/op-ed-listen-to-black-latinx-and-indigenous-scholars-in-this-pandemic/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/13/op-ed-listen-to-black-latinx-and-indigenous-scholars-in-this-pandemic/#respond Fri, 14 May 2021 03:46:17 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1182440 To save lives and end the inequities uncovered by COVID, we need to listen to Black, Latinx and Indigenous scholars who have spent their careers studying these communities.

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Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people in the US are disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, with higher mortality rates, and more economic fallout and educational setbacks for our children. In Colorado, where I live, a higher percentage of the Latinx population has died from COVID-19 than any other group, according to the CDC. 

Despite these realities, the voices and expertise of scholars from these communities have been missing in the search for solutions and public discourse. Ignoring the voices of Black, Latinx and Indigenous experts is not new in higher education and science.

I am a first-generation Latinx scholar in engineering and public health, trained at the very best institutions in this country, including Stanford. I have dedicated my scientific career to working with low-income communities. Though I do not look like most scientific experts you see on TV, I had all the right training and experiences to see this disaster coming.

As an aerosol scientist and indoor air quality expert, I called for the protection of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) and other vulnerable populations in this pandemic and spoke early about the role of aerosols in the transmission of the virus and the potentially devastating effects on these communities months before it was seriously considered by people in powerful positions. I provided guidance to the Latinx community in Spanish about protecting themselves from transmission. BIPOC scholars at the University of North Carolina also argued that campus responses could have been improved by including BIPOC voices; others trained minority students to use big data to better understand COVID-19 disparities.

Studying indoor air quality and related health outcomes in underserved communities, including the Mohawk and Navajo Nations, as well as Latinx and Asian immigrants, gave me early appreciation for the danger COVID-19 posed to these communities. My research determined that emissions from wood and coal burned inside Navajo homes increased the activation of antioxidant defenses and inflammation in cell models. This is important because they can lead to inflammatory responses in the respiratory, immune, cardiovascular and neural systems, which can render people more susceptible to COVID-19.

My study of low-income Latinx in Boulder found that housing quality was low and overcrowding was high. For participants with significant exposure to particulate matter (aerosols), their workplace appeared to be the primary source. Many of these people were deemed “essential” workers in the pandemic. Therefore, their essential work increased their likely exposure to the coronavirus, and their housing conditions promoted indoor transmission. These are the elements for a perfect storm.

Unfortunately, COVID-19 has been raging within another, larger and longer-lived pandemic: systemic racism in higher education and science. 

Research in BIPOC communities is not well-funded on any topic, including indoor air quality. I am one of a very small number of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous scholars in aerosol science, and in my research on indoor air quality in disadvantaged communities have faced systemic racism, gender harassment and lack of funding. During the pandemic, I focused on advising those working directly with BIPOC communities, like my local government and Last Mile, a non-profit based in NYC through its COVID Straight Talk initiative. They brought together scientists and communities to raise awareness about COVID-19 being airborne, encourage harm reduction measures and support workplace safety legislation. 

Lack of support for fields like indoor air quality, especially in underserved communities and by Black, Latinx and Indigenous researchers, has contributed to the inequities in this pandemic. President Biden spoke about being compassionate and putting oneself in someone else’s shoes. Similarly, my research responds to the call by Pope Francis to “listen to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor”. Initiatives that elevate the voices of Black, Latinx and Indigenous scholars cannot continue to be disregarded. There are legitimate experts within our communities, with the desire to help, and we must not be ignored, an afterthought, or actively excluded.

The needs of frontline workers in this pandemic are still not properly addressed, especially within BIPOC communities. The Biden administration must promote indoor air quality policies and enforceable standards that protect these groups, like the NYS Heroes Act. We need to monitor, measure and actively clear the air in workplaces and do it affordably. To save lives and end the inequities uncovered by COVID, we need to listen to Black, Latinx, and Indigenous scholars who have spent their careers studying these communities. Most importantly, our people need to see us and hear our advice and our leaders need our help rebuilding trust within our communities. 

— Dr. Lupita Montoya, MS ’91, PhD ‘99

Dr. Lupita Montoya will give a talk to Stanford University’s Alumni on May 18th to address Environmental Justice. She is a first-generation Latinx scholar from the LA area who conducts multidisciplinary research that addresses environmental and health impacts of indoor air pollution, especially in low-income communities in the US and abroad.

The Daily is committed to publishing a diversity of op-eds and letters to the editor. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Email letters to the editor to eic ‘at’ stanforddaily.com and op-ed submissions to opinions ‘at’ stanforddaily.com. 

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From the Community | The 2020 ACM Turing Award is a step against diversity, equity and inclusion https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/12/op-ed-the-2020-acm-turing-award-is-a-step-against-diversity-equity-and-inclusion/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/12/op-ed-the-2020-acm-turing-award-is-a-step-against-diversity-equity-and-inclusion/#respond Thu, 13 May 2021 04:00:43 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1182386 Turing Award honoree and Stanford professor emeritus Jeffrey Ullman has written that Iranian students who are in Iran or have grown up in Iran past the 1979 revolution should not be educated in the US and called for a blanket ban on admitting them to US schools.

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The Turing Award, dubbed the “Nobel Prize of computing,” is bestowed upon computer scientists who have demonstrated long-lasting impact and “trend-setting technical achievements” in computing, and is generally considered a lifetime achievement award. As such, the announcement of the award is a moment of celebration for the whole community. This was different for the 2020 award, announced in March 2021 by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to be shared between Alfred Aho of Columbia University and Jeffrey Ullman of Stanford University.

Within hours of the award’s announcement, social media was flooded with concerns by members of the computer science community over the selection. They recognized Jeffrey Ullman as an outspoken opponent of diversity, equity and inclusion over the past decades, arguing that the selection violates ACM’s own commitment to diversity and inclusion, listed as one of the four core values of the organization, as well as its declared mission of “promoting the highest professional and ethical standards.”

The significance of the social and ethical implications of the Turing Award is heightened by the fact that it commemorates the legacy of Alan Turing, who pioneered modern computer science, helped end World War II and faced a great deal of discrimination in his tragic life before dying by suicide. Posthumously, he received an apology from the British Prime Minister and a royal pardon by Queen Elizabeth II.

Soon, many congratulatory notes to Ullman were taken back. Some of the leading figures in the community, including Shafi Goldwasser (past Turing Award laureate and member of the Turing Award committee) expressed concerns in solidarity with the victims of Ullman’s discriminatory behavior, joined by others including the Turing Award committee Chair Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Yann LeCun, a recent laureate of the award. Within days, an open letter condemning the selection emerged that quickly amassed over a thousand signatures, including by such influential scientists as fellows of ACM, MacArthur fellows and laureates of the Nevanlinna Prize, Abel Prize and Turing Award itself. 

Like many of my peers, I learned much of computer science from Aho and Ullman’s excellent textbooks. In fact, the educational contributions of the duo in the form of their textbooks has been included in their award citation. Senior undergraduates at Sharif University in Iran, where I studied, often apply to graduate programs abroad. For us, the leaders in computing were the names on our textbooks, such as Knuth, Sipser, Hopcroft, Aho and Ullman. We thought of them as influential educators, people to look up to and people to seek advice from. Some of us contacted Ullman, and he actually did respond. His words were, however, nothing about graduate school or computer science. They were rants of hate and bigotry against Iranians. 

In the mid 2000s, tired of having to respond to emails from Iranians “every few weeks,” Ullman set up his infamous “Answers to All Questions Iranian” webpage, which he maintained until late 2020. In this page, he records his views against Iranians and other groups, such as Native Americans. Despite this, he continued to correspond with Iranian students. One such correspondence (as detailed in the above-mentioned open letter) was made public in 2011, causing public outrage and a complaint to Stanford by the National Iranian American Council. In response, according to The Stanford Daily, Stanford dismissed the allegations, saying that “there is no plan to discipline Ullman for his statements.” In contrast, in 2003, the University of Oxford suspended a professor for sending one email of such nature to a student.

Ullman maintains that Iranian students who are in Iran or have grown up in Iran past the 1979 revolution should not be educated in the US and calls for a blanket ban on admitting them to US schools. He has set a personal policy of wanting nothing to do with them: He won’t work with them and he won’t advise them, solely based on their national origin. He has also expressed a similar assertion regarding Chinese students, in a Google+ post in 2015 as well as in private correspondence as recently as 2020, though it is unclear if he has gone as far as declaring a ban on that group.

There is no question that Ullman is entitled to his opinions. However, when he turns those opinions to actions and policies against students, a red line has been crossed. At Stanford, “national or ethnic origin” is an explicitly stated protected category in the university’s non-discrimination policy. Moreover, Stanford’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, as stated in 2019, asserts to “support all members of the community independent of cultural background, ethnicity, gender identity, or political affiliation.” Stanford’s “Core Policy Statements” (Section 4.2.2) considers exclusions for faculty’s conduct “directly related to academic values” in reference to the extent of their academic freedom. 

Ullman and Stanford argue that he has no involvement in admissions. However, an outspoken and influential senior faculty (who has also chaired the department) can affect a department’s climate as a whole. Moreover, in graduate admissions in nearly every US school, despite the existence of an admissions committee, selection is directly influenced by individual faculty members. As a crude heuristic, I looked over the list of 1,074 Ph.D. theses, as of this writing, done at Stanford Computer Science. Among the authors, I notice only 6 Iranian names, only one of whom has done an undergraduate degree in Iran. In contrast, Stanford Electrical Engineering lists 4,731 theses, and among those, I can identify about 176 Iranian names (the contrast gets sharper in recent decades). Of course, that might not prove anything for such a complex issue, but at least signifies a telling gap. 

Regardless, for a faculty member to set a unilateral policy of discriminating against a group of students is already an action, one that goes against academic values that they have the duty to uphold. Furthermore, just being subject to Ullman’s behavior could have been enough to deter young students from graduate studies altogether. Several computer scientists from Iran are now on the faculty at Stanford. The late Maryam Mirzakhani, a Stanford professor and the only woman so far to be awarded the Fields medal, completed her undergraduate studies in Iran. In Ullman’s view, all these individuals should have been excluded.

Ullman’s controversy is not about freedom of speech, nor politics. It is a purely academic one. It is not about separating the artist from the art. It is about the art itself. At a time when the computing community is struggling to broaden participation, Ullman’s egregious actions are a disservice that goes against his own educational contributions for which he received a Turing Award. Factoring this into his overall academic impact, ACM’s selection does not seem clear-cut anymore.

ACM first reacted to the controversy by tweeting that Ullman’s “statements do not reflect the views of ACM.” In response to the open letter, ACM released a statement providing answers to precisely the two questions asked on the letter. Fourteen ACM Special Interest Groups released a separate statement expressing commitments to diversity and inclusivity. In summary, ACM’s response is that the issue was missed since no complaint against Ullman had been on file with ACM, and that in future ACM will require nomination letters to indicate whether they are aware of any behavior inconsistent with ACM values. This is while ACM could have easily discovered the behavior by a simple web search, and of course nominators would have a conflict of interest to disclose any red flags.

While ACM’s response is a positive step and promises long overdue reforms, it is far from sufficient. As time is now judging Stanford’s dismissive reaction in 2011, which is partly responsible for today’s controversy, it will judge any action ACM takes today. Ullman has had ample opportunity over the years to acknowledge harm and correct his behavior. Unfortunately, his April 2021 interview with San Jose Inside suggests otherwise, concluding that “the conversation thus far hasn’t swayed the professor.”

I hope that, at the very least, ACM takes genuine and measurable steps to prove commitment to its stated values by impactful action and not just words. ACM should, foremost, recognize the damage done to the computing community and directly empathize with the victims of Ullman’s actions, rather than strategizing to minimize the immediate impact on the organization. Since Ullman’s behavior is directly entangled with the educational impacts that contributed to the award, if ACM does not indeed share his views, the award citation and its public record should at least be amended with a disclaimer to reflect that. ACM should think of more effective reforms such as publicly announcing the nominees in advance and establishing clear mechanisms for rescinding awards in rare cases when relevant misconduct is discovered after the fact.

It is important to ensure that a clear precedent is set today by ACM that would not give a free pass to any future abusers of academic freedom. The computing community, which ACM aims to represent globally (as an international organization), needs to establish equal opportunity for everyone and ACM’s selection this year has diminished much of the hard-earned progress. ACM needs to do better and bring back trust and hope to the community.

Mahdi Cheraghchi is a theoretical computer scientist and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. He is a senior member of ACM and IEEE.

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From the Community | The house I (can’t afford to) live in https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/11/op-ed-the-house-i-cant-afford-to-live-in/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/11/op-ed-the-house-i-cant-afford-to-live-in/#respond Wed, 12 May 2021 05:01:41 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1182322 Silicon Valley’s housing struggles demonstrate that the fight for racial justice won’t just be waged on the streets but in city halls all across the Bay Area, argues East Palo Alto Councilman Antonio López.

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W.E.B. Du Bois famously wrote that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” For the Bay Area, the problem of the 21st is the red line, or rather its legacy: continued housing segregation, only now more sophisticated in its strategies of exclusion. 

Here in Silicon Valley, it is easy to believe that the problem of white supremacy is chiefly an issue of hate crimes. At worst, racism here is conceptualized at the individual level, a question of comportment towards one’s ethnic neighbors. Words like equity are popular in corporate mission statements. Anti-racist workshops abound during professional development events. Anti-racism, in a word, is reduced to performance. We show up to a rally to decry discrimination, but in the same breath favor policies perpetuating it. 

In conversations about equity, it is important to remember that de jure segregation persisted in the Bay Area all the way to the 1960s. With support from the Federal Housing Administration, African Americans were relegated to the most impoverished neighborhoods of the Bay Area. Federal Housing Administration manuals instructed banks to avoid “inharmonious racial groups,” advising banks instead to enact racially restrictive zoning ordinances, which Palo Alto did. As late as 1950, the majority of subdivisions in Palo Alto had ordinances stating that “No person not wholly of the White Caucasian race shall use or occupy such property unless person or persons are employed as servants of the occupants.” African American households in turn were routinely excluded from mortgage loans, often leaving them no choice but to rent housing in urban ghettos like East Palo Alto.

Decades later, neighboring cities suffer from a severe lack of affordable housing. Palo Alto has approved just 38% of the 1,988 housing units the state will require by 2023. San Jose has signed off on just 53% of its state-mandated housing by the end of 2020. For over 20 years, Menlo Park failed to adopt a housing element. (A key part of a city’s overall General Plan, a Housing Element provides an analysis of a community’s housing needs for all income levels, and lays out the strategies to provide for those housing needs.) Only after the civil rights firms Public Advocates Inc. and Public Interest Law Project sued Menlo Park did the city at last adopt a Housing Element and commit to facilitating construction of 2,000 homes to low-income housing

Meanwhile, East Palo Alto, where I am a councilmember, has been a vanguard of housing justice since its inception and incorporation into the county in 1982. From its rent freeze in 1985 to the Below Market Rate Inclusionary Housing Program in 2002 to the council’s unanimous endorsement in 2014 of impact fees for market rate developments to the latest round of Tenant Protection Ordinance in 2014 and housing ordinances in 2019, the city of East Palo Alto never stopped working to support the poor in this area. Most recently, Paul Bains, pastor of St. Samuel’s Church, piloted the first RV-safe parking program in the entire peninsula. Started in 2019, the program offers designated spaces for overnight parking for local RV dwellers. It also offers access to portable showers, restrooms and laundry services. Around two-thirds of funding is derived from the city’s general fund and Measure O, the voter-approved business-license tax on residential rentals. To date, 34 households have obtained permanent housing through the program

Esteemed Stanford academics and students, explain to me how a city with a 2020-21 budget 19 times smaller (41.8M) than neighboring Palo Alto ($810.7 M) can accomplish this, while Palo Alto struggles to house the dozens of families parked right outside Stanford’s campus.

Where outside of Silicon Valley would a proposal for affordable housing be met with answers like, “I just want you to imagine the kind of traffic problems we’re going to have when they’re insisting on so much housing?” An ideology that puts manicured convenience over care has become ingrained and institutionalized in our area. 

To absolve oneself of the responsibility for housing justice, as the Palo Alto mayor does, simply because “the majority of new homes being acquired in Santa Clara County are by Asian Americans,” belies the racist structure of housing here in Silicon Valley. It touts multicultural progress without any serious compliance with the state requirements for housing. Moreover, it passes the responsibility to cities like mine that are already overburdened with budget deficits and stagnant revenue. 

Consider that Latinos comprise 24% of the County of San Mateo but 13% of its elected officials. Consider that my father’s first job in this country was washing dishes, and after 35 years, he works room service. From toiling in the mercury mines of San Jose in the 1880s, to doing back-breaking farm labor in the 20th century, to serving as low-paid operatives in local microelectronic industries, Latinos in Silicon Valley have sustained the economic vitality of the greater region. How is this pandemic any different, with its disparities in infection rates between communities with the highest concentration of essential workers and wealthier communities? 

Silicon Valley’s housing struggles demonstrate that the fight for racial justice won’t just be waged on the streets but in city halls all across the Bay Area. Violence won’t just be made manifest in shaky cell phone videos on the 8:00 news, but by those headlines we won’t see, that won’t draw rallies even though they should: for instance, the reluctance of wealthy municipalities to comply with this year’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation numbers. 

To my neighbors in Menlo Park and Palo Alto, the next time you think about joining a march, by all means do so. But don’t let your allyship stop once you put down the picket sign. Pressure your councilmembers and homeownership association to reform single-family zoning policies. Tell them to build 60 affordable senior apartments instead of $5 million homes on the same land. 

