> who promises that "the party-planning process will be streamlined" (WTF?) and that "more administrators will be hired" to do so (WTF?).

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy

Think of the children!

Or, in this case, adults.

A special kind of "adults." I went to college and grad school in two different towns. Each college had its own culture of fun. The kind of "fun" that the colleges condoned occurred in a sheltered atmosphere, and would have been utterly off limits to the adult residents of the surrounding towns.

> The kind of "fun" that the colleges condoned occurred in a sheltered atmosphere, and would have been utterly off limits to the adult residents of the surrounding towns.

... What kind of "fun" is that? The only thing that I can think of that would be off limits to non-students is literally illegal activities that students shouldn't be doing either.

> and more administrators will be hired to help facilitate student social life.

Pre-registration of large (“level 3”) parties has been a thing for a long time. But when I was there, one pre-registered a party, one did so online, and I imagine a single administrator could keep up with the entire workload.

This made sense for a few reasons, including:

Parties can be dangerous affairs, and campus security needs to know where to direct its attention. (There is no need for campus security to be hostile to parties, but a good campus police force should help ensure everyone’s safety.)

Student groups throwing parties generally want good attendance, and pre-registration allows them to coordinate dates.

Pre-registration helps avoid facepalms like throwing a party during finals.

For what it’s worth, the actual policy:

https://vaden.stanford.edu/super/education/parties/party-pla...

Isn’t that crazy.

Thank you. I can see how, say, asking students to notify campus police in advance with a simple online form would make sense for large parties. But here we're talking about asking students to submit an application with a known list of attendants two weeks in advance. That doesn't seem right.

Something feels really off when I read that for 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrators.[a]

[a] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-stanford-guide-to-acceptabl...

That's unreal. One bad year for admissions and the administrators will outnumber the students.

> One bad year for admissions and the administrators will outnumber the students.

Only if a "bad year" is one where the majority of college-age students in the world are precluded from applying to college due to natural disasters or the like. A realistic "bad year" would mean that the same number of students are admitted, but Stanford breaks some informal non-poaching agreements with Harvard / Yale / Princeton, or perhaps admits some students at a lower bar than the administration was hoping.

If I am not mistaken, that has already happened at Yale.

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-... seems to say that in 2019 there were about 5900 undergrads and 5000 administrators and managers at Yale. Not quite parity.

But https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts shows somewhat different numbers.

I was remembering this article:

https://reason.com/2022/12/01/students-at-yale-faced-mental-...

But digging in it seems they may have been a little sloppy in their statement.

The administrators are there as approximately 1:1 hand servants to carry your bags, attend to preparation of meals, and so forth such that you not expend yourself unduly.

I think you should have included the /s tag. Since they don't actually do all of that stuff, it goes to show that ratio is ridiculous.

You got the /s. I thought it would be implicit.

>You got the /s. I thought it would be implicit.

As sad as it may be, Poe's Law[0] really is a thing:

   Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture saying that, 
   without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any 
   parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers
   for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.

I've been bitten by that more than once, myself. C'est la vie, eh?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

Not unless something has changed radically. The administrators are nominally there to do specific things. For example, there might be an administrator whose job is to liase (sorry!) with the students on staff at a group of houses to make sure that they do their jobs and to find out when the university needs to do to help. For example, if there is a plumbing problem, students would tell this administrator and they would get it fixed.

Of course, there seem to be a lot of administrators these days if all the articles are right, so perhaps there are now extra ones doing nothing particularly useful or administrators whose job is to make policy.’

There is no administrator that actually helps students with daily tasks.

The above commentator was almost certainly being facetious. However with so many highly paid administrators - there could be an alternate world where they simply did serve students in daily needs. Considering this alternate world, it really does beg the question what these administrators are doing.

>there could be an alternate world where they simply did serve students in daily needs.

I'd say an alternate time[0] (up to ~50 years ago) rather than an alternate world.

That said, domestic servants are still common today in some parts of the world.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedder

No apology is necessary as "liase" is a valid word dating back to at least the early 1900's:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/liaise

amluto notes: >"There is no administrator that actually helps students with daily tasks."<

We graciously thank you for pointing out this oversight and shall take measures immediately to correct it and ensure it never happens again!

Not unless something has changed radically. The administrators are nominally there to do specific things. For example, there might be an administrator whose job is to liase (sorry!) with the students on staff at a group of houses to make sure that they do their jobs and to find out when the university needs to do to help. For example, if there is a plumbing problem, students would tell this administrator and they would get it fixed.

