Most popular majors
at Bay Area universities
Stanford
1, Computer science
2. Human biology
3. Engineering
4. Economics
5. Biology
(http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_21175486/computer-science-becomes-stanfords-most-popular-major)

Just saying – he may have a point.

It’s silly to dismiss this guy. Any humanities student at Stanford knows that what he says is somewhat true. Our campus culture focuses on making money to the detriment of everything else, including social life.

People creating startups diverts energy from campus. It doesn’t improve our lives as students (though maybe they will change the way we play with our phones, for a month). Frankly, Stanford is a boring place to be a student. Resume-and business-building are so important that discussion and personal enrichment get pushed aside.

Citing a bunch of rankings and mission statements (put out by the University and the system it supports) is just as bad as making a sweeping conceptual claim.

With dichotomous fluff like this, you are exploding real issues into comical proportions and not actually thinking about anything that you are saying.

Consider the argument “Stanford is a top institution because it ranks highly on various national polls” and break it down into its component parts:

1) Stanford ranks highly on various national polls
2) Various national polls imply good standards
Then
3) Stanford ranks has good standards.

Where do we acquire the standards for number 2? From institutions like Stanford!

You’ve encountered the Cartesian circle and you have dropped it all over your ‘retort’ to a piece of ‘journalism’ that suffers from similar issues.

Worse, though, you have justified your attendance at a University with your attendance at a University, a selfishness seen all over campus. Worse yet, you hope your justification validates not making changes or re-examining the University’s position.

So worse that it deserves its own paragraph, is that you don’t understand the purpose of negativity or rebellion. You ask if the writer is “trying to take you down a notch”. As if the analysis of a University has to do with a personal vendetta but really you know as a journalist you are forcing the issue to a personal level, rather than truly letting readers think if they are in a University.

This article, like most about the University, has no concerns with pedagogy, social progress, or actually being a real member of a community. Like most defenses of our University, it rattles off statistics and conceptual standards but fails to show any clear understanding of the point of a liberal arts education beyond simply naming it such.

I know this seems like a rant. But we are better than this. We claim to think about things more. We aren’t sinking the Lusitania. We haven’t renamed fries, freedome fries. We want progress and change and critique is how we get there, critique from the students who have experienced the institution. Graciousness is important, but real, authentic analysis trumps all.

I read the news from Stanford today and hear the scoop from my friends and classmates who are now teaching in academia (either at Stanford or working with Stanford people) and find myself shaking my head. A lot. Academia in general has been moving toward a trade-school, job-preparation focus. We’re consistently seeing articles about how high schools and colleges have to focus on STEM fields. That Stanford excels at this is to be expected. But it’s not something many of us celebrate.

Similarly, for those of us who feel that undergraduate education is the lifeblood of the campus, we don’t really care about having a number of highly-ranked graduate schools either. Those are by definition trade-school and job-prep programs.

The news which comes out about the fuzzy subjects is not impressive. Class attendance is supposedly down in general and it doesn’t appear that the school is investing in new young faculty in those subjects. I don’t fear that fuzzy courses will die out completely. But I am concerned that we’ll become more and more of a tech college where the last bastion of people who value the fuzzy subjects is in the dschool.

Oh, and one note. Alumni will view the “Thinking Matters” courses from the context of the breadth requirements they had to take. And in that comparison, the new courses look like a lite version of what I had to take, which was a lite version of what the previous generation had to take.

Your discussion about the curriculum is what I think Nick is kind of talking about — universities are place for serendipitous discovery, where a surprise conversation in the gym or your E40 class could be the person you discover chances to make things happen.

Worrying that if you do X or Y, you might upset P and Q — while maybe a great preparatory lesson for some — should be encouraged, not potentially squashed.

That is all Nick is saying — IMHO.

Look, this is not about Stanford as a place, this is about the notion of Stanford contributing so much of its financial resources (not necessarily human capital, as the author very intelligently points out) and branding into this industry.

and you will find a very depressing ratio indeed…