Do so not to alleviate a personal sense of guilt, but as part of the protracted struggle of anti-racist work. White supremacy will only end when it is dismantled by those it oppresses or when those who benefit from it abdicate their privilege. True allyship is the willingness of those in dominant groups, whether they are white people, men or straight and able-bodied people, to cede coveted positions of power and invest in new leadership. True allyship begins with redistributing power to communities of color.

I am not interested in empathy. I want equity for my people. When I say my people, I mean Latinos, I mean Black people, I mean Tongans and Samoans, I mean working class communities who know what’s like shopping with WIC checks at Safeway, I mean all of the people of East Palo Alto. This beautiful city has taught me to advocate for neighbors not out of compassion, but because their struggle is ours. I know that in order to combat systemic oppression, we must combine resources to ensure we have a say and stay in the future of this beautiful Valley. 

Most of all, what I know is that the dynasty of white politics in our county must end. The good ol’ boys club that has ruled here, ever since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, has outlived its time. The beneficiaries of whiteness must gracefully exit the chamber. But as they leave, let them keep the door open, and see those whose parents and forbearers sustained this valley for centuries have their seat at the dais.

Antonio López (@barrioscribe) is a councilman for the City of East Palo Alto and the author of Gentefication, Winner of the 2019 Larry Levis Prize in Poetry. He is a first-year Ph.D. student at the Modern Thought & Literature Program.

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From the Community | A history of forgetting: Remembering Stanford’s complicity in anti-Asian violence https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/06/op-ed-a-history-of-forgetting-remembering-stanfords-complicity-in-anti-asian-violence/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/06/op-ed-a-history-of-forgetting-remembering-stanfords-complicity-in-anti-asian-violence/#respond Fri, 07 May 2021 04:50:32 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1182132 The Stanford Administration's email for AAPI Heritage Month masks deeper problems reflective of Stanford’s historic complicity in racism against not only Asian-Americans but all marginalized communities.

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I read the President and Provost’s email inaugurating the beginning of Asian-American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month with a sense of familiar frustration and exhaustion. On paper, the language of the email feels innocuous, even flat — there’s the usual rhetoric about “celebrating diversity” and “honoring the achievements of Asian Americans,” with a few events to boot. But the email’s seemingly innocent rhetoric masks deeper problems reflective of Stanford’s historic complicity in racism against not only Asian-Americans but all marginalized communities. 

These issues manifest from the beginning with the email’s uncritical use of  the term “AAPI.” Though the email references “AAPI Heritage Month” several times, not once does it mention Pasifika history or heritage — not the cultures that were wiped out by settler colonial expansion, nor the Pasifika community’s history of organized resistance to these violences. As a Chinese-American child of immigrants, I cannot speak to these heritages myself, but even I can recognize the deep problems with the undiscerning use of the term “AAPI.” To suggest that our histories are comparable and exclude the PI half of the acronym is to refuse the space to honor and celebrate these histories. (For more information on the fraught nature of the term “AAPI,” you can read Keoni Rodriguez’s article for The Daily here.) 

Even if we set aside the problematic marginalization of Pacific Islanders, the email’s rhetoric still sanitizes Stanford’s historic complicity in anti-Asian racism. This erasure appears powerfully in the email’s next several lines: “This fortune was amassed in no small part as a result of the work of the Chinese immigrants, a good number of whom also tended ‘the Farm’ and then helped construct the early university.” This is a gross distortion of the truth. Leland Stanford’s wealth was built, quite literally, on the backs of exploited Chinese immigrant laborers — a more accurate statement would be “this fortune was amassed because of the work of Chinese immigrants.” 

Likewise, the term “work” is technically correct but historically inadequate, erasing the violence Stanford enacted against Asian Americans in the process of building the railroads. The Chinese laborers who built the railroads were subjected to horrific working conditions: They received the most dangerous work assignments and were paid only 30-50% of the wages of their white counterparts and frequently faced physical abuse from their supervisors. As anti-Asian sentiment rose, these conditions often spiralled into direct violence: in 1885, 28 Chinese laborers were murdered by white miners during the Rock Springs massacre, marking one of the largest-scale anti-Chinese lynchings in history.

But there’s no acknowledgment of Stanford’s complicity, or even of this history. The Stanford family’s systemic exploitation of Chinese laborers and Leland Stanford’s well-documented Sinophobia go almost entirely unmentioned. Instead, we’re told that the completion of the transcontinental railroad — part of the settler colonial project that decimated countless Indigenous cultures — was an achievement to be celebrated. We’re given a narrative that romanticizes the real, concrete suffering that Chinese laborers were forced to endure and erases Indigenous genocide. 

At a time when violence against Asian-Americans has re-emerged in our public consciousness visibly and powerfully, these acts of erasure are neither neutral nor harmless. The problem with the email is the same flaw that undergirds so much of the current media discourse surrounding anti-Asian violence: Stanford — and, more broadly, the United States — refuses to recognize how the violence it inflicted centuries ago is not a historic aberration, but continuous with the violence that this country continues to inflict against Asian-Americans to this day. 

When the administration romanticizes the transcontinental railroad as a moment of Asian-American (and, implicitly, American) triumph, it not only sanitizes the history of labor exploitation and racialized violence against Chinese-Americans that enabled the railroads’ completion, but it fails to reckon with the very real, ongoing settler colonialism that the railroads enabled. It fails to recognize how the historic violence against Chinese and Asian laborers is part of a pattern that began with Leland Stanford, but has continued with events like the massage parlor shootings in Atlanta. Even the railroads themselves contributed to one of the largest-scale genocides in modern memory, and this was only made possible by the violent, racist exploitation of Chinese laborers. One cannot discuss the railroads earnestly without reckoning with these histories, much less consider them a point of “celebration” at a time when the very same violences that enabled the railroads’ completion have re-emerged yet again in our public consciousness.  

The further I read the email, the more tired I grew. I was tired of the University’s commendations of these laborers’ “contributions,” knowing how it exploited — and continues to exploit — its subcontracted labor force during the COVID pandemic. I was tired of its empty promises to support “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” when the vast majority of its instructors in Asian-American studies are either affiliated faculty from other departments (e.g. psychology) or non-tenured lecturers — not to mention the alarming lack of faculty specializing in Pacific Islander heritage. I wish I was surprised by the tone the email struck when discussing (or refusing to discuss) a violent history, but I wasn’t. These gestures are continuations of the same patterns I’ve grown accustomed to from administration over the years.  

But I recognize, too, that despite all of the anger I hold — that despite my justified outrage with the University’s half-hearted attempts to pander to its Asian American students — I can still hold space for hope. At a time when violence against people who look like my grandparents is on the rise, the term “celebration” feels woefully inadequate, and so instead I’ve taken solace, lately, in the knowledge that we have fought this fight before. I want to believe that we can turn back to the narratives we’ve so often ignored and recognize how the history of Asian Americanness is one of violence but also of struggle and resistance. I want to believe that we can acknowledge these histories while simultaneously recognizing the ways that Asian Americans, too, are capable of reproducing that violence — by, for instance, uncritically aggregating Pacific Islanders with Asian Americans, or perhaps by attending a university on occupied Muwekma Ohlone Land. 

In the face of these repeated institutional failures, I believe we can — and must — make a new way for ourselves. And we begin, first, by refusing the narratives we’ve been given about our past, so that we may learn how not to repeat these mistakes in the future. 

The Daily is committed to publishing a diversity of op-eds and letters to the editor. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Email letters to the editor to eic ‘at’ stanforddaily.com and op-ed submissions to opinions ‘at’ stanforddaily.com. 

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From the Community | Departmental accountability is a must: The case of Stanford Chemistry https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/04/op-ed-departmental-accountability-is-a-must-the-case-of-stanford-chemistry/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/04/op-ed-departmental-accountability-is-a-must-the-case-of-stanford-chemistry/#respond Wed, 05 May 2021 03:17:53 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1182022 It does not matter how many companion courses, tutoring classes or URM programs are created when students' well-being and input are actively being disregarded and departments are creating toxic cultures.

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This article contains discussions of violence against Black people that may be troubling to some readers.

On May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, a police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds: four minutes and 45 seconds as Floyd cried out for help, 53 seconds as Floyd shook due to seizures and three minutes and 51 seconds as Floyd was non-responsive. This happened against a backdrop of a pandemic that has and continues to disproportionately take the lives of low-income BIPOC, wreaking havoc on our communities. All across the globe, and here at Stanford, non-BIPOC had no choice but to reckon with the systemic inequalities Black people face and how they and their institutions have contributed to and continue to perpetuate those systems of inequality.

Across the University, department chairs sent messages of solidarity, and departments held town halls to provide safe spaces for students to voice their pain. They created special committees to come up with actionable plans to address and start the work of undoing the harm caused by academia and the role it has played in exacerbating inequalities. Professors reached out to support their Black students and demonstrated their understanding and empathy towards student needs by waiving final assignments, canceling final exams and/or passing everyone in their class. It was one of the few times at Stanford where the immense love and compassion that exist within our communities were clearly and openly on display. 

The narrative in the chemistry department, however, was and continues to be the complete opposite. 

On May 31, 2020, nearly a week after George Floyd’s murder, the chemistry community still had not received any communications in support of or in solidarity with the Black community. On that day, the Black graduate students of Stanford chemistry sent out a call to the leadership in the department making it clear that if they failed to speak up, their silence would be taken as intentional. Rather than respond to the Black graduate students directly or address the concerns at a town hall on an unrelated topic held the following day with over 100 members of the department in attendance, the department chose to post a three sentence statement on its Facebook page: a statement that said we need justice for all communities in the same breath as it stated solidarity for Black communities. This troubling “all lives matter” rhetoric continued into the statement which was finally sent to students, three days after the initial call for leadership. An excerpt of their statement is posted below.

We acknowledge the history of racism, injustice and racial disparities in Black communities. We want to be loud and clear: we value Black lives. 

The systemic issues of racism, inequality and injustice go against the values of our department. The creation of scientific knowledge and technology, which you are all an essential part of, relies heavily on chemistry, and this must be interwoven within diversity, equity and inclusion. Everyone’s contribution is valued.

We stand with you and ask all to join in as we seek racial justice for everyone. 

The same department chair sent this message to the chemistry student population on April 20, 2021 after the conviction of Derek Chauvin.

Dear Members of the Chemistry Community, 

Justice is done. But a man died, as have too many others, so this is not the end, and we must remain committed in whatever way we can. 

Steve

This two-sentence statement maintained “justice is done” even while we had witnessed the murder of Daunte Wright not two weeks earlier. It reiterated the need for an elusive “we” to stay committed without any concrete ways or actions the department will take to do so.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the leadership of the department continued to disregard the needs of the students within the department. In response to an undergraduate student’s request to acknowledge the additional burdens placed on Black students following George Floyd’s murder by making a final paper optional, the incoming chair — now chair of the department — responded with “I already do have final papers submitted and fairness and equality to everyone is very important, I’m sure you would agree. That’s exactly what people are protesting against — unfairness and inequality (on a much larger scale obviously).” This statement likened a final paper to protests against persistent systemic violence. 

When it became clear that individual action wouldn’t be enough, over 20 undergraduates students in a major with about 40 students signed on to a letter to condemn the department’s response and bring attention to the pervasive, callous illusion of meritocracy that manifests itself as a lack of accommodations in the department. This was met with a dismissive response by the incoming chair, and no further action.

In the quarter before, coronavirus had forced the majority of undergraduate students off of campus. Many low-income and housing insecure students, including myself, had less than a week to figure out where to live. When I wrote to one of my current professors in the department about my situation, I got no response. He proceeded to respond to my partner’s request for clarification on the final project instructions less than a week later. Other students have had to take timed synchronous exams during not only a national pandemic but also power outages. This fall quarter, the chemistry department was the only department to uniformly not implement the CR/NC grading option recommended by the faculty senate. It reversed its decision mid-way into the quarter, likely due to student organizing, but without any explanation. 

The behaviors I’ve described go beyond impacting individual students or just chemistry majors; they ensure racially disparate outcomes on a University-wide level. A 2017 report by The Daily found that “Almost 50% of URM students dropped out of pre-med, compared to 17% of non-URM students” and that “all 108 [URM] undergraduates and recent graduates cited dissatisfaction with the pre-med courses as the reason why they either considered or did drop out of the pre-med track. Of these students, the large majority explicitly cite the chemistry requirements as the main reason why they dropped out.” 

After a year, the only action the department has taken on issues of inclusiveness has been the creation of a diversity and equity committee. Eight months after its creation, there has been no department-wide communication about the committee, their goals or action items. The committee invited faculty members to serve but implemented a selective application process for post-docs and graduate students. Undergraduates were never formally invited to participate on the committee, and the committee has met a total of two times since the beginning of the academic year. No town halls were ever held for students during this period of ongoing racial violence, and a list of action items proposed by Black graduate students has widely been ignored.

While I cannot say this type of behavior is unique to Stanford chemistry, it does appear to be particularly rampant and unchecked there. Stanford cannot call itself one of the top universities in the world or a champion of diversity and inclusion when Stanford chemistry and a number of other departments are destroying the spirits and aspirations of the most vulnerable and marginalized students. It does not matter how many companion courses, tutoring classes or URM programs are created when students’ well-being and input are actively being disregarded and departments are creating toxic cultures. Although criticism of chemistry and other departments has been widespread and pervasive, the University appears to have no interest or no power to hold them accountable. While students’ actions and behaviors are regularly being held against the standards of the honor code, the office of community standards student accountability process and Title IX, amongst others, it seems the same cannot be said for professors and departments at large. 

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From the Community | Join the May 3 Day of Refusal https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/02/op-ed-join-the-may-3-day-of-refusal/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/05/02/op-ed-join-the-may-3-day-of-refusal/#respond Mon, 03 May 2021 06:00:00 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1181923 We encourage all members of all campus communities, whether or not classes are in session at their institution, to withhold their labor on May 3 in solidarity with the movement to abolish campus police and all police in general.

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Over the past year, we have experienced unprecedented conditions and needs for organizing work: a restriction on in-person gathering and increased reliance on digital mediums, a historic uprising for Black lives that swept across the continent all summer long and the widespread expansion of abolitionist thought and practice. This convergence and preceding oppressive conditions led to the formal creation of the Cops Off Campus Coalition in fall 2020. Drawing on long histories of liberatory movements, this coalition brings together over 60 abolitionist organizations and campaigns on university campuses across the United States and Canada. We are students, alumni and workers at institutions miles apart, united around three central demands: 

We are rising up to demand all cops off of all campuses — be they public or private, K-12, university or college; we demand the land back into Indigenous hands; and we demand a campus and community that are truly free and safe for all. 

At Stanford University specifically, we demand the following:

  • An immediate defunding of the Stanford University Department of Public Safety, by 80-100%.
  • That Stanford University terminate the Memorandum of Understanding with Santa Clara County that gives rise to SUDPS. This model where Stanford University subsidizes an effectively private police force — that is accountable only to itself — needs to end.
  • An immediate halt to negotiations around the Stanford Deputy Sheriffs’ Association Collective Bargaining Agreement, as well as meaningful engagement with community demands and a termination of the contract.
  • An approach to mental health that precludes law enforcement involvement, one that respects the autonomy of the person in crisis and explains legal consequences of support offered to the person in crisis.

Colleges and universities spend millions of dollars on their police forces; Stanford University spends roughly $25 million on its Department of Public Safety alone, or roughly one-third of the entire budget for the Office of Student Affairs (and its 29 offices combined). To our knowledge, this is one of the most expensive campus police departments in the country: UC Berkeley spends $3 million less for a campus population over twice our size. This spending occurs while states cut appropriations for higher education and schools impose layoffs, furlough workers, slash wages and more amid the pandemic.

Yet none of this increased spending, militarization and policing leaves us any more safe. In 2015, Sam DuBose, an unarmed Black man, was shot and killed by a University of Cincinnati police officer during a traffic stop. In 2017, campus police killed Georgia Tech student Scout Schultz during a period of distress due to mental illness. In 2018, the University of Chicago Police Department shot Charles Thomas, a fourth-year Black student, during a mental health crisis. Also in 2018, Portland State University fired at Jason Washington 17 times and killed him as he was trying to break up a fight. A Yale campus officer was one of two officers who shot Stephanie Washington, an unarmed Black woman, in New Haven in 2019. In the past decade, California State University police officers have killed two unarmed people of color and maintained a jail on the CSU Northridge campus. The University of California police system has a history of using its police departments to brutalize students and to surveil and assault activists. And in 2002, an SUDPS deputy was involved in the fatal shooting of Pedro Calderon at the base of the Stanford foothills.

These countless incidents of repression, racial profiling, brutality and violence — fundamental characteristics of policing, inherent to its design — are why we choose to join the national Cops off Campus Coalition’s May 3 Day of Refusal.

On Monday, May 3, we join the countless students, faculty and staff who are absenting themselves from work, class, teaching and all forms of university labor. We cannot be complicit in the violence of our institutions. Students, faculty, staff, alumni, any group affiliated with the University — we must use our respective positionalities to pressure our institutions to take care of us and our communities. At profit-hungry universities, this won’t happen on its own. We have to mobilize our people power and demand change. So, we encourage all members of all campus communities, whether or not classes are in session at their institution, to withhold their labor on May 3 in solidarity with the movement to abolish campus police and all police in general. 