/s

> Something feels really off when I read that for 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrators.[a]

Major universities aren't primarily about educating undergraduates, and of course graduate students (about half of that student population at Stanford) are essentially "employees" from a economic production perspective. So really it's about 8k kids paying to learn near the activities of 10k researchers and academics, and the 16k administrators are just the staff needed to keep those 10k workers productive. Which... sounds about right to me?

You make a good point... but when I read that one of those 16K administrators has the title of "associate vice provost of inclusion, community and integrative learning," I can't help but feel that things have gotten out of hand. And when I see that the "sticker price" of attending elite US colleges has risen faster than pretty much everything else and is now ~$80K/year, I can't help but be shocked.

> but when I read that one of those 16K administrators has the title of [...]

That's the same logic you see on Fox Business when guests demand that we defund the entire federal government because something they don't agree with got funded. Whether or not you personally see value isn't really the issue here. You get that, right?

Even granting that the post is likely to ineffective and silly (something I'd agree with, FWIW) lots of people at the school value things like inclusion, community and "integrative learning" and want to see the school prioritize it in its staffing decisions.

Also post-secondary tuition has been beating general inflation, but lagging many other areas. This link says it's been growing at 4.63% for the last decade, which is less than most real estate markets. The idea of tuition being "out of hand" is mostly just a meme.

Defending something you concededly can’t defend on the merits with the assertion that nobody should agree with Fox News about anything is a bad tic that won’t work out for you in the long run.

It makes it trivially easy to bait mainstream liberals into seeming to embrace wacky ideas. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

> It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

That may be true, but why would you do that here?

Look past that person's specific title more at the general problem; the systemic bureaucracy. That's the problem the Fox News rightwingers have with the Federal Government; they may not be sophisticated enough to voice it like that, but its the root of the problem. Its the biggest problem in modern universities, simultaneously causing them to be more expensive, allow for less formative experiences, and reducing the quality of education. Why are new cars so expensive? Someone has to pay for the system which produced it, and the system wants to be bigger.

There is literally no genuine reason why any of this has to exist at the scale it does. Standford's 16,000 administrative staff are not solving problem core to what a University does; they are solving problems they invented, or they're simply not actually solving problems at all, but will nonetheless defend their paychecks with their life.

Diversity & Inclusion is a totally reasonable thing to want. What impact have they had? In 2021, Stanford's admissions statics were: 28% white, 25% asian, 18% hispanic, 7% black. Compare that to US-wide statistics: 75% white, 19% hispanic, 14% black, 6% asian (its multiple choice). 65% of Stanford's admissions did not come from California, so this is a more fair comparison than just California's population.

What someone with a title in that department would say is: well, we've made progress, but there's clearly still more work to do. Internally; they're likely just as frustrated as anyone; because they'd know better than anyone that the system is wholly rigged against their ability to make equity a priority. The system, in any organization, optimizes only for one thing: Revenue. Any change which could hurt revenue (in Stanford's case: maybe reducing international admissions) will never be given serious consideration.

That's the critical piece: when a Fox News rightwinger says they want to defund the federal government, or a leftwinger says they want to defund the police: Absolutely, they're overreacting with respect to the scope of their specific issue with the system they're criticizing. But our systems have become too big within which to create meaningful change and these systems' reward functions are so perverted to any generally optically good goal that what little people can influence them is always implemented through the lens of that reward function (in nearly every case, the reward function is revenue, but there are cases like the Police where the reward function is more-so something like "keeping officers safe"; ultimately this is the same reward function though, its "keeping the system's insiders happy").

Its worth being abundantly clear about this: these giga-systems like Stanford or the Federal Government are another symptom of the low interest rate environment. Its always macroeconomics. Every good and bad thing that has ever happened has macroeconomic causes. If we end up entering a decade+ period of more expensive money, you'll slowly start wondering if your statement that "the school should staff someone dedicated to inclusion and community" makes sense. The fact that they are capable of hiring people to review the guest lists of parties is a problem of excess; not a symptom of the system approaching an ideal state.

