The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education recently named Stanford University the worst higher education institution for free speech in the United States. Unfortunately, this problem is just one of many that are eroding student life at Stanford. Over the past few years, the Stanford activist administration has sought to radically transform almost every element of student life. The Office of Student Affairs, which had less than 50 employees just three decades ago, now employs more than 400 administrators who micro-manage students and infantilize adults who pay for education at Stanford.
The current attack on student maturity began six years ago with the adoption of what is euphemistically called Stanford’s “Standards of Excellence.” With these standards came social contracts and performance contracts that apply today to almost all organizations at Stanford. Reluctance can be assessed and punished. Stanford’s “student customers” have been transformed into something more like puppets.
The latest development is a program called ResX. Every new student now gets a university assignment during their first year in the “neighborhood” where students need to stay connected throughout their undergraduate careers. This “rethinking” of student life now determines - when students live on campus - where they eat, sleep and socialize. In this way, administrators centrally plan what they consider acceptable housing crops.
From ethnic dormitories for students from the “black diaspora” and “Shiite / Latin” to residential buildings that promote “IDEAL (Inclusion, Diversity, Equality and Access to the Learning Community)”, students are sorted by individual attributes and protected from those who look different and think differently. Not so long ago, liberals would call such school isolation and discrimination “segregation.”
But residential life is just one area in which Stanford administrators have taken away adulthood from students. Administrators also aim to lead their social lives.
In 2021, they imposed stricter regulations on student activities outside the classroom. They now require students to register every party they organize, while also banning gatherings during the “dead weeks” before the finals. Officials banned spirits and declared drinking games a criminal offense. Even students 21 and older must adhere to these restrictions.
These measures are too broad and even counterproductive. They have provoked widespread condemnation of students, including a student-led health and safety initiative that provides snacks and water at parties and takes students home on weekends. These students say that the changes in the rules have encouraged an increase in excessive drinking.
This year, Stanford administrators have established new policies that require fraternities and sororities to lobby to stay in their homes on campus after three years. And organizations that want to return after the break face great challenges. Since Stanford requires freshmen to live in university apartments, there are only three years left for students to choose from. Fraternity members are now arbitrarily barred from living in their fraternity for more than two years, forcing organizations to rush with 50% more members.
Stanford devotes resources to various student goals, activities and organizations, but there is not much reason to strengthen the life of Greece. However, numerous studies show that students who join Greek organizations graduate more on time, are more engaged in the classroom, are more likely to participate in internships and research projects generated by the faculty, maintain a higher level of mental health and are more likely to interact. and discussions with people different from themselves.
Stanford enrolls young people who have spent much of their youth sacrificing themselves to gain admission. But these days, he tells adult students where they have to live, how they can hang out and who they can hang out with. These students, who have finally set out into adulthood and a future they can imagine for themselves, have no choice but to adhere to strict rules that neither improve their education nor prepare them for life after college.
Shamefully, Stanford’s motto is: “The winds of freedom are blowing.” Yet Stanford, like many elite educational institutions, has moved from studying social ideas and behavioral practices to conducting forced utopian experiments on campus.
Williamson M. Evers is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California. He received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees. graduated from Stanford and retired as a Stanford employee in August 2019.