On May 3, we will gather at White Plaza to hear and see a chorus of campaigns joined in this struggle, which will be streamed across multiple platforms at 11 a.m. PT. We will continue to hold this space for folks interested in abolition and our work, until and through the nation-wide dance party event at 1 p.m. PT. This Day of Refusal across Turtle Island is only the beginning of Abolition May, a series of direct actions taken up by member campuses throughout the month, beginning with all campuses on May 3 and community events on May 25 in honor of the life of George Floyd, who was murdered by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020. Each campaign has its own individual targets, demands and tactics, but all unite under one principled demand: an end to campus policing. 

Read the full Day of Refusal pledge, signed by over 170 members and organizations of our campus community, here.

— Abolish Stanford

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Letter to the Community: Vote to approve amendments to the ASSU Constitution https://stanforddaily.com/2021/04/29/letter-to-the-community-vote-to-approve-amendments-to-the-assu-constitution/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/04/29/letter-to-the-community-vote-to-approve-amendments-to-the-assu-constitution/#respond Thu, 29 Apr 2021 08:00:59 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1181776 Since the beginning of 2021, the Constitutional Review Committee, a team of both graduate and undergraduate students holding a variety of roles both within and outside of the ASSU, has evaluated the Constitution and developed recommendations for changes to the document. Several key recommendations, passed unanimously by both the Undergraduate Senate and the Graduate Student Council, appear on the ballot this week.

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Dear Stanford Student Body,

While you are likely familiar with the Associated Students of Stanford University’s (ASSU’s) function and hopefully are engaged with the current ASSU election cycle, you may not be as familiar with the ASSU Constitution. The Constitution serves as the foundation for establishing the larger institutional structure. This document is lengthy and dense, weighing in at 52 pages plus an additional 110 pages of bylaws, and it is tasked with outlining definitions, clarifying duties and responsibilities and formalizing procedures. Unfortunately, a full review of the Constitution has not been performed since the 1990s, and the document as it stands does not fully reflect how ASSU currently operates. 

Since the beginning of 2021, the Constitutional Review Committee, a team of both graduate and undergraduate students holding a variety of roles both within and outside of the ASSU, has evaluated the Constitution and developed recommendations for changes to the document. In a process involving a comprehensive review of constitutional language and purpose as well as interviews with members and officers of the ASSU, the Committee has made headway in identifying key focus areas. We anticipate that a thorough and full review will continue into the 2021-22 academic year, but several key recommendations, passed unanimously by both the Undergraduate Senate and the Graduate Student Council, will be on the spring ballot this year for you to consider.

Our Interim Report provides additional context on the review process to date and about these recommendations, but we provide short explanations below to inform you as you prepare to vote on them this week. 

  1. Gender neutrality: The committee has reviewed the Constitution and removed all gender-specific pronouns to ensure the document includes and represents all members of the student body. 
  2. Undergraduate Senate elections by Single Transferable Vote method: To better capture students’ voting preferences, the Committee is supporting a change in voting method for Undergraduate Senate Elections to the Single Transferable Vote (STV) method, similar to ranked-choice voting. Instead of merely voting for multiple candidates from a list, students would rank them in order of preference. An explanatory video can be found here.  More detail on the process can be found in the interim report.
  3. Updates and clarification to the Constitutional Council process: The judicial branch of the ASSU is the Constitutional Council, an independent body of President-appointed councilors keeping the elected branches of the Association in check. This amendment aims to make the Council more accessible and accountable to all members of the Association by clarifying the Constitution’s language regarding the Council’s jurisdiction, as well as removing contradictory and confusing provisions from the text. The general changes this amendment proposes codify the findings of past Constitutional Council cases and make procedures of the Council easier to understand for a lay student. Of the minor changes proposed from past practice, this amendment allows the Council members to discuss cases in private and also allows for the Council to provide emergency relief over the summer months until a full case can be heard with the resumption of the school year in the fall. The first change is limited in that all official actions must be taken in public with three days of advance notice and that all records of the Council continue to remain publicly available to any student. The second action is intended to close a loophole that potentially allows unconstitutional actions to be performed during the summer months.
  4. Updates to the ASSU Finances Articles: The financial system is one of the most complex pieces of the ASSU, and the banking services and grants the ASSU provides to campus organizations is a central part of that system. The constitutional language surrounding the financial system is unclear and outdated. In addition, the legislative bodies, who bear the fiduciary responsibility of the organization under these Articles, presently have a limited understanding of the structure, status and activities of many parts of the financial system. This amendment improves the clarity of the constitutional language describing the financial system, and the engagement of the legislative bodies with its management. The full text of the proposed change can be found here.

    Key aspects of changed language include the following: 
    1. Improving the engagement of the legislative bodies with the financial system by providing regular reports from the Financial Manager’s office to the Legislative bodies.
    2. Revising language around legislative reserves and VSO reserves to match the ways we have already improved our banking system, including language about surcharges used to pay accounting staff and how fees interact with the ASSU general budget.
    3. Moving Quick/Standard Grant language to the Joint Bylaws. The GSC does not use the current system as described, and the language is unnecessarily detailed for the Constitution. This language has been replaced with more generic language allowing these rules to be further specified in the bylaws.
  5. Inclusion of a non-discrimination statement in the ASSU Constitution: Currently, an explicit prohibition on discrimination is in the ASSU Joint Bylaws, but nowhere in the ASSU Constitution. This amendment adds the non-discrimination language from the bylaws to the Constitution and additionally designates protected status based on perceived or actual disability, familial status, pregnancy, and genetic information. The amendment provides that all governing documents, officers, and branches of the Association must refrain from discrimination on the basis of a variety of protected characteristics, including race, gender, religion, national origin, sexual orientation and (dis)ability.

After close review, we strongly believe that adopting these changes offers a starting point that will adapt our Constitution to contemporary community norms and expectations for inclusivity and equity. As we continue to revise this document over the summer and into the next academic year, we will continue to update the community on our progress. In the meantime, any questions, ideas, or feedback are encouraged and welcomed at krapivin ‘at’ assu.stanford.edu. 

Signed,

The Constitutional Review Committee:
Viktor Krapivin, Co-Chair
Sherwin Lai, Co-Chair
Jamie Fine, Member
Christian Giadolor, Member
Daryn Rockett, Member
KC Shah, Member
JJ Scot Sutton, Member
Tim Vrakas, Member

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Letter to the Community: The spring ASSU survey https://stanforddaily.com/2021/04/18/letter-to-the-community-the-spring-assu-survey/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/04/18/letter-to-the-community-the-spring-assu-survey/#respond Mon, 19 Apr 2021 04:15:33 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1181312 The 325 survey responses can help us better understand the concerns of the student body, especially during a year when the majority of the student body is virtual, thus making connections more difficult.

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Dear Stanford community, 

We as your current ASSU Executive leadership want to update you on the survey that was administered at the end of winter quarter to solicit feedback on the determining factors for your on-/off-campus living and enrollment decisions for spring quarter. Though similar in certain respects to the Axess Quarterly Check-In Hold Survey in its focus on enrollment and living status, our survey also invited your comments through providing textboxes to elaborate on your selected answers. In advance of juniors, seniors and students with special circumstances living on campus this spring, we also included questions to gauge your level of familiarity with various aspects of Stanford’s spring COVID-19 Response. After a survey period of one month, we received 260 complete responses (325 total), with a wave of 65 new responses after our most recent all-campus email on Sunday, April 11. 

An important disclaimer about our results is that the low sample size means that we cannot draw any substantive conclusions, as 325 data points hardly represent the full range of Stanford student experiences during the remote year. At the same time, 325 responses can help us better understand the concerns of the student body, especially during a year when the majority of the student body is virtual, thus making connections more difficult. We are grateful to the 325 students who took time to engage with the ASSU and have taken note of themes that arise across multiple responses.

The survey is skewed toward juniors and seniors, who constitute 43% of all responses, and underrepresents our graduate student population as well as students on leaves of absence or gap years. We recognize that our stated emphasis on gathering feedback, questions, comments and concerns in advance of the return to campus likely contributed to the over-representation of students enrolled full-time or living on campus this quarter. We saw an increase in the number of graduate student responses in this past week since promoting it in our recent all-campus email, but the overall data is undergraduate-focused. 

General Takeaways 

To respect confidentiality, we have chosen not to include more detailed comments from the survey and instead will rely on high-level visualizations. The spring 2021 ASSU COVID-19 Response survey received 325 responses (as of April 17) distributed across the academic cohorts as follows: 

Letter to the Community: The spring ASSU survey
The Spring 2021 ASSU COVID-19 Response survey received 325 responses(as of April 17th) distributed across the academic cohorts as follows: 55 Frosh (1st year), 51 Sophomore (2nd year), 75 Junior (3rd year), 68 Senior (4th year), 1 Masters (>= 5th year), 68 Graduate Student, and 1 Other.
  • One out of two survey respondents planned on living on-campus this quarter 
  • 84% indicated that they are full-time enrolled for spring quarter; 6% are taking a flex-term; 9% taking a Leave of Absence and one student taking a gap year before their freshman year 
  • Academics, Mental Health & Wellbeing and Social Life were the top three determining factors among surveyed students for on-/off-campus living decisions 
  • Covid-19 Safety and Regulations, Mental Health & Wellness and Affordability were the top three ASSU issue areas selected as relevant to student spring quarter plans 
  • On average, students expressed a moderate to low level of confidence (6/10) in their knowledge of the Campus Compact, Stanford COVID-19 Guidelines, Santa Clara County Guidelines, Stanford Campus COVID-19 Testing Protocols, Stanford Health Check and Households, and a similar confidence level (5/10) for familiarity with Campus Safe Zones

We thank all of you who completed the survey and especially those of you who took the time to comment on your particular considerations for campus living and enrollment. You can review more comprehensive data visualizations for the ASSU spring survey results here. While some students indicated interest in a spring COVID-19 webinar or town hall in the survey, the ASSU and selected Office of the Vice Provost for Student Affairs (VPSA) panelists decided to cancel the town halls scheduled for this Wednesday (4/14) and Thursday (4/15) due to a low anticipated turnout. In light of the cancellation, the ASSU Spring survey will remain open for students who wish to let us know about how Stanford’s COVID-19 response informs their academic and living situations.

With love,

Vianna Vo, ASSU Executive President
Chris Middleton, ASSU Executive Vice President
Jianna So, ASSU Executive Chief of Staff

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From the Community | Serenity Strengthens My Gut https://stanforddaily.com/2021/04/06/serenity-strengthens-my-gut/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/04/06/serenity-strengthens-my-gut/#respond Tue, 06 Apr 2021 16:04:10 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1180773 I am from the 3rd Ward in Houston, TX, that one place Beyonce talks about in Homecoming. But one of the last times when I went back, I truly got a proper homecoming surprise. Upon my arrival to Houston from a trip to Europe in 2019, I ran into my Congresswoman Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. I draw on these memories now to make clear the experiences that inform my politics today.

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Growing up, one of my mom’s biggest lessons was the serenity prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

I am from the 3rd Ward in Houston, TX, that one place Beyonce talks about in Homecoming. But one of the last times when I went back, I truly got a proper homecoming surprise. Upon my arrival to Houston from a trip to Europe in 2019, I ran into my Congresswoman Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, one of the first Democrats to support Trump’s impeachment from the jump, stating, “We proceed with facts.” I told her that I was proud that she was holding Trump accountable as we posed for a photo.

From the Community | Serenity Strengthens My Gut

When we ran into each other in Ross, she had recognized me and asked for my major and how Stanford was going, and she then offered me an internship if I wanted one. This encounter reflects my belief that my actions speak louder than words, and I draw on these memories now to make clear the experiences that inform my politics today.

In high school, I worked alongside Republicans and Democrats at my school to throw one of the largest youth political events in Houston and was a part of the most active Young Democrats Club in the state of Texas. I also frequently made appearances at the Junior Statesmen of America (JSA), a national bipartisan political engagement organization. See, for years, I’ve been working with various youth empowerment organizations in Houston, namely the World Youth Foundation. For three years, I went with youth in my district (twice as a student and once as a guide) to the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference where I’ve met Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Maxine Waters in addition to seeing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In all of these political experiences, I learned the serenity model of politics. I wasn’t trying to change the minds of people I’ve disagreed with — rather, I was trying to model better political behavior so we could all be nicer. Changing minds comes naturally thereafter.

From the Community | Serenity Strengthens My Gut

My work in high school demonstrated an early commitment to working with people from all backgrounds in order to get things done. Although SCR tried to use this against me when I first ran for Senate, I rebuked them in an op-ed called “Ain’t No Omarosa ‘round Here.” Political grace is what I wrote about in my Stanford essay, which was published on Forbes after my admissions video went viral on Twitter, leading to articles published in the New York Times and Washington Post. The morning after my Stanford reaction was first played on KHOU 11 in Houston, I went to a donut shop with my mom who told the cashier that I’d gotten into Stanford; his response: “What position do you play?” This was what I would come to learn at Stanford was a microaggression. Long before I arrived at this school, I had to learn to find serenity in the face of external adversity, both within and outside my political work.

Weeks later, a video surfaced with over 3 million views of three women calling me, a 17-year-old kid, “obnoxious” for applying to a lot of schools. I tried to laugh it off, but many people who did not know me at all were judging me, so it hurt. It reminded me of Rowan Pope telling Olivia, “You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have.” Although it helped to see outrage on social media like on the Breakfast Club who gave the newscasters “Donkey of The Day,” I saw that as superficial accountability. I called the station to interview one newscaster, asking her to explain herself and apologize; the other two apologized separately. 

The one newscaster refused to apologize, with the Huffington Post praising my decision not to allow the interview with the reporter to air after her refusal to apologize. Youtuber Casey Neistat offered his public support, saying “the world needs more people like you,” and I decided to keep my head high in hopes that my positive behavior might inspire positivity and love from others — even if I couldn’t change how some thought about me. The practice of serenity and political grace informed how I chose to approach FoHo #135, refusing to give them screenshots of my private conversations to fuel the flame of rumors about my personal relationship after copies of my personal messages were leaked to the FoHo.

In high school, I started my high school’s first diversity club and received the 2017 Princeton Prize in Race Relations because, after the shooting of Michael Brown, students began calling me Ferguson. After coming to Stanford, I’d hoped to escape this sort of name-calling, yet I’ve been described with various coded language such as “scandalous,” “politically advantageous” and Machiavellian. I’ve developed anxiety from being Zoombombed, threatened with lawsuits, bullied and publicly humiliated. I’ve been compared to Godzilla whilst fighting to hold people associated with powerful groups like SCR, Turning Point USA and Save Our Sons accountable. 

It feels impossible to hold someone accountable without there being an assumed ulterior motive. Everyone is entitled to their opinions on our work, personal life and every literal phrase we say. This, at times, has made me fearful to walk around campus, but my gut knows me and what I stand for. Unfortunately, this comes with the territory of being Black, outspoken and unprotected at a predominately white institution (PWI). But I find my strength in serenity, making space for grace and accountability because there is too much more work to be done.

The Daily is committed to publishing a diversity of op-eds and letters to the editor. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Email letters to the editor to eic ‘at’ stanforddaily.com and op-ed submissions to opinions ‘at’ stanforddaily.com.

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Opinion | Abolish Greek: Sisterhood sold as commodity, not community https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/31/abolish-greek-sisterhood-sold-as-commodity-not-community/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/31/abolish-greek-sisterhood-sold-as-commodity-not-community/#respond Mon, 01 Feb 2021 05:39:26 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1177404 Reform will continue to be impossible if the structure of IFC/ISC organizations are not altered.

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 Alpha Chi Omega (AXO) no longer exists on Stanford’s campus. 

On Dec. 14, 2020, AXO National Council, a group composed of the sorority’s national president and five vice presidents, unanimously voted to revoke the Zeta Iota chapter’s charter. This action reveals that traditional sororities are intent on selling sisterhood as a commodity instead of building community, and that reform is impossible due to the involvement of their national organizations.

Last summer, Stanford’s AXO chapter faced a mass exodus. After failing to secure a unanimous vote to force AXO Headquarters (HQ) to consider revoking our charter, many members left. The vote was organized due to the chapter’s repeated failures and inability to bring about substantial reform from within. By the winter quarter, only four members remained in the chapter. Those who stayed believed they could bring about the reforms they felt would result in an inclusive AXO, one without interference from HQ. But those who disaffiliated had realized, after years of attempted reform, that the core issues with our chapter — financial inaccessibility and restricted membership — are at the very foundation of how sororities operate. 

Financial inaccessibility is foundational because the majority of membership dues go to national organizations, rather than internal chapter expenses, which makes abolishing dues logistically impossible. Anything less than removing dues entirely is still a barrier to entry for potential and current members. While there are resources, such as Stanford’s Opportunity Fund, to help pay dues, they rarely if ever are able to cover the full cost and impose an additional cost on students — in time and effort — that prevent sororities from being accessible and welcoming to all. All this cannot be reformed within the current set up of sororities as national organizations. 

Similarly, social exclusivity is upheld by membership recruiting practices taught by HQ. Active members train for countless hours to become the ideal brand ambassadors and recruiters. Almost every moment of a conversation with potential members is planned in order to ensure the chapter receives women who will increase their social standing on campus, and in turn, become their new brand ambassadors. The comparison of sororities to a business is not my own — in fact, it was inspired by the way AXO Headquarters referred to the sorority themselves in a recruitment powerpoint: “In order to get others to buy into what we’re selling, we have to believe in it and be confident that our product is the BEST product worth investing in on that campus. If we don’t believe that we’re selling the best experience, why would anyone else?” For more information on AXO Headquarters influence on the local AXO chapter, refer to my previous op-ed “Confessions from an Ex-Sorority President.”