Universities are a tremendously interesting case study on what impacts cheap money has had on our macroeconomic system; because there's literally nowhere else with cheaper money. Students bundle up on loans, which they can't default on, and thus there's zero acceptance criteria for loan eligibility. What isn't paid for in loans comes from donations and investment returns, during the largest bull market in the history of economics. All of this will come crashing down in the next five years, and Universities which let themselves balloon up to solve problems that few of their customers (students) actually care about will have a substantially harder time adjusting than one which, say, never hired twenty people to review the guest lists of parties in the first place.

> Look past that person's specific title more at the general problem; the systemic bureaucracy.

My point was exactly the converse: let's look at evidence for the "general problem of systemic bureaucracy" instead of using ridiculous job titles as a stand-in straw man to beat up.

Laughing at a woke job title is a logical fallacy. If you want to make a broad point that Universities spend more on administration than necessary, I'd want to see numbers comparing them to similar private organizations, etc...

Thank you.

Over the past four decades, the rise in the cost of post-secondary education has outpaced everything else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_tuition_in_the_United_...

The cost attending a comparable elite university in other countries is often multiple times lower. For example, tuition at Cambridge University for British citizens is ~$9K/year: https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.undergra...

The only people I personally know who think bureaucratic bloat isn't a big problem at elite universities in the US are themselves members of that bureaucracy. All the college professors I personally know think bureaucratic bloat is a problem. All the college students I personally know (mostly relatives) also think bureaucratic bloat is a problem.

> Even granting that the post is likely to ineffective and silly (something I'd agree with, FWIW) lots of people at the school value things like inclusion, community and "integrative learning" and want to see the school prioritize it in its staffing decisions.

Because the costs are hidden. Ask them if they'd continue to fund that bureaucracy if they knew that cutting it would cut their tuition in half. I think you'll see a very different result.

> The idea of tuition being "out of hand" is mostly just a meme.

You're in a bubble. US tuition is the most expensive in the world.

> lots of people at the school value things like inclusion, community and "integrative learning"

Probably true. Although you might find considerable disagreement as to what, exactly, “community” means.

> and want to see the school prioritize it in its staffing decisions.

Prioritize how?

If you mean that hiring for unrelated positions should be require DEI statements, I think you’ll find this is an unpopular view.

If you mean that one should choose one’s hires inclusively such that one preferentially hires people of specific races, ethnicities, etc, then you may find that this is unpopular, or illegal, or dubiously legal, or maybe even unproductive for the purpose of improving the degree to which one’s staff is a representative sample of the population.

If you mean that a university should hire such that the student community feels like a community, then I bet many people agree but may feel that the universities are not actually succeeding.

Not so sure. I was in a research lab at a similar school a couple decades ago. There were two staff lab assistants (not sure they'd be considered administrators by any stretch), and the PI shared an executive assistant with three other PIs. That's not a ton of local overhead.

At the department level, there were of course deans, provosts, counselors, admissions people, etc etc etc, but even that departmental overhead wasn't more than maybe a 1:8 ratio compared to the number of grad students.

I'm sure there was similar or even greater proportional administrative staff once you got to the university level, but even if you include every single employee in big departments like Research and Graduate Admissions, it wasn't anywhere close to even half the number of students. I know this because the entirety of the administration fit into a few old buildings in half the campus, while the rest of the buildings on that half and all of the buildings in the newer part of campus were filled with labs and classrooms.

So in the ensuing twenty years, administrators have either gotten massively worse at their jobs and required far more of them to accomplish the same things (running directly counter to the general trends in worker productivity in that time), or they've created an immense amount of new make-work for themselves and their colleagues. Articles like this point pretty strongly at the latter explanation.

>>> So in the ensuing twenty years, administrators have either gotten massively worse at their jobs and required far more of them to accomplish the same things

I feel that since they have no shortage of money, they don't feel the pinch of hiring more admins. Thus the number of admins has increased.

As a professional software engineer, it's common for support staff at elite firms to number 1/10 or 1/100 compared to “productive” staff. Even including folks who “support” the productive part of the business with tooling and infrastructure - you are usually looking at 1/3 at most.

> As a professional software engineer, it's common for support staff at elite firms to number 1/10 or 1/100 compared to “productive” staff.

Only if you close your eyes and shut your ears and not count any of the facilities, HR, finance, legal, admin, media, procurement, and janitorial staff.

I personally haven't seen a lot of SWEs spending much of their time paying the power bill, laying out offices, cleaning toilets, or sending out W-2s.