The more time you spend in a sorority, the clearer it becomes that you cannot just reform your chapter and be the exception. Reform requires fundamentally changing how the sorority operates nationally, which requires rewriting every contract, doctrine and rule book it has. Last year, the idea of reform quickly became a pipe dream for most AXO members, and disaffiliation with the possibility of creating a Voluntary Student Organization (VSO) seemed like the only way to spend their short time at Stanford being a part of communities more reflective of their ideals: namely, total inclusivity and accessibility.

The Stanford chapter continued to exist until Dec. 15, 2020, when it received an email from AXO Headquarters notifying members that the charter had been revoked a day prior by the National Council. The email attempted to justify the decision by stating, “The chapter has experienced decreasing levels of member involvement, turnover in leadership and low overall morale. The collegiate members have expressed concern for their own well-being and noted concerns about not having the bandwidth nor capacity to maintain the experience.” More notably, “the chapter fell to a size where the Alpha Chi Omega experience was no longer viable,” meaning that it wasn’t financially viable. 

In a FAQ attached to said email, AXO Headquarters explain how “The Zeta Iota chapter has been given a great deal of support that far exceeded the level of support given to most chapters,” such as a full-time/part-time chapter consultant who lived near campus, recruitment-related in-person support and various other discussions about finances, chapter growth and more. HQ goes on to write that it no longer felt that the chapter was worth spending further time or money on.

HQ’s message reveals that sororities are a business marketing sisterhood. The Zeta Iota chapter no longer promised them visibility at a prestigious university. What’s more, it threatened reform as its condition for remaining affiliated. It became clear that AXO’s business model was no longer sustainable at Stanford and it was time to liquidate.

The FAQ stated that “While the chapter conducted ongoing discussions about the sustainability of the chapter experience, the National Council’s review of the chapter’s progress and current state resulted in a unanimous vote to withdraw the chapter’s charter…” This means that they took it upon themselves to end the chapter while the members continued to attempt to keep their chapter alive.  They also made it very clear in their FAQ that there was no ability to appeal the decision to revoke the charter as “No [the decision can not be appealed]… Ultimate responsibility for closing a chapter by withdrawing a charter rests with the National Council by unanimous decision.” 

So what happens to those who were in the chapter at the time? Without recognition from HQ, the Zeta Iota chapter of AXO can no longer officially claim to be a collegiate chapter. Due to university guidelines, the chapter will also not be recognized as a Greek organization as it must be backed by a national organization and is no longer considered a student organization on campus. Beyond this, AXO Headquarters will refund the membership dues paid for Fall quarter and transition those members to alumnae status. The fact that members were still required by their national organization to pay dues despite being in a literal pandemic, off-campus, and with a limited capacity to offer community is another prime example of how national organizations continuously attempt to commodify community instead of truly providing it. 

Despite being depicted as a student organization, it is clear that students in Greek organizations have no real say in whether or not the organization is allowed to exist on campus. Even if no one on campus wants to be a part of the Greek organization, the national organization can still attempt to force its presence on campus as it is ultimately up to the national organization if or when it revokes a charter. A charter serves a contract between the national organization and the university, and similar to a contract for ad space, the former is entitled to it whether or not people want to see it. Tellingly, they call the process of reestablishing their presence on a campus and recruiting new members during a period when the chapter has no current members as “re-colonizing,” while “colonization” is a similar process conducted when they first come to campus (example of usage by AXO). Even their terminology demonstrates an attitude of commodification and extraction — it reveals the business and corporatist mentality of Greek life. 

AXO HQ’s behavior only cements the fact that sororities exist to sell the promise of sisterhood and view each chapter as a financial investment. Once a chapter no longer becomes a lucrative investment, they cut their losses and move on to the next university willing to open their doors. As someone who once bought into this scheme, I am furious. Despite leaving in the summer and wanting the charter revoked, I still held love for the members and for what sororities could truly be. For Headquarters to take it upon themselves to take away a Stanford student organization is an immense breach. The idea of a sorority is beautiful — women banding together to help each other navigate college, encouraging one another to make philanthropy a normal part of their lives, pushing each other academically and providing the comfort knowing they are always at home when they are with one of their sisters. Instead, it has been tainted by a need to rise to the top of an arbitrary social hierarchy, classism (requiring membership dues), exclusivity (requiring recruitment) and lack of authenticity (having a national organization dictating how and if your sisterhood exists).

Reform will continue to be impossible if the structure of IFC/ISC organizations are not altered. Stanford chapters are viewed as a prized commodity, not a community. Any attempt to truly change the core problems of these organizations (classism and exclusivism, which also intersect with sexism and racism) cannot take hold due to their national organizations. If IFC and ISC organizations are truly interested in rooting out these problems on the Stanford campus, they must unhouse and disaffiliate from nationals. Abolish Stanford ISC/IFC Greek.


Contact Noor Fakih at nfakih ‘at’ stanford.edu and Abolish Stanford Greek at abolishstanfordgreek ‘at’ gmail.com or @AbolishStanfordGreek on Instagram.

Contact the opinions editors at opinions ‘at’ stanforddaily.com.

The Daily is committed to publishing a diversity of op-eds and letters to the editor. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Email letters to the editor to eic ‘at’ stanforddaily.com and op-ed submissions to opinions ‘at’ stanforddaily.com

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The Battle for Black Studies: Going beyond anti-racism https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/27/the-battle-for-black-studies-going-beyond-anti-racism/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/27/the-battle-for-black-studies-going-beyond-anti-racism/#respond Thu, 28 Jan 2021 05:05:43 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1177280 Instead of recognizing the wealth of knowledge and leadership that the African and African American Studies program already brings to campus despite the limitations of its program status, Stanford promised to create three new initiatives related to “the impacts of race in America.”

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The Battle for Black Studies is an article series run in collaboration with the Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA) and the Black Student Union (BSU). It comes amid a decades-long struggle for a department of African and African American Studies at Stanford. This series, however, is not only born out of a desire to highlight the need for a departmentalized AAAS program — it is an ongoing project of imagining and theorizing possibility, in line with the long tradition of Black Studies. It is a project of education, addressing the realities of race and fighting for a more equitable future. We hope you will join us. 

As a junior at Stanford, I was asked by one of my professors during his office hours, “What would you recommend that other white people read to become better allies?” It was and is a frustrating question, because it assumes that there is a magic answer, one article on “Ten Ways to Be Less Racist” that will put people on an imagined path to racial justice. Asking this question continues to center whiteness, and prioritizes work that is written for white consumption and for white conversion to the cause of allyship. Questions like this miss so much, and yet they are emblematic of Stanford’s approach to addressing issues of race, and why that approach fails. When I came to Stanford, I knew that I wanted to contribute to racial justice work in some way. With that vague idea in mind, I joined the NAACP, got a job at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute and attended events with speakers sharing their work on topics like criminal justice, education and housing. In all of these places, I realized that students and professors in African and African American Studies were leading the efforts, bringing the most thoughtful perspectives, and challenging my thinking the most. Black Studies doesn’t exist for me as a white person, but I am confident that learning about Black history, resistance and liberation was by far the most meaningful and rigorous education that Stanford could offer me.

Last summer, in the aftermath of renewed national attention to police murder of Black people, it seemed like “anti-racist” books and reading lists were everywhere. Alongside calls to self-educate were those to support Black-owned businesses. However, when the same popular titles — such as
“So You Want to Talk About Race” by Ijeoma Oluo, “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi and “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo — began to sell out everywhere, frustrated responses by both white would-be anti-racists and white journalists demonstrated the futility of this quick-fix approach to racism. As DL Mullen, owner of Semicolon, Chicago’s only Black woman-owned bookstore, wrote: “The ‘Black booksellers can’t handle a ton of orders’ is the wrong narrative to try to push right now, journalists. We can. We are. We do. Regularly. Let’s try to be a tad more creative with the bylines, ie: ‘A Rush to Purchase the Same 5 ‘Anti-Racist’ Titles Creates Backorders and Proves that’s [sic] the Real ‘White Fragility’ is Practicing Patience.’” Mullen is pointing out not only white hypocrisy and entitlement, but also implicitly challenging the usefulness of the idea of a book that can bring one to a place of anti-racism. 

Stanford’s response to calls for more support for Black scholarship, Black faculty and Black students similarly falls short. Instead of recognizing the wealth of knowledge and leadership that the African and African American Studies program already brings to campus despite the limitations of its program status, Stanford promised to create three new initiatives related to “the impacts of race in America.” When it comes to meeting the demands to provide further support to existing programs, in particular the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute and AAAS, Stanford offers only to consider, to conduct studies, to hold conversations, to create strategies. This is the language of racism — slowing progress and willfully ignoring the conversations, strategies, and demands that have been put forward time and time again by Black students, professors, and alumni. The idea that 2020 provided a kind of new moral clarity is ahistorical, forgetting the long history of activism at Stanford that has pushed for change and the many demands that have yet to be met. By pretending that these ideas and conversations are new, Stanford seeks to absolve itself of its past inaction.

Stanford was the first private university to start an African and African American Studies program not because of its own benevolence or commitment to justice but because, in 1968, after Dr. King’s assassination, a group of 70 students from the Black Student Union took the microphone from the provost during an event called “Colloquium and Plan for Action: Stanford’s Response to White Racism.” Black students offered a plan of their own, and BSU Chair Keni Washington demanded: “Put your money and your action where your mouth is.” 

Stanford has another opportunity to put its money where its mouth is. There is no need to look for magic solutions or flashy anti-racism branding. Stanford can honor the demands made by students in 1968 and every year since then by not only making a Black Studies department, but by providing it the funding and institutional resources it needs to thrive. 

Jessie Schrantz is a second-year MSW student at University of Illinois at Chicago and an intern with the Chicago Torture Justice Center. She graduated from Stanford in 2017 with a degree in African & African American Studies and minors in Spanish and Public Policy.

Contact Jessie Schrantz at jessicaschrantz ‘at’ gmail.com.

The Daily is committed to publishing a diversity of op-eds and letters to the editor. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Email letters to the editor to eic ‘at’ stanforddaily.com and op-ed submissions to opinions ‘at’ stanforddaily.com.

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Opinion: Environmental justice must be foundational to the new School of Sustainability https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/27/environmental-justice-must-be-foundational-to-the-new-school-of-sustainability/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/27/environmental-justice-must-be-foundational-to-the-new-school-of-sustainability/#respond Thu, 28 Jan 2021 04:31:21 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1177285 To advance environmental justice leadership, Stanford requires institutional structures and resources to support EJ research, teaching, communication and community building in the new school.

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Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

– Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

We are writing as a diverse group of Stanford staff, students, and faculty committed to Environmental Justice for Sustainability at Stanford. This weekend, faculty will gather for a deliberative democracy process guiding plans for the new School of Sustainability and Climate (SoSaC). We strongly encourage serious discussion on this vital question: how will Stanford build a truly innovative institution that addresses the most important, interconnected racial justice and sustainability problems of our times?

Solving the sustainability challenges of the 21st century requires actions grounded in equity, collaboration, and positive change for all people and societies—including Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) communities and other groups made marginalized. We will achieve this goal only by aligning sustainability research and programs at SoSaC with established principles of environmental justice, universal human rights, and UN sustainable development goals; and also by committing to environmental justice (EJ) scholarship in support of university-wide efforts to diversify Stanford’s faculty and students.

To advance environmental justice leadership, Stanford requires institutional structures and resources to support EJ research, teaching, communication, and community building in the new school. We have had many years of discussions and meetings where we have heard EJ referenced as an aspiration. But to our knowledge, no structures have yet emerged in draft plans to support the institutionalization of EJ at Stanford or in the new school.

The current lack of institutionalized support and resources for EJ at Stanford suggests a strong need for deliberations this weekend and beyond to include EJ principles and ask (1) why do EJ principles matter for the new school? (2) how can we create the necessary institutional spaces for EJ to grow and flourish, improving scholarship, teaching, and diversity at Stanford? (3) How can Stanford catch up with peer institutions (e.g., Yale, UC Berkeley, Brown, Duke, University of Michigan, etc.) who have already implemented rigorous EJ departments, institutes, programs, majors and minors?

Here, we share concrete ways by which EJ will be transformative at Stanford. Applying an EJ lens expands sustainability research by applying a wide range of disciplinary areas to address structural inequities embedded within environmental and sustainability problems. This includes augmenting our ability to do cutting-edge sustainability research that examines the deep links between histories of racialized violence and oppression and environmental degradation.

Further, EJ frameworks enable sustainability research questions, methodologies, and collaborations that engage directly and respectfully with BIPOC communities and other groups that have been marginalized. This approach includes centering the knowledge and experiences of BIPOC communities through self-representation in the academy.

In this way, EJ research and teaching at Stanford can lead to pioneering forms of interdisciplinary and applied environmental research that draws on both the biophysical and social sciences to effect meaningful change, e.g., by connecting environmental monitoring that is conducted through deep partnerships with communities to critical analysis of structural inequities, and also by effectively communicating our research results.

We therefore write to the broader Stanford community with urgency: current deliberations will determine the future of EJ at Stanford. 

We recommend the following:

First, explicitly name “environmental justice” and “sustainable and just societies” as cross-cutting themes for the new school. Translation: EJ will be included as a priority in hiring, new courses, interdisciplinary educational programs, new departments, the creation of new institutes, etc. through the distribution of resources that are mobilized in the new school.

Second, create a new department that can attract leading environmental social scientists and diverse EJ scholars to the new school, such as a Department of Global Environmental Justice, Department of Climate Justice, or Department of Environmental Ethics and Social Justice. This new department will work in partnership with institutions such as the proposed Department of African and African American Studies, and will enable Stanford to take a rigorous approach to studying issues of uneven power dynamics and racial justice that are inherent to environmental politics and sustainability. Translation: EJ leadership will have a strong role in creating and guiding the new school, so that Stanford can continue to attract the most talented and diverse faculty and students and build its EJ teaching and research capabilities into the future.

We make these recommendations as members of the Environmental Justice Working Group (EJWG) at Stanford, serving a broad community of 400+ members. Our EJWG Coordinating Council comprises a leadership team with faculty, staff, and student coleads and representatives from 20 different organizational affiliations on campus.

This year, the EJ Working Group has joined with faculty across departments and schools and received funding support for our Initiative for Environmental Equity and Sustainability at Stanford. In addition, the EJWG has received over 800 signatures of support for our EJ cluster hire proposal, advanced through Stanford’s Long Range Planning process. The EJWG further supports the departmentalization of African American and African Studies (AAAS) at Stanford, as a critical opportunity to center Black-focused and Black-led research, Black community voices, and Black leadership in the academy.

Stanford and Silicon Valley will be fundamentally changed if we incorporate EJ principles and leadership. We see this school as a crucial opportunity to advance racial and environmental justice through sustainability science. By supporting EJ at Stanford, we can learn and teach how to think about environmental sustainability and social equity in transformative ways and develop the capacity to train future generations with the tools, strategies and experiences they need to meet the most urgent sustainability challenges of our time.

Dr. Sibyl Diver, Earth Systems Program

Dr. Emily Polk, Program in Writing and Rhetoric

Professor Rodolfo Dirzo, Department of Biology and Woods Institute

Professor Rob Jackson, Department of Earth System Science and Woods and Precourt Institutes

Professor Gabrielle Hecht, Department of History and Freeman Spogli Institute

Ayoade Balogun, Associated Students of Stanford University, Co-Director of Environmental Justice and Sustainability

Tanvi Dutta Gupta, Students for a Sustainable Stanford

Chris Tan, Students for Environmental and Racial Justice

Penelope Van Tuyl, Center for Human Rights and International Justice

Jessie Brunner, Center for Human Rights and International Justice.

Writing together with the EJ Working Group Coordinating Council.

To get involved in EJ at Stanford, please see the Stanford Environmental Justice Working Group at https://www.ejstanford.com/ and on social media, or sign up for our listserv at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/ejworkgroup.

Contact the EJ Working Group Coordinating Council at ejwgstanford ‘at’ gmail.com.

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An alum’s response to ‘Why are student-athletes more important…’: Not us vs. them https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/24/an-alums-response-to-why-are-student-athletes-more-important-not-us-vs-them/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/24/an-alums-response-to-why-are-student-athletes-more-important-not-us-vs-them/#respond Mon, 25 Jan 2021 05:13:46 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1177140 This op-ed is not meant to garner sympathy from anyone. It is meant to set a standard of respect. There is a time and place to complain about the privileges student-athletes might have — the time is not now and the place is not at Stanford (many other schools give their athletes privileges which do not exist at Stanford).

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Being frustrated, apathetic and angry, along with the rest of the emotions in the book, is absolutely justified. I’m sure there are things we have felt and experienced this year that we don’t have adequate words for, as we wrestle with a global pandemic that has been wringing us dry for nearly a year. I think we can agree that any and all feelings are warranted and that they shouldn’t be bottled up. When they become problematic is when they are viscerally disrespectful to others, and worse, are expressed as such on a public news platform.

I believe that we’re all entitled to our own opinions, but only to the extent that we understand who our words could harm. I thought we had collectively learned this, especially at an institution like Stanford, which prides itself on teaching its students to tolerantly and empathetically value experiences and conversations. Most importantly, we’re taught to be informed and educated when we speak or write about experiences that are not our own. With all that 2020 crafted us a lens to see, it is discouraging to see that some members of the Stanford community haven’t learned, even now that hindsight really is 2020. 

Everyone has experienced the pain and heartache of this pandemic differently — we can truly only speak for ourselves and how the weight is manifesting pressure in our body, relationships and life. The least we can do is understand and respect this about each other. Needless to say, the last thing we need to be reading in our school newspaper is a group within our community being damagingly represented. Importantly, this is a group, because many see them as less intelligent and unwelcome, that has always had to lift up its own voice. Student-athletes’ voices have been some of the most prominent, powerful and impactful tools in combating injustice, whether they hail from Stanford, other NCAA schools or professional sports. Dare you say they’re more privileged when you haven’t walked in their shoes. Many, if not most, are competing this year for reasons well beyond the respective game they play — their role is beyond what they can do with a ball. Athletes are not more important than anyone else, but they are doing an important job that not all have the platform to do. 

Now is not the time to create an intentional rift. If anyone needs someone to bash, there’s a long list. Don’t come after the student-athletes who have given their bodies, minds and hearts to ensuring that we can see some kind of normalcy on TV (that isn’t a glorified Zoom meeting) and who have fought relentlessly to use their platforms to instill change in our shared community. You might wonder where my place is in this. Well, I was a student-athlete at Stanford too — I graduated in June. I also recognize that I haven’t lived through what it’s like to be an NCAA student-athlete during the pandemic, so I did some research and asked the current student-athletes themselves. Many of the sentiments that follow are a reflection, echo or paraphrase of their words. Apparently, doing research and ensuring that you’re informed is a novel concept for some, even those publishing pieces of writing who attend one of the premier research institutions in the world. 

I don’t doubt that being on campus is tense to say the least, and that unpopular decisions about living arrangements have immensely affected everyone within the Stanford community. I truly cannot imagine the dearth of complications, abuse and inadequacies that many students are being forced to live with away from Stanford, and I don’t dispute that certain decisions will take a financial, mental, emotional and physical toll. Be critical of Stanford’s decision-making — I fully respect that, but don’t make claims about an experience that you haven’t lived. You cannot think or write critically about something, especially a group of people, if you don’t understand their experience. Generalizing about that group, and speaking on behalf of them when you aren’t one of them, is ignorant. Many decisions affect student-athletes too. Let’s take a moment to think about their experience, and what they have lost for how much they continue to give to Stanford. 

The vast majority of student-athletes have not been on campus. Throughout the pandemic, since their seasons ended so abruptly in March, student-athletes have spent time at home like everyone else, with all the challenging baggage that this brings. Imagine trying to train at home — without facilities, coaches and teammates — in order to prepare for a season that might happen. Practice, lifts and adequate preparation for a season cannot be orchestrated over Zoom (not to mention, student-athletes are still required to take the same course load as everyone else). After loving a sport so much that you give thousands of hours to it over the course of 10+ years of your life, a pandemic switches the gears on the train, setting you on an unprecedented, uncertain, foggy path where the very thing you have dedicated your life to is stripped away. Mental health among student-athletes, to no surprise, has suffered greatly. I lost the end of my senior season back in March, but at least I was semi-prepared for the end of my career. I can’t imagine how dark and unclear it might be trying to navigate without this empowering piece of your identity — the thing that gives life, purpose and meaning. A public lack of empathy for other members of our community and what they are experiencing only deepens the distance and stress of this current moment.

What has been painted as “special privileges” for student-athletes was a decision to protect other students and the community as a whole. To accommodate Santa Clara’s strict policy, student-athletes have been housed in Mirrielees House and Suites. Per county protocol, teammates in only two households can share equipment at one time. Additionally, Stanford does not want student-athletes to be housed in the same buildings as other students in order to ensure that one group does not get the other sick, if by chance someone is exposed elsewhere and brings it back to campus. The same goes for student-athletes residing in the hotels near campus. By nature of the close physical proximity in competition and COVID-19’s continued spread, it is smart to isolate the student-athletes this way. 

For student-athletes on campus right now, the reality is not a fun, social or privileged experience. Most days are spent pushing bodies to their physical limits and taking classes isolated and alone in dorm rooms. As is typical with a student-athlete’s lifestyle, there is often little to no time to eat meals. I can surely see an electric bike being helpful here, saving time and providing a quick leg break (not to mention the fact that there is a very small subset of student-athletes who have electric bikes — many cannot afford them). Just because student-athletes are peak physical performers doesn’t mean that their bodies aren’t constantly exhausted or injured. Student-athletes’ bodies are riddled with injuries that will permanently alter their mental and physical health for the rest of their lives. Student-athletes are on campus to work, compete and advocate. 

Student-athletes spend at least 20 hours each week training. This does not include the time spent getting ready for practice, transitioning to practice from class, fueling and refueling, tending to injuries in the training room and training outside practice. Of course, there’s also classes and all other academic requirements that come with being a Stanford student. Athletically and academically, Stanford student-athletes represent the University diligently and passionately, hence our program’s 25-year streak of winning the Directors’ Cup, awarded to the best Division I program in the nation. 

This op-ed is not meant to garner sympathy from anyone. It is meant to set a standard of respect. There is a time and place to complain about the privileges student-athletes might have — the time is not now and the place is not at Stanford (many other schools give their athletes privileges which do not exist at Stanford). Importantly, no one’s slate is clean. Mistakes have undoubtedly been made by everyone — manipulation has occurred, groups of students have been harmed by decisions, students have been hit on sidewalks by bikers and COVID-19 policy and restrictions have been disrespected and disregarded. However, you’d think we would be beyond generalizing now, and painting everyone with the same brush, especially in an opinion piece. Write about something that you have thoroughly researched. A newspaper is not a space to spew hatred. Journal, rant to a friend, pray. God loves us despite the chaos. Being tired is warranted, but be tired of systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, inequality in access to mental healthcare, inequity, lack of cultural competency, ethnic and LGTBQ+ disparities and lack of affordable housing to name a few. Help everyone quit these instead. Understanding and making space for a difference of opinion is how we grow, but there is a time to take a step back and be critical of your perspective and vantage point — what are you standing for?

Student-athletes are students, hence why “student” comes first, but they are doing a job, right now, that not all students can do. They represent something much bigger than themselves and they’re not doing it because it is necessarily fun. They are doing it because they have a duty to stand, or kneel, within a heavily broadcasted platform that others don’t have. And they do it for everyone. Respect and appreciate that, especially now. I think this is where some people can learn from student-athletes, who build around a team, selflessness, compassion and accountability. We’re all on the same team. We can’t be turning on each other anymore. 

Contact Mikaela Brewer at mbrewer8 ‘at’ alumni.stanford.edu. 

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Why ‘Save Cantonese at Stanford’ matters: A testimonial from an anthropology Ph.D. candidate https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/21/why-save-cantonese-at-stanford-matters-a-testimonial-from-an-anthropology-ph-d-candidate/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/21/why-save-cantonese-at-stanford-matters-a-testimonial-from-an-anthropology-ph-d-candidate/#respond Fri, 22 Jan 2021 05:01:25 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1177040 I am therefore extremely distressed to learn that Stanford has decided to cut Cantonese from a variety of thoughtfully designed courses to an on-demand offering of language tutoring.

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“Wait … did you just say that you learned Cantonese in America? How possible is that?”

“Yes, actually I had taken two years of Cantonese classes at Stanford before I came to Hong Kong for fieldwork.” 

Conversations like this constantly occurred during my research in Hong Kong from 2018-19, when I studied contemporary Hong Kong’s political culture by immersing myself in a network of advocacy groups that aim at democratizing land-use urban planning. Every time I explained this to my friends and interlocutors, they were amazed by the vast array of language courses available at Stanford University. 

So was I proud and grateful for this experience offered by the Cantonese program at Stanford. From 2016 through 2018, starting from scratch, I took four Cantonese courses with Dr. Sik Lee Dennig, joined her during numerous office hours and had many off-hours meetings she kindly offered when I could practice my language skills and learned about Hong Kong from her. Without a wide range of Cantonese language classes, I would not have been able to carry out my ethnographic research that requires a high level of Cantonese proficiency in everyday settings. 

Beyond Hong Kong, I also conducted some research on a short field trip to Guishan Island in Zhuhai, Guang Dong Province in the summer of 2020. As the only one in a small team who could speak Cantonese, I facilitated an unexpected interview we originally prepared in Mandarin (the interviewer felt more comfortable in Cantonese). A month later, when I was wandering in a morning market in Ningde, Fujian (one of my hometowns in China where I am currently based for dissertation writing and exploring future research projects), I met a middle-aged woman selling Indonesian snacks in the street. I learned that she came from an overseas Chinese family, and then we ended up talking in Cantonese, her mother tongue. Both of us found it joyful — and surprising — to speak Cantonese in Fujian, a province outside the greater Canton region. 

A few weeks before I wrote this op-ed, I had dinner with a friend from Macau, the other Special Administrative Region of China with a majority of Cantonese-speaking residents. I learned about his first-hand experience of Macau’s social and political life during the COVID-19 pandemic, which gives me a useful reference to think comparatively about my ongoing project on Hong Kong. This kind of encounter wouldn’t be possible without the linguistic-cultural intimacy enacted by my proficiency in Cantonese. If English is the first language that prepares my career as a “transnational” scholar, Cantonese is definitely the second one that profoundly diversifies this trip with numerous nodes of inquiry that I previously hadn’t thought about.

I am therefore extremely distressed to learn that Stanford has decided to cut Cantonese from a variety of thoughtfully designed courses to an on-demand offering of language tutoring. The abrupt termination of Dr. Dennig’s current lectureship, in particular, is an institutional mistreatment to her 20+ years of service to the intellectual community of Stanford. Reading testimonials from numerous alumni whose learning experience at Stanford benefits from Dr. Dennig’s work, it is not hard to tell that what she has done is much more than teaching language as an easily replaceable employee (as the rationale of budget assumes), but as a devoted educator, well-respected facilitator and beloved member of the community. It is an ill-judged decision for Stanford to make major changes to the Cantonese program without substantially consulting with Dr. Dennig, not to mention ending her position in such an insensitive manner.

Beyond my experience of learning Cantonese at Stanford as a student, I would like to say a few words in support of the program as an anthropologist. It’s not uncommon to hear people say (especially in Mainland China but increasingly elsewhere) that Cantonese is just a dialect in China, downplaying its significance at a time when Mandarin Chinese becomes a dominant representative of Chinese languages. This is clearly a biased reading under what linguistic anthropology calls a monolinguistic, nationalistic language ideology. Here, this language ideology maintains that a nation-state should have what is in fact a most standardized “dialect” as its exclusive national language. 

Today, the strongest force that puts this language ideology into practice is the Chinese government. In recent years, ethno-linguistic diversity within a nation-state, once promised in China’s progressive socialist path and manifested most clearly in the Regional Ethnic Autonomy System backed by the state, is being considerably curtailed by the increasingly majoritarian, Han-Chinese centered cultural politics. In this politics, state institutions more vigorously enforce what might be called “Mandarin First” language policy. The enormous distress this kind of policy imparts on minority groups is, most recently, evident in the ethnic-Mongolians’ protest against curriculum reform in 2020.

Ironically, this tendency, with all its unfortunate outcomes, may be globally reproduced if institutions too quickly adopt the reasoning that “China is important, so we only need to learn ‘its language’ — Mandarin — instead of its ‘dialects.’” It would be particularly saddening if Cantonese, a recognized “global language,” as several pieces in the testimonial series and Stanford Daily op-eds have shown, receives the nationalistic treatment even outside China. With these reflections, I sincerely hope that as a renowned educational institution, Stanford could take the due responsibility and keep our Cantonese program. 

I call the readers of The Stanford Daily to support the Save Cantonese at Stanford petition. I urge the University to reevaluate the plan’s negative effects on both the local intellectual community and Stanford’s reputation as a top-tier institution and to make more sensible decisions regarding the Cantonese program. 

Shan Huang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford, specializing in urban studies and political cultures with a regional focus on Hong Kong and Mainland China. 

Contact Shan Huang at shan5 ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

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The Battle for Black Studies: AAAS helped me achieve my full potential. Stanford should departmentalize it. https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/19/the-battle-for-black-studies-aaas-helped-me-achieve-my-full-potential-stanford-should-departmentalize-it/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/19/the-battle-for-black-studies-aaas-helped-me-achieve-my-full-potential-stanford-should-departmentalize-it/#respond Wed, 20 Jan 2021 05:21:38 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1176914 In this moment, a AAAS education is more important than ever, and it is past time for Stanford to put its considerable money where its mouth is. AAAS helped me achieve my full potential; with departmental status, it can ensure that generations of future students, and the University itself, can do the same.

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The Battle for Black Studies is an article series run in collaboration with the Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA) and the Black Student Union (BSU). It comes among a decades-long struggle for a department of African and African American Studies at Stanford. This series, however, is not only born out of a desire to highlight the need for a departmentalized AAAS program — it is an ongoing project of imagining and theorizing possibility, in line with the long tradition of Black Studies. It is a project of education, addressing the realities of race and fighting for a more equitable future. We hope you will join us. 

The summer after my first year at Stanford, I managed to get an internship at a small tech company in my hometown. Like many, I’d been dazzled by the idea of programming as a freshman, but as July turned to August I began to feel disenchanted. In part it was the hours I spent debugging code, but more immediately it was the hours I spent watching Ferguson burn on the news. When I returned to campus as a sophomore, I decided to expand my knowledge of the world and of my own history and identity by enrolling in “Introduction to African & African American Studies (AAAS).” In hindsight, it was one of the most consequential decisions I made at Stanford. A year and a half later, I switched my major from Symbolic Systems to AAAS. In June 2017, I graduated with honors.

Not everyone shared in my sense of accomplishment. A few months after graduation, a close friend from high school shared a story with me about a conversation she’d had with a former classmate of ours. The classmate asked her if I had ended up graduating as a SymSys major as I had previously planned to. “No,” my friend replied, “he actually switched to African and African American Studies.” The classmate shook his head ruefully. “Aw man,” he sighed. “He had so much potential.”

It’s not hard to see why he might think this. Surrender a chance to land a job at Google or Facebook? Really? Every time I received a curt rejection email from a prospective employer during my senior spring, I had to momentarily wonder if I had made a mistake. But the more time has passed, the more confident I’ve become that his statement was profoundly, incredibly wrong. Studying AAAS was not a waste of my potential: It was critical to achieving my full potential.

AAAS offers students the opportunity to study the Black experience from a number of academic perspectives — from history to literature, sociology to performance art. It is perhaps no surprise that this diverse mix of disciplines trains graduates who go on to become (among other things) community organizers, artists, academics and lawyers. I fall into the latter category (graduation from Harvard Law notwithstanding), and I credit my AAAS education with providing me with a more critical lens to assess the U.S. legal system and its impacts on not only Black Americans, but all marginalized people in this country. Becoming a AAAS major also allowed me to become a part of an incredible community of peers and friends who consistently amaze me with their passion and accomplishments, and it connected me with Black professors and mentors who helped guide me through my undergraduate experience.

Unfortunately, the benefits of AAAS (and Black studies generally) have largely been ignored by the University, which has tended to adopt the attitude of my high school classmate. This is perhaps best on display on the far western edge of campus. There, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute — home to the authoritative resources on King’s life and legacy — still sits in a shabby portable in the literal shadow of the colossal Engineering Quad, even after decades of broken promises to move the institute to a better location. AAAS itself — created in direct response to student activism in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination — has been held in a similarly separate-but-unequal status: It is an academic program rather than a full department. Among other things, this prevents AAAS from hiring its own faculty and limits the program’s ability to provide adequate mentorship and support to its students.

Financial constraints simply cannot justify this treatment. From 2000 to 2016, under President John Hennessy, Stanford raised $13 billion in donations, “leading the country every year but one.” Nor can the failure to promote AAAS to department status be premised on some sort of argument about academic impact or fit. African American Studies departments exist at universities across the country, including at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton and Berkeley. Moreover, Stanford already has full departments in German Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Iberian & Latin American Cultures and others. If these are any guide, it would clearly be appropriate for AAAS to be a department; indeed, it’s more remarkable that AAAS is not included among this list.

At this point, Stanford’s position cannot be attributed to anything other than a systemic devaluation of Black studies. Following last summer’s widespread Black Lives Matter protests prompted by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, President Marc Tessier-Lavigne released a plan for “advancing racial justice at Stanford.” Among the plan’s components was a “University-wide self-study” that would consider the “future status” of AAAS and “whether the research and educational missions of the university would be better served with departments” than programs. These developments are heartening, but it doesn’t take a study to answer those questions. It simply requires listening to the faculty, students, alumni and members of the Stanford community — and the Black community in particular — who have called for full support of AAAS.

Last summer’s uprisings and the inequalities of the pandemic have made it abundantly clear how much work is yet to be done to achieve racial justice in this country. In this moment, an AAAS education is more important than ever, and it is past time for Stanford to put its considerable money where its mouth is. AAAS helped me achieve my full potential; with departmental status, it can ensure that generations of future students, and the University itself, can do the same.

Alex Ramsey is a second-year law student at Harvard Law School, where he is an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated with honors from Stanford in 2017 with a degree in African & African American Studies.

Contact Alex Ramsey at a.ramsey525 ‘at’ gmail.com.

The Daily is committed to publishing a diversity of op-eds and letters to the editor. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Email letters to the editor to eic ‘at’ stanforddaily.com and op-ed submissions to opinions ‘at’ stanforddaily.com.

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The Battle for Black Studies: Desiring a beloved community… https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/12/the-battle-for-black-studies-desiring-a-beloved-community/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/12/the-battle-for-black-studies-desiring-a-beloved-community/#respond Wed, 13 Jan 2021 05:44:35 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1176577 I write this for all of us who are now “The Trayvon Generation,” and especially for those who have grown up in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012 in Sanford, Florida. We want not only a beloved community that values Black love, life and liberty as a foundation for a freer world; but also strive for structural change to achieve that desire.