That was including those folks. HR departments are tiny, and increasingly automated. W2 is done by ADP or a similar system, same with billing alongside CFO oversight. My last group had one lawyer per 1000 engineers or so.

> W2 is done by ADP or a similar system, same with billing alongside CFO oversight

Outsourcing the tail doesn't mean it doesn't exist (it might make it slightly more efficient, or it might just be a convenience bevause it gives you someone else that is liable in the event of a mistake.)

Sure it does. ADP has about 60K people, and 620K _companies_ as customers. That's on average 0.1 ADP employee per entire client org.

I once worked at small org with a dozen people, and one person was "support" role: she was finance, admin, facilities etc.. We did have cleaning services from our landlord and separate legal and tax, but they were nowhere close to full time.

In another place we had maybe 30-40 two person offices, and 3 of them were occupied by HR/finance/admin/facilities etc...

So 1/100 does not sound very realistic (maybe for all-remote orgs?), but 1/10 I can easily believe.

1/100 was at a firm with many thousands if employees. There is a good amount of cost efficiency that happens when companies get big.

It's not like having a huge party during a frickin' pandemic is a sensible idea in the first place. Really, I have trouble getting what people are complaining about. Nobody likes shelter-in-place all that much, but sometimes it is the right choice.

So you think that when the frickin' pandemic is officially over, it'll be OK again?

Is this a pandemic precaution?

There guest list two weeks in advance seems useless for that.

One admin per student, almost. What on earth do they need so many admins for?? What are they doing?

Big R1 universities do a lot more than organize classes.

From memory (the last time this came up) That number includes staff at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (a National Lab, Stanford University Medical Center (which runs two hospitals and a bunch of clinics), Stanford University Press, and all of the research administration needed to manage the (many) grants Stanford gets.

These are admin-intensive things: federal contracting involves lots of paperwork, healthcare + insurance is a nightmare too. Plus, many of these involve staff that aren’t students (nurses at the hospital, scientists at SLAC, etc), all of whom still need “normal” admin things like parking, HR, and payroll, so the per-student denominator is a bit misleading.

Also all the land and buildings it owns, manages, and rents/leases to others. (eg, they own and lease properties and buildings on El Camino)

And they have their own police force, own thousand of houses, and all the infra too (including streets, roads, sewers, etc).

Stanford is immensely rich, just considering their land holdings alone...

They’re elite bro

Approving parties although based on their response they still have a staffing gap there.

> Something feels really off when I read that for 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrators.[a]

Are administrators exclusively for administrative work? Or does this also include people like teaching aides, lab assistants, etc. which aren't exactly "faculty" but also aren't doing, well, administrative work?

On the face of it, this number sounds completely bonkers. So bonkers that I suspect that there's some nuance to it and that these "administrators" are doing more than just "administrating". Maybe not, but really needs some more detail than this.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article recently [1] about how Princeton's endowment generates more than enough income to fund the entire school forever- no need for tuition. Yet, they still employ hundreds (thousands? I'm guessing given I know USC employs over a hundred full-time fundraisers, then all the fund managers, etc.) of people as part of their fundraising machine.

These schools really are bureaucratic monsters. They need to make more money so they can hire more fundraisers so they can make more money etc.

1. https://malcolmgladwell.bulletin.com/princeton-university-is...

Even if it's including all support staff that seems like kind of an insane ratio to me.

"Seems like", sure. But a lot of thing "seem" this or that until you actually look at the details and context. Without that, it's essentially meaningless information.

Sure. How many businesses have more employees than "customers"? It's not a perfect analog but it's not unreasonable to ask "what are we really doing here?" either.

> How many businesses have more employees than "customers"?

Um, lots.

How many of those have customers who generate less than the average employee's salary in revenues?

Other than some niche tiny firms catering to the stupidly wealthy (the 0.1% and above) like a dynastic family investment fund, I can’t think of any. Can you elaborate on some examples?

> Other than some niche tiny firms catering to the stupidly wealthy (the 0.1% and above) like a dynastic family investment fund, I can’t think of any.

Very much not niche, not tiny firms catering to the even more stupidly wealthy than any individual human: customers aren’t always natural persons.

The reason it makes sense is the common view of “administrators are useless” is backwards.

It’s the faculty that are replaceable. Students go to a university because they like the administration. It’s like a resort.

(The faculty may be adding value by being in academia at all, but it doesn’t matter for students which particular ones you meet. It could if you wanted to enter academia yourself, but you definitely don’t want to do that.)

You can’t find daycare with that ratio.

Which is why daycare is only somewhat unaffordable, while university is completely unaffordable.

Requiring pre-registering parties is dangerous precisely because it is a control lever and a slippery slope.

Students and administration will always disagree.

Ergo, any requirement that can be abused by administration eventually will be abused. Exactly as apparently happened here. The only check is to prevent that lever from ever existing.

Anarchy has many problems, but its foremost strength is standing in direct opposition to outside control.

And that's an unfulfilled and critical need in our modern society, as liberties are bricked up bit by bit.

(And before someone tosses it in, we can have the militia vs police end debate some other time, because "a bunch of college kids getting in trouble" is far short of anything that serious to themselves or the surrounding community)

It’s not just about registering parties, if you click the link you will find that the application will have to pass the Party Review Committee where you have to answer questions such as

> How the student group will prevent members and guests from bringing in their own alcohol and what they will do if they observe someone bringing in their own alcohol.

Dude, I went to a large state school. Why the heck would anyone register a party? Why is it the administration's business what the students do after hours? If the cops show up, be respectful and turn down the music. Don't do stupid things near the front door.

When I was in college, we organized parties by getting some booze and opening the door.

Great! So you got all the alky's first!

Judging from the policy, it could also be argued the rules are there to protect the student organizers. A lot of people don't seem to realize that regulations surrounding extend beyond age restrictions. Similarly, a lot of people don't realize that insurance coverage is a factor whenever an organization is involved (and, of course, insurance companies will add additional restrictions). If things aren't done properly, the university and the students will be liable.

(Note: I am not suggesting the university isn't trying to protect their own interests. I am suggesting they are doing more than protecting their own interests.)

Since that directly links to the "Student Alcohol and Other Drugs Policy", that’s also "fun"

> All undergraduate student groups and residences may host only alcohol-free parties or events during Admit Weekend.

> Beer, wine and packaged pre-mixed alcoholic beverages (e.g. wine coolers, pre-mixed cocktail or seltzer drinks under 20% alcohol by volume, etc.) are the only alcoholic beverages that can be present at on-campus undergraduate student parties

> Shots of hard alcohol are prohibited at all parties.

> Games and activities that promote high-risk drinking or rapid alcohol consumption are not allowed on campus.

> While California has legalized certain recreational cannabis usage among persons aged 21 years or older, cannabis still remains illegal under federal law. […] For the avoidance of doubt, the possession, use, storage, delivery, cultivation, distribution and sale of cannabis in any form is prohibited on all Stanford University property, including university-owned and leased buildings, housing and parking lots. Cannabis is also not permitted at university events or while conducting university business.

This stuff is not at all new. Also, consider:

> All undergraduate student groups and residences may host only alcohol-free parties or events during Admit Weekend.

Not sure what point you’re trying to make.

Underage Stanford students getting drunk is one thing (and one can quite reasonably debate the merits of the university trying to prevent it, trying to make it safer when it happens, etc m). Stanford students supplying alcohol that gets high school students drunk is another issue entirely.

When I was an undergrad, we took this extremely seriously. You do not drink with the prospective students. You do not host a party where you might mistake a prospective freshman for a Stanford student.

Even ignoring safety and liability, the purpose of going to a school like Stanford is not to get drunk. The prospective freshman have about 48 hours to learn what Stanford has to offer, and doing so drunk or hung over benefits no one.

Here’s an article about it. This policy apparently dates to 2001:

https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/03/students-reflect-on-adm...

(Other groups were surely less responsible.)

> I imagine a single administrator could keep up with the entire workload.

From the link you shared:

- The Party Review Committee will meet Tuesday each week during the Autumn, Winter and Spring quarters to review party requests submitted via CardinalEngage.

- The Party Review Committee will consist of representation from the following units/departments including, but is not limited to:

    - Office of Substance Use Programs, Education & Resources (SUPER) 
    - Office of Student Engagement (OSE)
    - Residential Education (ResEd)
    - Fraternity and Sorority Life (FSL)
    - Residential & Dining Enterprises: Housing Operations (R&DE)
    - Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS)
    - Stanford University Fire Marshal’s Office (SUFMO)

That sounds like a fun party! Have they registered their meetings with themselves?

Jesus Christ. Kill it with fire before it spreads!

Too late. Need a permit for the fire.