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The Battle for Black Studies is an article series run in collaboration with the Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA) and the Black Student Union (BSU). It comes among a decades-long struggle for a department of African and African American Studies at Stanford. This series, however, is not only born out of a desire to highlight the need for a departmentalized AAAS program it is an ongoing project of imagining and theorizing possibility, in line with the long tradition of Black Studies. It is a project of education, addressing the realities of race and fighting for a more equitable future. We hope you will join us. 

“Black celebration is a village practice that has brought us together in protest and ecstasy around the globe and across time. Community is a mighty life force for self-care and survival. But it does not protect against murder. Dance itself will not free us.” 

– Elizabeth Alexander, “The Trayvon Generation” 

I write this for all of us who are now “The Trayvon Generation,” and especially for those who have grown up in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012 in Sanford, Florida. We want not only a beloved community that values Black love, life and liberty as a foundation for a freer world; but also strive for structural change to achieve that desire. Indeed, since the outbreak of the pandemic, I have been thinking a lot about places of refuge, of care, of hospitality and the hope of health … of the too many (especially Black, brown and native) who have died from the pandemic and of Jacob Blake speaking from his hospital bed.

If you have participated, as I have, in Professor Hobbs’ Sunday Community Hours, you may have heard some guests speak of southeast Arkansas where Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks and I claim roots. My mother, who is 89, grew up in the segregated South in the town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. So did civil rights lawyer Wiley Branton, activist Ivory Perry and writer Alex Haley. As was the case in many other places throughout the South, Black residents of Pine Bluff built communities of necessity that were dedicated to the survival of its members. There was a Black university, a Black-owned taxi company, a Black movie house, churches and other institutions where the brutality of their lived reality — the daily deprivations — psychological, economic and otherwise — could be countered with a measure of dignity.

My grandfather, Ernest Edward Bright, moved to Pine Bluff in 1929 as a young man and in an effort to make a space for Black care, he became the founder of the United Links Hospital — the only hospital dedicated entirely to Black patients in the entire state, where predominately white hospitals only had segregated wards. He was its administrator for more than 20 years. He devised an insurance plan for landowners to use for sharecroppers who could receive care at the Hospital. My mother, Erness Edwyna Bright, was born there in 1931 and as a child remembers much about growing up in the “U-shaped” building and where her “house” took up one wing. He used to joke that, had he had a son, he might have named him “MISTER” so that he would be accorded respect in the days when everyone was merely “boy.” The hospital was sold to Dr. Flowers and his daughter, also an M.D. presiding over a clinic on the site of the original building designed by Black architect Floyd McKissick.

Every day since the pandemic began, I talk to Mother, who lives on the East Coast. She, like so many Black, brown and native folk — harbors many of the risks for contracting COVID-19 — diabetes, lung disease from having smoked since she was a 15-year-old freshman at Fisk and the tobacco companies gave out free cigarettes to Black college students — and heart disease not to mention the generational stress of segregation. Recently, Mother shared a memory with me about her time growing up in the Hospital that I had never heard before. I was shocked to learn about the numerous times my Mother claims she and her best friend, Julia Effie, snuck over to the “emergency room” side of the hospital and witnessed the gruesome sight of tortured and maimed patients who had survived racist violence — often at the hands of the Klan who may also have been members of the Pine Bluff police. She astonished me when she said that when she heard about George Floyd’s lynching, her first thought was that his killing reminded her of things she had seen when she was a child. Such torture is excruciating to witness and reverberates. My mother’s memory reminds us of John Lewis’ observation that “humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time.” In his powerful, posthumous piece, “Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation,” Congressman John Lewis — “founding father of a better America,” as Barack Obama’s eulogized him — reiterates his hope for the next generation writing that Emmett Till (murdered in 1955, in Money, Mississippi) was his “George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Rashard Brooks.” To know that each generation generates such gruesome deaths is to desire a disruption in such cyclical violence.

Like Lewis, there is no doubt that the anti-Black violence my mother witnessed and that our family suffered spurred her to collective action as well as to become a professor of education and chair of an African American Studies Department. She was determined to teach about the past with the hope that we could intervene in the future. It is imperative that we all do so. I close with Lewis: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.” Vote. Protest — for police reform, healthcare, dignity and more …

Contact the editors of opinions at opinions ‘at’ stanforddaily.com. 

Jennifer DeVere Brody is a professor of theater and performance studies and the faculty director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE). A version of letter originally was published in The 2020 Project, a special issue publication coordinated by the African & African American Studies Program at Stanford University (AAAS).

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After the pandemic, can we keep the COVID-19 schedule and add a December Term? https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/11/after-the-pandemic-can-we-keep-the-covid-19-schedule-and-add-a-december-term/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/11/after-the-pandemic-can-we-keep-the-covid-19-schedule-and-add-a-december-term/#respond Tue, 12 Jan 2021 04:50:43 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1176495 One of the blessings of this horrible pandemic will, I hope, be that it gets us out of some of our ruts. At Stanford, I have come to think that we should adopt the current academic year’s calendar permanently — starting a week earlier in September and a week later in January, and canceling Finals Weeks, except that we could make use of the weeks after Thanksgiving to create a new “December Term” that would take the place of our three Final Exam weeks.

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One of the blessings of this horrible pandemic will, I hope, be that it gets us out of some of our ruts. At Stanford, I have come to think that we should adopt the current academic year’s calendar permanently — starting a week earlier in September and a week later in January, and canceling Finals Weeks, except that we could make use of the weeks after Thanksgiving to create a new “December Term” that would take the place of our three Final Exam weeks. A three-week period that would begin sometime from Nov. 26 to Dec. 2, and would end sometime from Dec. 13 to the 19, could be used for intensive classes, field research work, public service, extracurricular activities or just a period of rest, depending on the desires of different students and faculty. 

COVID-19 has taught us, I think, that we don’t need Finals Week. Few students or faculty ever liked it, but now Finals Week really seems like a vestige of the idea that students spend the term going to lectures and learning, in preparation for one big test at the end that is timed and administered to all students in a class simultaneously. Many (most?) of us no longer think that’s an effective way to learn or to evaluate students, preferring more continuous assessments that happen throughout the quarter. So if we don’t need Finals Week, why not just get rid of it? 

I think this idea is attractive for multiple reasons:

  • Starting in mid- instead of late-September would allow fall quarter to end before Thanksgiving and so would avoid the awkward interruption of the term and what is, for many, a somewhat depressing return to finish papers and finals following a festive week.
  • Starting winter quarter a week later (e.g. Jan. 11 this year instead of the usual Jan. 4) would, in regular times, provide time to recover from New Year’s and other holidays, and would allow students and faculty in some disciplines to attend important conferences that happen in the first week of January before (rather than during) the first week of classes.
  • Canceling Finals Week in spring quarter would allow students to go home (or to a summer job) sooner, which would make up for the lost week in September.
  • The seven-week period between the end of fall quarter and the beginning of winter quarter could be used, in addition to a three-week December term, for extended work, activities, research travel and family time, flexibly depending on one’s other commitments during those weeks. 

My guess is that others have been thinking along similar lines. This idea is just too obvious. But I hope the administration of Stanford will consider doing this, or something like it, when things return to “normal.”  

–Todd Davies (’84, M.S. ’85, Ph.D. ’95), Associate Director and Lecturer, Symbolic Systems Program

Contact Todd Davies at davies ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

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Letter to admin: Stop excluding student voices from decisions that impact us https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/10/letter-to-admin-stop-excluding-student-voices-from-decisions-that-impact-us/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/10/letter-to-admin-stop-excluding-student-voices-from-decisions-that-impact-us/#respond Mon, 11 Jan 2021 05:05:30 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1176496 In the face of widespread community fear and anxiety, the ASSU has been tasked with work that the University should have proactively done: collecting stories to understand the diversity of students' situations, recognizing what new and exacerbated problems this update creates, and analyzing how to best respond.

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Dear Stanford administrators, 

We write to you as members of the Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU), Stanford’s student government, representing and advocating for the needs of our student body. 

We write to you as student leaders who were excluded from every aspect of the reopening decision-making process, despite consistently requesting to provide input on how this decision would impact the financial, academic, physical and mental well-being of the Stanford community. 

We write to you as community members who have spent the last weekend of our break fielding urgent concerns from students who now don’t know where they’re going to live, how they’re going to meet academic expectations and whether they’ll be able to protect their mental health.

The decision to change plans, yet again, just 48 hours before the quarter starts, is unacceptable. You have let the Stanford community down and further eroded the trust of the students you are meant to support. Since your announcement, we’ve received countless notes from students who are feeling “emotionally manipulated” and “ashamed to be a Stanford student” in the face of this seemingly “unethical money grab.” 

In the face of widespread community fear and anxiety, the ASSU has been tasked with work that the University should have proactively done: collecting stories to understand the diversity of students’ situations, recognizing what new and exacerbated problems this update creates and analyzing how to best respond. We are heartbroken at the student testimonials we’re receiving and the irresponsibility of Stanford’s decision and the way in which it was communicated.

There are still opportunities to properly support our community now and in the future, most importantly by centering the voices of those impacted by your policies. To promote transparency and community care, we submit the following recommendations, corroborated by the anonymous responses we’ve collected to our own rapid-response form and a student petition

In the short term, we implore you to:

Provide financial support for changes in travel plans.

The burden of Stanford’s late announcement should not fall upon students and our families when the University had ample time to make this decision. As one student shares, “Stanford has done this so last minute that many students are now out hundreds of dollars in flights and many more are in limbo with nowhere to stay.” Another student specifies that “as a brown indigenous woman, it’s not easy to just ‘crash’ with people. I am concerned for my safety since I will need to find other housing.”

Extend the Leave of Absence and flex-term deadlines to at least Jan. 18.  

Students deserve more than two days to reconsider their plans. Many students previously made their plans under the expectation of an on-campus quarter. A student writes: “Because of multiple reassurances to expect to be on campus, I didn’t make any plans for winter quarter and declined certain opportunities I’d applied to. My request for special circumstances housing was denied, but I am unable to do online classes from home. Now, I have one day before the enrollment deadline to decide if I’m doing this quarter or not, and I have no time to scramble even for last-minute plans.”

Ensure that the rehousing process for those students left on campus is accessible by providing academic accommodations, funding professional movers and centering student needs. 

The lack of academic accommodation and moving support for rehoused students sets up an ableist and classist system for students forced to move without cars or peers to help. A student shares that “having to pack, move and unpack again during the quarter with classes going on sounds like a real nightmare. I don’t believe that they decided today to cancel frosh/sophs, so why didn’t they just let special circumstances people know beforehand so that we didn’t lug our suitcases and unpack for a place we’d need to move out of soon?”

In the long term, we demand that you:

Radically increase transparency of decisions around reopening by sharing the criteria that the University is monitoring and basing its decisions off of. 

Without any clear explanation of how the University could feasibly reopen in the first place, students are feeling betrayed by what seems like an “unethical decision” that “should have been communicated weeks ago.”

This update is leaving special-circumstances students on campus feeling especially misled. A student feels that “the fact that Stanford announced this decision less than two days before the start of classes makes me feel as if I’ve been tricked into coming on campus so that they could get my room & board money. What I’m most appalled about is that special circumstance move-ins were used as an experimental guinea pig for the rest of the frosh move-ins — had it been their plan all along to use the first batch of students to gauge the covid situation, then cancel housing if cases surge? Or did they just have no plans whatsoever?”

Proactively solicit community feedback during any decision-making process impacting either students or workers. We suggest continuing town halls and forming a focus group to help you gain student perspectives on complex issues.

As we’ve stated time and time again and countless others have aptly pointed out, community input was not taken into account throughout this monthslong process. Those tasked with implementing the University’s decisions, from student Residential Staff to service workers, were left with innumerable unanswered questions regarding their responsibilities and personal protection. 

Apologize for the mismanagement of the Stanford community’s safety during the entire pandemic, as demanded in students’ petition:

“From evicting Studio 2 residents in the middle of a statewide moratorium on evictions, to failing to pay subcontracted workers what they had been promised, to endangering victims of sexual violence through the campus compact, to the unmitigated disaster of the Stanford Medicine vaccination algorithm, to this deeply upsetting decision around Winter Quarter 2021, Stanford has consistently demonstrated its inability to adequately care for the campus community.” 

Now, more than ever, the University must start demonstrating radical transparency and community care in every aspect of its leadership. We expect far more from Stanford.

Best,
Vianna Vo (she/her), ’21 ASSU President
Chris Middleton ’16 J.D. ’21 (he/him), ASSU Vice President
Jianna So ’22 (she/her), ASSU Chief of Staff
Cricket X. Bidleman ’21 (she/her), Director of Communications

Contact Vianna Vo at viannavo ‘at’ assu.stanford.edu, Chris Middleton at cmiddle ‘at’ stanford.edu, Jianna So at jiannaso ‘at’ assu.stanford.edu and Cricket X. Bidleman at bidleman ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Prioritizing transparency and accountability in health care worker COVID-19 vaccination https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/04/prioritizing-transparency-and-accountability-in-health-care-worker-covid-19-vaccination/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/01/04/prioritizing-transparency-and-accountability-in-health-care-worker-covid-19-vaccination/#respond Tue, 05 Jan 2021 05:14:22 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1176367 Common-sense emergency management calls for securing the safety of those persons who secure the safety of others, whether in an airplane or in a pandemic. Prioritization of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination should be no different, protecting those frontline health care workers who are most at risk so they can continue caring for the sickest patients.

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“Place the oxygen mask over your own face before assisting others.”

Common-sense emergency management calls for securing the safety of those persons who secure the safety of others, whether in an airplane or in a pandemic. Prioritization of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination should be no different, protecting those frontline health care workers who are most at risk so they can continue caring for the sickest patients.

First in the room, back of the line,” chanted the droves of Stanford Medicine physicians-in-training, streaming through the hospital in protest last week after learning that a meager seven of their 1,300 colleagues would be included in the first wave of 5,000 workers vaccinated at the hospital.

One particularly a propos placard read, “I saw 16 COVID patients in the last 24 hours, more than double the amount of residents getting the vaccine.”

With non-frontline providers who had been working from home receiving vaccines before the resident physicians who had just been asked to volunteer in the intensive care unit, Stanford Medicine responded that an error in its vaccine distribution algorithm had deprioritized certain frontline workers and residents, including those providing bedside care for patients with COVID-19. An open letter to the Stanford Medicine administration made it clear that physicians-in-training as a group had been overlooked in the distribution planning process.

Not only had those residents been deprioritized from vaccination — they had been ignored entirely, a psychological blow to the frontline health care workers who have become sick and have even died from COVID-19, and whose mental health continues to suffer during the pandemic.

The vaccination blunder reflects what can happen when a sanity check is missing from an algorithm’s application, and to its credit, Stanford Medicine apologized and is seeking to rectify the ghastly error. But could it have been avoided by involving in the planning and rollout processes the actual health care workers who have been placed in jeopardy during the pandemic? Perhaps prevention is best accomplished not by top-down measures, but by bottom-up ones.

It has been long recognized that health care personnel, defined by the Centers for Diseases Control (CDC) as all persons serving in health care settings, are at risk of being exposed to clinically significant inoculas of SARS-CoV-2. As such, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) summary statement, published prior to the first COVID-19 vaccine Emergency Use Authorization, established a common-sense framework for the initial phase 1A of vaccination: to vaccinate all healthcare personnel, including support and environmental services, nursing staff and clinical staff whose duties require proximity to patients with COVID-19, so as to “preserve capacity to care for patients with COVID-19 or other illnesses.”

This was academic medicine’s first instinct, too. Early journal articles predating the ACIP’s official recommendations, including the National Academy of Medicine’s guidelines, prioritized vaccinations to in-person health care workers and staff to prevent direct harm to workers and indirect harm due to spread of COVID-19 in health care facilities. By vaccinating the respiratory therapist, resident physician and ICU nurse who spend night after night resuscitating our sickest patients with intubations, central lines and chest compressions, and the mission-critical support staff who enable this care, we provide more societal good than vaccinating the health care workers who can see their patients through telemedicine from home.

Remarkably, vetted national guidelines still fail to be upheld, and vaccinations of frontline health care workers have not been a universal priority. Why might this be the case?

Ultimately, the answer is institutional discretion. Tracing the path from vaccine manufacture to administration is informative. Public health authorities built frameworks largely aligned with the ACIP’s official recommendations. Within our own jurisdiction, for example, the Illinois Department for Public Health (IDPH) and Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) released common-sense and non-binding guidance: Within phase 1A of vaccination, first priority is vaccination of health care workers routinely caring for patients with COVID-19 or engaging in high-risk clinical activities, with second priority to workers who may care for patients with COVID-19. The IDPH guidelines are unambiguous: “Access to vaccine when scarce should not be defined by professional title, but rather by an individual’s actual risk of exposure to COVID-19.”

After distributing the vaccines, regulators have left individual institutions to their own devices. Institutions’ choices surrounding vaccine distribution then become a reflection of their values, and the extent to which they deviate from the recommendations of public health authorities are an approximation of these institutions’ perceived level of accountability to society. Further, the processes by which they arrive at those choices and the transparency with which they do — independent of what they choose — are proxies for the respect they have for their employees’ intelligence and input.

Prioritizing vaccination to those at “risk of severe disease” rather than “risk of workplace transmission” acts in opposition to guidance issued by the IDPH which recommend an exposure risk prioritization schema for vaccination. Further, those who are disadvantaged by a policy of “risk of severe disease” before “risk of workplace transmission” are the health care workers who have provided direct care for patients from the pandemic’s onset. In academic systems, these are often the workers with the lowest likelihood of having influence within their institution, including trainee physicians that frequently lack a representing union to advocate for their best interests.