This absolutely seems crazy to me.

College students are adults, why the fuck is the college managing what they do off campus at all? You go to school for education, not for the school to manage your entire life.

That Americans have become increasingly okay with colleges being surrogate parents for literal adults is just bizarre.

Well stated. In 2021, my college cancelled my study abroad semester for winter 2022 due to "covid". (Reminder that this is after 2 doses of the vaccine, and the semester would have almost been at the time of the booster for me.) No way to decide our own risk tolerance to travelling, just a complete ban because the college knows better than it's students.

> why the fuck is the college managing what they do off campus at all?

It’s not. Stanford’s campus is huge, and almost all undergrads live on it. The parties in question were generally held on campus, often in university-owned and managed buildings and often on the front lawns. The university had insurance (I don’t remember the precise details).

And, to be clear, the university was generally fairly supportive. You could host a party in university space. You could coordinate with student who were not part of the hosting group to throw genuinely interesting parties. You were allowed to serve alcohol on university property under a fairly uniform set of rules, and guests knew what to expect. If the police showed up, the hosts wouldn’t get in trouble if they followed the rules. If an out of control guest set of the fire alarm, the host would generally be treated quite favorably. If a guest was out of control and the host needed to call the police or medical services, they would come and not bust the host. (And hosts were strongly encouraged to send excessively drunk people seek medical care if needed.)

Part of the point of preregistration was to make sure that everyone was prepared. If you’re going to buy wristbands, post flyers, etc, filling out a quick web form is not a great hardship.

Of course there were obnoxious parts of the policies, but overall I think the university did fairly well here.

The PARENTS are paying for the college, so I'm not surprised that the college is taking a parental role...

When the students themselves are coughing up the $80k/year then you will see a permissive atmosphere. Or you'll find them reallocating their resources to $40k colleges and the rest on alcohol?

TulliusCicero says >"College students are adults, why ... is the college managing what they do off campus at all? ... That Americans have become increasingly okay with colleges being surrogate parents for literal adults is just bizarre."<

Well, college students are mostly not adults. They are young, inexperienced and incompletely developed intellectually and emotionally. This is nothing new and colleges know much more about this than HN does.

It was the same way when I was in college and it will remain so as long as we have colleges. Colleges have always had to keep an eye on students and rein in problematic behavior.

College-aged students are called young adults. And they definitely are. Infantalization of young adults is not good for their development in my opinion and experience.

    They are young, inexperienced and incompletely developed intellectually and
    emotionally.

College is supposed to be the place where they can gain that experience and develop intellectually and emotionally by doing things, including things that result in negative consequences. Instead, what Stanford is doing is infantilizing its students in a manner that will make them incapable of displaying personal initiative and handling disputes like mature adults. God forbid that a Stanford student actually demonstrate that they've grown, in terms of social skills and emotional maturity, by doing something as adult as inviting a bunch of people over for a party.

> It was the same way when I was in college and it will remain so as long as we have colleges. Colleges have always had to keep an eye on students and rein in problematic behavior.

Except we know this is not true, because plenty of other countries don't expect universities to micromanage their students' personal lives.

Your comment is a great example of, "well this is how it currently works in America, therefore it must be this way universally for all time." Please try to account for other countries existing before issuing sweeping generalizations about human nature. There's more to the world than just the US.

Do not put words in my mouth.

TulliusCicero says >"Your comment is a great example of, 'well this is how it currently works in America..."<"

Yes, this is part of what I was saying. Another part (also implied) is "that is how it was when I went to college (in USA)...". There are many underlying unspoken implications in speech, I haven't the time to tell you all of them for this particular sentence nor do I think that you would be interested.

>"...therefore it must be this way universally for all time.'"*<

No, this is NOT what I was saying. YOU implied this and YOU said this.

You are more eloquent and communication speeds up when you speak for yourself. Do not speak for me.

In what world are adults organized in fraternities with arcane rules everyone has follow? In what adult world are adult women not allowed to host parties with alcohol while having to rely on male friends to host such parties in their dorms? That literally mandate going to parties for members?

The above are all features of greek life at Stanford. You know why sorroties dont allow alcohol parties? Because adults who finished college long time ago run the larger organization and these are rules they impose. This has nothing to do with spontaneous self organization of students.

In what adult world do adult throw temper tamptrum for years because salamander took precedence over sand hill build during drunken party years ago? In what adult world is "social life" equated with fraternities? Like, in adult world, lakes on institution property do get sometimes close for public for whole host of reasons, without that being framed as "war on fun".

Unimportant side not is, if you go to university primary for education and do not want have large part of life mandated by institution, you stay out of greek life (as majority of students do).

>Pre-registration of large (“level 3”) parties has been a thing for a long time. But when I was there, one pre-registered a party, one did so online, and I imagine a single administrator could keep up with the entire workload.

As far as "level 3" is concerned, are you referring to this scale[0]?

        Festivity Level 1: Your guests are chatting amiably with each
   other, admiring your Christmas-tree ornaments, singing carols around
   the upright piano, sipping at their drinks and nibbling hors d'oeuvres.

        Festivity Level 2: Your guests are talking loudly -- sometimes
   to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all, rearranging your
   Christmas-tree ornaments, singing "i gotta be me" around the upright
   piano, gulping their drinks and wolfing down hors d'oeuvres.

        Festivity Level 3: Your guests are arguing violently with
   inanimate objects, singing "i can't get no satisfaction," gulping down
   other peoples' drinks, wolfing down Christmas tree ornaments and
   placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when
   the little hammers strike.

        Festivity Level 4: Your guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over
   their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around the burning
   Christmas tree.  The piano is missing.

        You want to keep your party somewhere around level 3, unless
   you rent your home and own Firearms, in which case you can go to level
   4.  The best way to get to level 3 is egg-nog.

[0] https://motd.ambians.com/quotes.php/name/freebsd_fortunes/to...

No. IIRC level 3 meant open to the whole campus. The party rules varied depending on who was invited.

As someone who went to a large state school, this post blows my mind. I can’t imagine this level of restraint around parties.

My fraternity and half a dozen other groups would host parties with 2-300 people each weekend. Most groups hosting these large parties had practices in place to ensure everyone was safe (e.g. sober drivers, cutting people off who were too intoxicated, etc.).

Attendance was more valuable when events conflicted because it became a social status symbol. That being said, prominent groups coordinated with each other. I also disagree with characterizing throwing a party during finals as a “facepalm”. My friend group always prioritized studying and grades, and I believe others should as well. I believe to a greater extent that they should be given the freedom to make mistakes, or have fun if they believe themselves able to manage both their studies and their social life.

I doubt that diligent campus security could do a better job than responsible and respectful hosts and friends. Giving students resources to host safe parties would be more effective since they are closer to the source of issues and can stop small issues before they become bigger issues. The same resources could encourage other safe practices like not over-imbibing, traveling with trusted friends, etc., and would keep students safer than any campus security could, while giving students more freedom and responsibility.

I base this assessment in part off of personal experience. At my school one year, a girl went to a frat party with her friend, and got too drunk. The fraternity made sure she and her friend had a ride home. Her friend made sure she got to her dorm room safe. After getting home, she wandered out of her building to the nearby fire department, which neighbors the famous police office. She fell asleep in front of the bay door and was run over and killed by a firefighter responding to a call who did not see her.

This story demonstrates 1) the effort that other students made to ensure safety and 2) the failure of campus security to catch a massive safety issue right under their noses. I feel terrible for the girl and her family. Their experience was tragic and heartbreaking. That tragedy resulted does not negate the fact that all involved did everything they could (shy of not having the party) to ensure safety and campus security could not have done anything more without tucking her in to bed and watching her all night, which I find unreasonable.

As you said, parties can be dangerous. Hosts and attendees being cautious and responsible will go much further than more vigilant campus security.

To be clear, campus security didn’t actually hang out and watch parties. The hosts were supposed to manage their own parties (within boundaries set by the university). And I’m not saying Stanford’s policies were perfect or even close. But I do think they did a decent job of letting students host parties on campus with keeping a degree of awareness of what happened on campus.

Stanford was also known for allowing students to drink with friends in their own rooms, in undergrad dorms, with the doors open. It was quite strongly discouraged to close the doors when drinking. These weren’t “parties” for these purposes. I think this was an excellent policy — it encouraged being social, it helped keep everyone safe, and it steered undergrad drinking in a more mature and safer direction. Sadly, IMO, this is no longer the case:

https://stanforddaily.com/2021/09/20/from-the-community-stan...

I don’t know how the actual bureaucracy and effects of the policies have changed since I was there.