More seriously troubling than this is the lack of transparency in institutional allocation processes. At their best, algorithms with transparent design and careful deliberations involving stakeholders afford an opportunity for health care institutions — with their own diverse structures, goals and sets of beliefs — to set an example for how society’s other organizations ought to behave in a crisis. But at their worst and when done without transparency, algorithms are merely “garbage in, garbage out” — such as what happened at Stanford Medicine — and the invocation of “Committees” and “Ethics Departments” to set vaccination guidelines can bring to their employees’ minds notions of conspiracy and kleptocracy.

We believe that medicine’s reflex is still to do the right thing, and the servant leadership that called many of us to medicine in the first place is alive and well, including the Department of Medicine at Stanford.

Rather than providing quick answers, thoughtful leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic has more often been shown by those who publicly ask good questions, including of themselves. Thoughtful leadership is also shown by seeking to reassure others by disclosing what they do not know. To those of us in medicine that means, famously, taking one’s own pulse as the first step in a cardiac arrest.

Reaching back to the airplane oxygen mask metaphor, the critical question to be asked by leadership is not, “Where is my mask?” — it is, “Who is on the plane?” The folks who have been on the frontlines directly caring for patients with COVID-19 from the beginning have been on the plane in a way that many of us have not.

In the increasingly balkanized world of health care, leaders know that they occasionally need help in answering these challenging questions, from vaccine prioritization to hazard pay to volunteers needed for the next wave of COVID-19 cases. Effective and compassionate leaders seek that help by bringing those on the front lines into the fold, by giving health care workers, particularly those trainees who have been historically disenfranchised, a say in their working conditions.

Crafting policies with which 100% of employees will be happy is a fool’s errand. But an institution’s greater error is in not approaching a crisis as an opportunity to seek antifragility and become an increasingly accountable organization. In medicine, this is of critical import — nothing less than medicine’s continued self-governance and self-regulation depend on its accountability. All stakeholders in COVID-19 vaccination, from environmental staff workers to resident physicians to nurses to patients, should have a seat at the table to preserve the legitimacy and equity of a process entrusted to us by society.

Garth Strohbehn is a clinical fellow in hematology and oncology at the University of Chicago and a former resident physician in internal medicine and chief medical resident at the University of Michigan. Ajay Major is a clinical fellow in hematology and oncology at the University of Chicago and a former resident physician in internal medicine at the University of Colorado. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of their employers, past or present.

Contact Garth Strohbehn, M.D., M.Phil., at gstrohbehn ‘at’ uchicago.edu and Ajay Major, M.D., MBA, at ajay.major ‘at’ uchospitals.edu. 

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Turning the tides on COVID-19: It’s time to change the playbook https://stanforddaily.com/2020/12/14/turning-the-tides-on-covid-19-its-time-to-change-the-playbook/ https://stanforddaily.com/2020/12/14/turning-the-tides-on-covid-19-its-time-to-change-the-playbook/#respond Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:04:07 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1176067 We can do better than just to wait for vaccine-mediated herd immunity next year — there are too many children not learning to read, too many Americans at food bank lines, and too many grandparents alone at nursing homes.

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This article represents my own views, not those of the Santa Clara Department of Public Health, where I am a volunteer case investigator and contact tracer.

The virus is winning. Classrooms are empty (or, at best, filled a few days a week), businesses are shuttered, and many people are socially-isolated during holidays that normally celebrate togetherness. And, of course, the death toll of COVID-19 has caused immense suffering and despair. Currently, we are experiencing an unprecedented surge of cases and hospitalizations across the country. For the immediate future, there is little reason to be optimistic — as one public health expert stated, “the next three months are going to be just horrible.” 

Recent vaccine developments, however, show glimmers of daylight. On Dec. 11, the first COVID-19 vaccine in the U.S. was approved by the FDA with a limited number of vaccines to be released in December. While most people know that it may be months before they can receive the vaccine, there are other factors which may preclude vaccine-mediated herd immunity next year. Public health officials have warned about public fears over the vaccine, with one study finding that only half of Americans would get the vaccine once it’s available (Experts state that 70% is the proportion necessary for herd immunity). Moreover, others worry that the vaccine could be less effective than reported in the clinical trials or that the virus would mutate, reducing or eliminating the effectiveness of the vaccine. Finally, it may be possible for even vaccinated people to be contagious. For these reasons, one should be realistic about the timeline for vaccine-mediated herd immunity and realize that life might not return to “normal” until the middle of next year or later. (This is not a condemnation of the vaccine; when it is available to you, please take it!)

Besides, we can do better than just to wait for vaccine-mediated herd immunity next year — there are too many children not learning to read, too many Americans at food bank lines, and too many grandparents alone at nursing homes. In the interim, we can change the tides of the war by identifying contagious people through antigen testing and preventing them from spreading the virus.

Dr. Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard, has advocated for a mass program of rapid antigen testing. In this system, people would test themselves at home with an antigen test, a type of COVID-19 test which is much faster and cheaper than a molecular test. Because antigen tests are less accurate, if the first test came back positive, they would test themselves again with a more sensitive antigen test. If this confirmatory test came back positive, they would begin their isolation period. Dr. Mina and colleagues have shown that if half of the population tested themselves every four days, it would be possible to slow the spread of COVID-19, similarly to the effects of a vaccine. 

What are these antigen tests, and why are they faster and cheaper? The standard COVID-19 test (“molecular test”) amplifies ribonucleic acid (RNA) present in the patient’s upper respiratory tract, often using reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (thus, they are also referred to as PCR tests). The RNA produced is compared to known genes of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. This process occurs in a laboratory, a common bottleneck in the testing cycle. 

On the other hand, antigen tests do not require a laboratory to give a result. An antigen is any substance that produces an immune response, typically antibodies. In this type of test, when antibodies on a paper strip bind to proteins of the COVID-19 virus, a dark band appears. This same technology is used for at-home pregnancy tests, where the binding of an antibody to a hormone produced by a pregnant person causes the famous two dark lines.

The two different technologies lead to the two different price points: molecular tests have a median price of $129, compared to $5 for an FDA-approved antigen test by Abbott Technologies. While antigen tests are much cheaper than the standard COVID-19 test, this mass testing program would still require billions of federal dollars for manufacturing and distribution. Yet, the ratio of economic benefits to cost of such a program is estimated to be between 4 and 15.

Costs have not been the only barrier to such a program. Because antigen tests have a lower sensitivity (returning positive in the presence of disease) and specificity (returning negative in the absence of disease) than the standard PCR test, they have not been embraced by public health officials nor the FDA. Currently, there are seven antigen tests which have an Emergency Use Authorization by the FDA, but they are only available to laboratories or health-care providers. 

However, the sensitivity and specificity of antigen tests should not be compared to molecular tests; antigen tests should be compared to having no test at all. Most people are not able to get tested before engaging in higher-risk activities, like going to work or seeing family. When people are able to get a testing appointment, they may have to wait for hours in long car lines. In my hometown of Newport, Ore., a physician order is required to get a COVID-19 molecular (PCR) test. 

Because of the lowered sensitivity and specificity of antigen tests, the FDA has stated that a molecular test is necessary for making COVID-19 treatment decisions. This is precisely correct; antigen testing should be used to prevent the spread of infections, not for the delivery of medical care. If a person tests positive with an antigen test, then they should be given a PCR test to guide clinical decisions. In the meantime, a positive antigen test will signal that the patient should isolate for 10 days, per CDC guidelines. In the CDC antigen-test algorithm, the diagnosis of COVID-19 is also contingent on other factors, including symptoms and exposure type to COVID-19.

Despite the lower sensitivity of antigen tests, the CDC has acknowledged the usefulness of antigen testing for infection control in high-risk congregate settings: “Especially in settings where a rapid test turnaround time is required, there is value in providing immediate results with antigen tests.” Further, lower sensitivity and specificity for antigen tests is not a fait accompli: An antigen test from Abbott Technologies, the same one available for $5, has a sensitivity of 97.1% and specificity of 98.5%, which is comparable to PCR tests.

Expanding our current system of molecular testing has been a long-standing goal, with many experts calling for between 20 and 30 million tests per day, compared to our current capacity of between 1.5 and 2 million tests per day. However, persistent shortages of supplies and backlogs of samples have demonstrated the difficulty of scaling this type of test. Additionally, molecular tests can take between 24-48 hours for results, which is exacerbated by delays in getting testing appointments. As a contact tracer, I’ve seen cases where a positive test result was not returned to the patient until after the 10-day period in which they would have been required to isolate. 

Moreover, there is a difference between “COVID-19 contagious” and “COVID-19 positive.” A PCR test can be positive even when the patient is not infectious (i.e., transmit to another person), which happens when viral RNA is present but below a certain, albeit unknown, threshold. This period of being detectable with a PCR test but non-contagious may be months long in some cases. A positive antigen test, in contrast, generally means that someone is infectious and likely to transmit the virus.

However, a mass antigen testing program is not a panacea; a reliance on antigen testing has been blamed for the COVID-19 outbreak at the White House. “Testing isn’t,” as one medical director put it, “a get out of jail free card.” An antigen testing program will still require other public health measures such as mask wearing, social distancing and vaccines. Thus, it is essential that the public is educated on the limits of antigen testing. 

Our testing system is not working. We are testing people only after they have transmitted the virus to their coworkers, friends and family. The medical establishment is beholden to paradigms of the past — similarly to the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Antigen tests should be distributed to Americans, allowing them to test themselves when they would not have normally been able to. In the words of Martin Burke, a chemist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working on COVID-19 testing, “[T]esting should become a part of life: In the morning you take your cereals, your vitamins, and you quickly check your [COVID-19] status.” We are in a public health crisis and need to start fighting like it. It’s time to change the playbook and start winning.

If you are interested in learning more about rapid antigen testing, visit rapidtests.org. If you would like to contact your representative about rapid antigen testing, text “RAPID TESTS” to 50409.

Contact Ruben Krueger at ruben1 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Here to stay until the job is done: An update from the Basic Needs Coalition https://stanforddaily.com/2020/11/30/here-to-stay-until-the-job-is-done-an-update-from-the-basic-needs-coalition/ https://stanforddaily.com/2020/11/30/here-to-stay-until-the-job-is-done-an-update-from-the-basic-needs-coalition/#respond Tue, 01 Dec 2020 02:47:11 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1175641 For all the amazing work this Coalition has done and continues to do, it is absolutely imperative to remember that it is Stanford, the institution, not our volunteer work force, that needs to take responsibility for the lack of basic needs access that has plagued its most vulnerable community members, even before this pandemic began.

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In the midst of a nerve-wracking summer, remote fall quarter, disruptive pandemic and historic election, members of the Basic Needs Coalition (BNC) raised nothing short of $91,946.76 in community funds. In accordance with our mission, these funds were used to ensure that access to basic needs were not barriers to success for our peers and fellow Stanford community members.

In these last 90 days well over 1,000 donors, 100 coalition members and dozens of other dedicated individuals have unceasingly affirmed that we cannot continue to allow students to fall through the cracks — cracks that exist due to our prideful institution’s stubbornly narrow understanding of the diverse student body it decided to admit.

Here we provide updates to our stakeholders, through insights from just a few of the many amazing community members that have shaped the BNC, community members that took the time these last few months to simply and sincerely ask, “How can I help?”

A data-informed approach

Here to stay until the job is done: An update from the Basic Needs Coalition

Photo of Patricia Wei ‘23

Patricia Wei ’23 is one community member who found her answer in the Basic Needs Coalition. As a local student, Patricia was spared from the worst of the March mass eviction that abruptly unhoused a majority of Stanford’s undergraduate population a week before spring-quarter finals. 

Patricia is aware of how lucky she was, noting “how important it is to acknowledge your privileges” and that “Covid hitting really showed me I need to step up for my community because I care about these people so much, I just want them to worry less, I just want them to know they can still be cared for.” 

Despite joining as a rising sophomore with no prior organizing experience, taking on a full course load, a part-time job and supporting her family, Patricia found herself indeed stepping up in important ways for this community. Most recently, she has served as a key coordinator in BNC’s collaborative data analysis efforts, involving ASSU members (notably Hannah Mieczkowski, co-director of affordability) and the Stanford Daily Data Team. This data was collected to inform holistic, permanent solutions to meeting the community’s basic needs. Their analysis of the 2020 ASSU Community Needs Survey revealed the (unsurprisingly) far from insignificant number of students struggling to meet their basic needs. To this point Patricia clarifies that, “we acknowledge that Stanford students have it relatively better compared to students in other universities or colleges. But the fact still remains: one person struggling with basic needs at Stanford is just one too many.”

Fundraising to support those we can

While the Coalition fully affirms that Stanford must take ultimate responsibility for establishing a more permanent solution, we would be no better than the institution if we ignore those in our own community currently struggling with basic needs. With or without an ongoing pandemic, our work strives to center the simple fact that being caught in this struggle is far from conclusive evidence of failed character or lack of effort.

Both the past and present refusal for the institution to fully recognize this unmet need remains the fundamental reason the BNC organizes robust fundraising campaigns in support of its Basic Needs Fund (BNF). Designed by a diverse group of student organizers and fundamentally informed by generations of First-Generation Low-Income (FLI) students and their experiences, the BNF is a diligently managed fund that allows trusted community leaders to distribute support and funding more equitably and efficiently than Stanford’s rigid and narrow policies allow.

Here to stay until the job is done: An update from the Basic Needs Coalition

Photo of Thea Rossman ‘20

Thea Rossman ’20 brings important insights as a class-privileged student with the humility and class consciousness critical for doing this work. Returning from a leave of absence and then choosing to stay at Stanford for a coterminal master’s, Thea took the prospect of an extra year as an opportunity “to rethink my relationship and responsibility to Stanford, and really understand it as one of my communities.” 

Thea has been instrumental in BNC fundraising efforts and securing fiscal sponsorship with the Academic Mutual Aid Foundation (AMAF). This sponsorship allows donors willing to contribute larger amounts to mutually benefit from tax deductions. AMAF’s 501(c)3 status enables people to send money through donor-advised funds and some corporate matching policies. On top of that, an anonymous donor has offered to match every three dollars raised with one dollar, up to $10,000, for any donations made before Dec. 18.

These new partnerships open significant doors for larger donors and different funding resources. This has been a ray of hope amongst Coalition members, as much of the previous fundraising came from small-dollar donations personally provided by community members. 

Knowing that a disproportionate amount of that funding came from other FLI students and those in close association with the FLI community, Thea stresses that, “People in my position — Stanford students, faculty, and alums who have a family safety net, who have access to high-income careers, or who grew up class-privileged or wealthy, or all of the above — have not done our fair share. And we need to get real about that.” 

Preparing for a long road to real change

With so many people supporting their mission, the BNC recognizes the importance of ensuring that graduation, burnout and other phase-out processes do not break the momentum for change that so many have already invested in. As such, BNC’s advocacy and fundraising efforts are complemented by a robust new-member onboarding program headed by Sreya Guha ’22. 

Here to stay until the job is done: An update from the Basic Needs Coalition

Photo of Sreya Guha ‘22

Sreya also had little organizing experience prior to the BNC, yet this Coalition has served as a critical incubator to her development as a leader and change maker. Drawing from her own observations while settling into the BNC, Sreya’s onboarding strategy assumes no prior experience with organizing. Instead it centers direct, personal connection to nurture new skills and leadership in anyone looking to learn. Sreya notes how the open and honest culture of the BNC is also reflected in her onboarding, as “there is no pretense at all of superiority, people are just really excited to welcome people into the Coalition… setting up one on ones and making them semi consistent removes the intimidation. It allows new members to honestly say they have no idea what’s going on.” 

And her strategy has worked. Today the BNC enjoys a culture of mutual mentorship, honesty and care as members of the Coalition excitedly welcome any and all interested contributors. In line with sustaining BNC efforts, members new and old are consistently encouraged to contribute only as much as is healthy and reasonable for them. Truly the biggest struggle is convincing interested members that they can meaningfully contribute regardless of past experience, or lack thereof. To such members Sreya promises, “You don’t need experience at all. People don’t need to know how to fundraise; new ideas from inexperienced people make this interesting and so dynamic. It doesn’t take years to be creative, the investment and passion in our community is more important.”

A sobering reminder

Here to stay until the job is done: An update from the Basic Needs Coalition

Photo of Poojit Hegde ‘23

Lastly Poojit Hegde ’23 affirms the power of this passion through his experiences as a strategist on our social media team. To Poojit and many others in the Coalition, the deep care fueling this work comes from a genuine love for the communities that we serve. In recalling some of the testimonies shared by students for social media campaigns and long-term advocacy, Poojit realized, “I can’t live in other people’s lives, but even just reading their experiences is the next best thing. I’ve seen the impact that we can have.” 

Despite the immense sums being raised, Coalition members are well aware this is not the permanent solution Stanford students need. As Poojit confesses, “There is so much more to do, and that kinda pushes me to stick around.”

In closing, for all the amazing work this Coalition has done and continues to do, it is absolutely imperative to remember that it is Stanford, the institution, not our volunteer work force, that needs to take responsibility for the lack of basic needs access that has plagued its most vulnerable community members, even before this pandemic began. 

At the same time we also honor Stanford, the community, that has and always will push for necessary change in this institution, change fueled by a shared and timeless commitment to doing what’s right. 

Keep up with BNC and our work through Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. If you are interested in helping students right now, share our story to your networks and or please donate to our Basic Needs Fund to give us the resources to support our community. Since August the Fund has only been able to meet half of the nearly $180,000 in need requested by students. If you wish to be involved with long term advocacy and the search for permanent solutions, or if your organization would like to build a partnership with us, contact us at contact@basic-needs-stanford.org or through any of our social media accounts

If you are interested in supporting other members of the Stanford Community not currently supported by our Basic Needs Fund, see Students for Workers Rights and their current campaign aiming to raise funds and awareness for Stanford’s overlooked but highly essential campus workers.

Contact Kiara Bacasen at kbacasen ‘at’ stanford.edu and Lizzie Avila at eaavila ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Letter to Stanford’s president: Policing on campus https://stanforddaily.com/2020/11/15/letter-to-stanfords-president-policing-on-campus/ https://stanforddaily.com/2020/11/15/letter-to-stanfords-president-policing-on-campus/#respond Mon, 16 Nov 2020 05:12:27 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1175191 Stanford’s renewed relations with the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office exemplify its failure to acknowledge the voices of marginalized students, staff and faculty.

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November 18th, 2020

Committee for Change
Stanford Institutes of Medicine 1, Lorry I. Lokey Building
Stanford Medicine

Dear President Tessier-Lavigne, 

It is with great disappointment and frustration that we learned of the University’s decision to extend its contract with the Santa Clara County Sheriff, and that we see demands from campus organizations on changes to policing ignored. 

Increasing diversity is a recognized goal at Stanford, but, as discussed frequently on campus in recent months, many potential Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) students or faculty may feel unsafe and unwilling to join an environment where many-layered university law enforcement has been mobilized to harass and profile them. Stanford’s renewed relations with the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office exemplify its failure to acknowledge the voices of marginalized students, staff and faculty. In comparison, UC Berkeley’s establishment of a mental health crisis response unit to replace police response in emergencies empowers and recognizes its BIPOC community, motivating more BIPOC to apply there instead. This way, Stanford will lose to our UC neighbors in recruiting and nurturing the brightest BIPOC students, staff and faculty.

Recent demonstrations, statements, letters and campaigns from the campus community are direct indicators of the deep flaws in Stanford’s approach to policing and public safety. By maintaining the current manner of policing on campus, Stanford dissuades outstanding BIPOC students and faculty from applying to its programs or positions in its failure to cultivate a safe and welcoming environment. The fact that UC San Francisco, another Bay Area world-class institution, enrolled a greater proportion of BIPOC graduate students into its academic programs in 2017 than Stanford did in its most recent academic year highlights the latter’s lackluster efforts to also attract BIPOC students. In addition, University of California schools have collectively amassed support from both their faculty and students to fuel one of the nation’s most cited campaigns to abolish campus policing, drawing a parallel to Stanford’s apparent lack of action on this matter. 

Continuing to disregard requests from Stanford BIPOC community members will have far-reaching consequences on the school’s reputation as a well-rounded academic institution. It is imperative for Stanford to be extremely attentive to BIPOC’s detailed sentiments toward campus policing, coupled with an elaborate, researched list of action items proposed to reform Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS) from the Coalition of Black Student Organizations.

We, the students, staff, faculty and leadership comprising the Stanford Medicine ISCBRM Committee for Change stand in solidarity with the Coalition of Black Student Organizations in their demands for change in policing on Stanford’s campus, summarized here: 

Dismiss and DisarmEnd all affiliations with non-Stanford law enforcement and their presence on campus; end firearm possession by Stanford police/SUDPS. 

Defund and DivertRepurpose SUDPS budget funds to existing, more effective methods of addressing common campus crimes such as sexual assault and burglary, and add funds to financial aid resources and community support

Desist and De-escalate — Train safety officers, faculty, staff and students in de-escalation via resources, workshops and a mandatory student orientation module led or approved by Black Graduate Students Association (BGSA)-approved local organizations, commit resources to support community-led policing alternatives and reframe guidelines on reporting suspicious activity to law enforcement. 

DiscloseExplicitly publicize SUDPS policies on deadly force, use of force, ethical behavior and commitment to de-escalation techniques. Provide a confidential reporting system for negative interactions with law enforcement, and publish an accessible, detailed procedural explanation on the complaint filing process and possible outcomes. Create an independent civilian oversight board of students, faculty and staff whose findings are published and reported to the chief of police. Clarify the value and terms of contracts with non-Stanford law enforcement agencies, and publish the full SUDPS budget.

We emphasize the seriousness of first acknowledging the linked and summarized statement, followed by putting into place a plan to implement these changes at Stanford. Our institution owes a beneficial, tangible and lasting change to BIPOC students, staff and faculty who chose Stanford to pursue their scientific careers and exemplify their brilliance. Viable alternatives to the current methods of policing do exist. There is no excuse for continuing to ignore the voices of BIPOC community members. 

The full list of signatories can be found here. The full list of demands from the Coalition of Black Student Organizations can be found here. 

Contact the editors of opinions at opinions ‘at’ stanforddaily.com.

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The case against BLM https://stanforddaily.com/2020/11/15/the-case-against-blm/ https://stanforddaily.com/2020/11/15/the-case-against-blm/#respond Mon, 16 Nov 2020 04:05:01 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1175204 The task of criticizing Black Lives Matter (BLM) is immediately complicated by a deceptively simple question: What is BLM? A slogan, a movement, an ideology, an organization? The answer seems to change depending on who’s asking.

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The task of criticizing Black Lives Matter (BLM) is immediately complicated by a deceptively simple question: What is BLM? A slogan, a movement, an ideology, an organization? The answer seems to change depending on who’s asking. BLM is associated with organized bodies, policy agendas, protests, petitions, ideologies and more. The term has become elastic enough to encompass everything from a fundamental conviction that Black lives do, indeed, matter to visions of “toppling… White-supremacist-patriarchal-heteronormative-capitalism” through “Spiritual work.” This ambiguity enables the movement to perpetually elude categorization. BLM presents a litany of political demands, but it’s not so political that government employees can’t don its paraphernalia at work. Left-wing outlets report on the progress BLM has made while defending it from accusations of — or even justifying — rioting, looting and arson. These endorsements facilitate the movement’s expansion. The more support it gains, the more difficult it becomes to criticize. I focus my critique first on BLM as a political movement centered on police reform and second as a cultural phenomenon that has brought critical race theory and intersectional activism into the mainstream of American discourse.

The most cohesive component of both BLM’s ideology and its political activity centers on police violence, which activists view as the product of an inherently racist system designed to target people of color. This issue has sparked massive protests worldwide and has catalyzed the development of several policy proposals — including the BREATHE Act, Campaign Zero and 8 Can’t Wait. It is difficult to say whether BLM (as a political movement) explicitly endorses any of these. I suspect, however, that if any of them prove successful, many will credit BLM and that if the policies fail, they will fade into the background. What appears to be the official Black Lives Matter website makes no mention of these policy proposals, instead offering an unenlightening video to clarify that defunding the police means giving the police less money. Unsurprisingly, the video omits a hefty dose of nuance, like the fact that, in a country occupied by more guns than people, officers have reason to fear for their lives during arrests. Though this reality doesn’t excuse excessive use of force, this fear is still part of the equation. And for all its attention to the white supremacy and racism that ostensibly underlies these statistics, BLM pays far less heed to much more deadly forms of crime. In 2017, 304 Black people were killed by police. 9,908 were victims of homicide. A Department of Justice report found that “Based on victims’ perceptions of the offenders, the offender-to-population ratio shows that the percentage of violent incidents involving Black offenders (25%) was 2.1 times the percentage of Black persons in the population.” Homicide is also the leading cause of death among Black males age 1-44 years, which is not the case for any other ethnic group, but these numbers never seem to make it into BLM talking points.

These statistics don’t diminish the tragedy of police violence, but they do point to a degree of complexity that hashtag activism and protest signs don’t capture. The problem here surfaces in discussions about police reform and is symptomatic of a deeper issue within BLM and racial justice ideology: Zealotry is superseding reason. The “defund the police” slogan seems closer to a quote from treasured scripture than a promising policy proposal, engendering all manner of reverse-engineered solutions. Interpretations range from plausible to borderline ludicrous, but better to be ludicrous than to be a heretic. And indeed, as many commentators have pointed out, anti-racism carries numerous unmistakably religious overtones, with white privilege as a parallel to original sin, Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates as prophets, the 1619 Project providing convenient mythology and the insistence that one must “do the work” or risk ending up “on the wrong side of history.”

Presumably, many of the people putting BLM signs on their front lawns and blacking out their social media profiles are unaware of the extent of BLM fanaticism; or of the fact that BLM leaders are self-proclaimed “trained Marxists;” or that for years, the mission statement on their website included plans to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” Given the number of people who have been fired, doxxed, harassed and slandered for opposing BLM, I can’t help but wonder how many of us are remaining silent about our concerns for fear of being ostracized. I have yet to hear any Stanford student voice dissent. After George Floyd’s death, my inbox was flooded with emails from faculty, student groups, organizations and entire departments endorsing critical race theory and re-articulating anti-racist dogma. I understand why this was a reflexive response for many, particularly in the wake of such appalling violence. But in the months since, this fervent support hasn’t evolved into the kind of rigorous debate that one would expect from a university. In such a climate, opposing Black Lives Matter amounts to near blasphemy.

I expect that a good portion of the people who clamored to show support for BLM will eventually distance themselves from the movement, reaching what scholar James Lindsay describes as “the Woke breaking point.” A summer of protesting, rioting, looting, arson and iconoclasm has raised plenty of awareness and initiated many conversations. It has also resulted in damage that may cost insurance companies up to $2 billion. Homicide rates have spiked in major U.S. cities, calling into question the prudence of reducing police presence during an ongoing pandemic and economic downturn. Meanwhile, election results point to a widespread rejection of identity politics that challenges BLM’s approach to race-based grievances. Amid all this chaos, I can’t help but wonder if BLM has done more harm than good.

Though the movement claims to advocate for every aspect of Black life, BLM’s myopic focus on police reform distracts from more significant problems. Black lives matter and racial inequalities should be addressed with thoroughly researched, thoughtfully implemented initiatives that expand beyond the issue of police violence to address education, poverty, crime and family structure. When BLM puts forward such initiatives, I would be glad to support the movement. In the meantime, I hope that we will not let ideologues stand in the way of progress and that we continue to openly and honestly confront the questions that matter most.

Contact Lucy Kross Wallace at lucyw00 ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

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Indigenous peoples: Not your mascot https://stanforddaily.com/2020/11/11/indigenous-peoples-not-your-mascot/ https://stanforddaily.com/2020/11/11/indigenous-peoples-not-your-mascot/#respond Thu, 12 Nov 2020 05:23:56 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1175013 Professional sports teams have a remarkable ability to unite people under one common goal, but this ability is abused when sports fans are encouraged to join together under offensive names and emblems.

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The Washington Redskins’ name change on July 13 marks the end of an agonizing, decades-long debate. While the football franchise’s surprising — and coerced — name change is viewed as a victory in the Native American community, the battle is far from over.

Professional sports teams, such as the Cleveland Indians, Kansas City Chiefs, Atlanta Braves and Chicago Blackhawks, still perpetuate negative stereotypes of Native Americans through their team names and mascots. With Washington out of the picture, the spotlight now places these teams at center field. The question at hand: Will they follow suit or continue to justify the unjustifiable? While Washington, albeit reluctantly, provides a powerful model of change, these sports franchises should adopt new mascots simply because it is the moral thing to do.

Professional sports teams have a remarkable ability to unite people under one common goal, but this ability is abused when sports fans are encouraged to join together under offensive names and emblems. This environment invites fans to wear headdresses, paint their faces and even swing around tomahawks in the spirit of team pride, making a parade out of the most abhorrent and antiquated ideas of the nation’s first peoples. Sports have tremendous influence in today’s world, and as role models for impressionable people of all ages, sports teams should use this power for the betterment of society, not its miseducation. Native American tribes have a simple wish that, as evidenced by Washington, can be easily met: that sports culture will no longer disrespect and disparage Indigenous culture.

Indigenous representation is sorely lacking in the media, and Native American mascots unfortunately fill this narrow space. Stereotypical and disparaging images subvert the ability of Indigenous peoples to correctly represent sacred culture and traditions. In a nation where most people have never met or had contact with Native American peoples, the astounding inaccuracy of Indigenous portrayal in American media is uniquely destructive. Indigenous peoples are more diverse than popular imagery cares to show, with hundreds of vastly different tribes reduced down to a smiling, red-faced caricature with a feather and a spear. For added clarity, this would be similar to the entire European population, from Denmark to Greece, being represented by a blonde, white-faced cartoon holding bagpipes and a baguette. Therein lies the absurdity of the Native American mascot.

Proponents of Indigenous mascot usage commonly argue that they seek to honor Native American strength, reinforcing their stance with narratives about the beloved history of their mascots and fan traditions. The culture of Native Americans vastly precedes the establishment of the United States, let alone professional sports franchises, so fans should certainly understand how sacred tradition and culture are to Indigenous peoples, even while they flagrantly defile them. Many believe that Native American peoples do not take offense to these sports mascots or fan behavior, citing faulty polls and studies. As an Alaska Native woman and an enrolled member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), I have never met one Indigenous person who does not consider Native American mascots to be embarrassing, shamefully inaccurate and a downright atrocious representation of our culture and humanity.

Stanford’s history with Native American mascots must not be overlooked. It was in 1930 that Stanford sports teams began operating under the “Indians.” Protests in 1970 by the Stanford American Indian Organization (SAIO) brought attention to the mockery and falsity of the mascot. In response to this outcry, the name was formally removed in 1972, however, the struggle to erase symbols degrading to Indigenous Peoples persists into the present. Now, in SAIO’s 50th year, it is unbelievable that Native American mascots are still prevalent in popular imagery.

Now is the time to erase the erroneous smear of racist and degrading team mascots and names from sports. Now is the time to recognize the dehumanizing effect that they have on Indigenous peoples. The best way to honor Native Americans is to listen to our voices. 

We are people, not mascots.

Contact Jade Araujo at jaraujo ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Why are Stanford’s healthcare premiums being hiked? https://stanforddaily.com/2020/11/11/why-are-stanfords-healthcare-premiums-being-hiked/ https://stanforddaily.com/2020/11/11/why-are-stanfords-healthcare-premiums-being-hiked/#respond Thu, 12 Nov 2020 05:00:39 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1175022 In light of a pandemic that is seeing a devastating resurgence and plunging medical usage across the country, why will Stanford’s health care premiums take such a large jump for faculty, staff and retirees in 2021?

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Every year, Stanford University renegotiates with its healthcare providers to dictate premiums and rates for its faculty, staff and retirees. This year is no different from that trend. But this year, for a myriad of reasons, is anything but a normal one, and the University has not shifted its policies to reflect this reality for its community members. With COVID-19 still gripping the nation and medical usage down across the board, Stanford’s policy on healthcare premiums is no exception to this trend of negligence.

Beginning in 2021, faculty and staff premiums for Stanford Health Care Alliance (SHCA) are increasing by a whopping 20% and even the least expensive plan, Kaiser, is going up 5.6% for 2021. In comparison, the economic impact for Stanford retirees is even more dire. The only health plan offered by Stanford for its retirees in 2021 that provides access to care by Stanford health care providers is through Blue Cross, and those premiums are increasing by 8.1%. These retirees are Stanford faculty and staff who have worked tirelessly, often for 25 years or more, and have dedicated a substantial portion of their lives to making Stanford a world-renowned institution. During retirement, most retirees invariably live on a fixed income. Stanford’s health care premium increases are unjustifiable and cause tremendous financial burden on Stanford faculty, staff and especially retirees. In light of a pandemic that is seeing a devastating resurgence and plunging medical usage across the country, why will Stanford’s health care premiums take such a large jump for faculty, staff and retirees in 2021?

Furthermore, these hikes continue Stanford’s troubling trend of opacity and lacking accountability around employee healthcare. Our union — Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 2007 represents more than  1,200 Stanford employees, and we have repeatedly requested that a representative from SEIU be included on any Stanford committee that negotiates and determines benefit rate levels. These requests for inclusion and transparency have been outright rejected without explanation from Stanford University. Our union specifically requested a representative on the Stanford Benefits Committee, given that we represent over 1,200 Stanford employees — we were outright refused. We have also asked for a rep on the Affordability Task Force — again we were refused.

Stanford’s negotiations with insurers, by their own design, is an opaque process. The University refuses to discuss with us specifically how they arrived at a particular increase, except for vague statements such as “we negotiated them down from the 15% [Kaiser] originally wanted,” or “we compare ourselves with other local entities” without any specifics. This opacity persists, even as insurance rates for Stanford employees are much higher across the board compared to our peer institutions, such as UC Berkeley, and especially higher for retirees. We do not know how Stanford’s negotiations with insurers proceeded, but Stanford management obviously did not take into account the interests of those who stand to suffer the outcome of this opaque process. It is particularly important to note that, on the issue of SHCA premiums, Stanford is essentially negotiating with itself. Furthermore, many times in the past, the University has stated that it is at a disadvantage in negotiation because of its small size, but it has made no meaningful attempts at alliances that could bolster its negotiation position. For example, our union has suggested in the past that the University attempt to work with other private universities, such as Santa Clara University and/or USF, but so far there have been no indications of such attempts being made. 

Stanford’s policies around healthcare have not adjusted to meet our current moment. This negligence, combined with a lack of inclusion and transparency, is troubling in normal times — it is unforgivable during an ongoing pandemic. Affordable health care is essential for our members and for all Stanford faculty, staff and retirees — we all need to know why it is being denied by the University.

Richard Patrone 

Executive Board Secretary 

SEIU Local 2007

Contact Richard Patrone at richardpatrone ‘at’ gmail.com.

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