That sounds like a good policy to me as well. I think the “they will do it anyway” logic is a slippery slope, but underage drinking in college is so mainstream that preventing it is a Sisyphean task. IMO it is best to discourage but encourage a safe atmosphere when students inevitably ignore recommendations.

How is throwing a party during finals a facepalm? I recall that being one of the best times to party...

Even more administrators? And we wonder why education keeps getting more expensive.

> Even more administrators?

Yes, they will hire a planned parenthood admin who you contact 2 weeks before any “on-campus intimacy”.

The erosion of campus liberties at elite schools makes them worse places for everyone. And it's been happening at least since I went to school, from 2000-2004. It not only removes all the fun, it also infantilizes the students. College is where modern kids grow up, and growing up requires, for many of us, doing some unwise or at least unwise-looking things. The growth of the nanny-bureaucratic complex at these schools will make them dull, lifeless, and even more expensive, and then after college, people will finally start the growing up process at age 22. As that happens, they'll hire ever more administrators to try to fix it, with predictable results.

>” then after college, people will finally start the growing up process at age 22.”

I used to think like this, but then I realize that a good portion of the students who are used to this kind of institutionalized infantilizing internalize that it is proper and necessary.

Then they go on to agitate for similar structures “in the real world”. Something to be especially mindful of is the fact that these students are going to “elite” schools and are therefore likely to end up in management or decision making positions.

Ah, so this is how we ended up with SBF and his “oopsie I made a fucky wucky” act.

This isn't Seinfeld, and everything doesn't come back to Lloyd Braun.

SBF?

SBF = Sam Bankman-Fried

Thanks!

aka. Sam Bank-Fraud

He's almost 30 though.

Exactly, they’re saying that SBF and cadre expect to be treated as “kids” with the government/institutions playing nanny. It’s become their worldview coming from elite universities.

Exactly right. I remember 10 years ago when boomer conservative pundits would talk about how all of these crybaby college students would have something coming for them when they entered “the real world”. Instead, they predictably entered and shaped the institutions to fit their deranged worldview.

See the ultimate example in Yoel Roth (PhD in woke nonsense) acting as the stick-up-the-ass hall monitor for our entire civilization.

I think you are giving too much credit to Twitter and an ex manager from it. Shaping the civilization? Oh come on, the whole saga is just a part of a billionaire’s clash in the culture war. Could have played out entirely differently had he bought it for cheaper.

Yes, Twitter is a key platform where political ideas are exchanged, particularly for politically active / elite, and Roth was responsible for censoring it on the basis of his own political bias and on behalf of the FBI, CIA, and other federal government agencies

There's no evidence he acted on personal bias, and the US government never asked or told Twitter to do anything.

Other than that, your knowledge of current events is spot on.

Huh? This is not asking or telling? Is it suggesting at least?

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/12/22/how-twitter-hid...

Of all the "revelations" of the Twitter Files (mostly recapping the interactions that were already publicly known), preventing DoD run accounts from being marked as spam is the closest thing to an actual scandal. But

1. These accounts weren't promoted, they were just protected from being "deranked".

2. Twitter and Meta suspended most of these accounts, and made public that they had done so. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/us/politics/pentagon-soci...

So the entirely of this "scandal" is that Twitter agreed to shield these accounts from being attacked themselves (mass labeled as spam) - which as it turns out wasn't needed because according to their own records, these accounts received 1-2 impressions per post. In other words, no one even saw them.

Then Twitter banned them and pubicaly fingered them.

Should Twitter have done this? No. Is it proof of an engine of Twitter/US Gov cooperation to promote certain things and silence others? No.

The US government does tell Twitter to do things, the same way they tell you to do things, by passing laws saying not to murder people or have CSAM on your website. That is what happened here.

Sometimes individual government employees report posts, the same way you can; this doesn’t have the force of law and you can ignore them.

You sarcastically accuse me of not being up to speed on current events, but clearly you haven’t read (or at least haven’t comprehended) the multi part “Twitter Files” releases that indeed show that

1) Twitter censorship often took place at the discretion of employees, including Yoel Roth

2) The FBI was in consistent contact with Roth and co, directing them on which topics and individuals to censor

3) the CIA also had representatives who met with Twitter to help arrange censorship.

Best to catch up on the latest breaking news before wading into these discussions. Im sure you’d agree that mis, dis, and malinformation are extremely dangerous to our democracy!

1. Ultimate people employed by Twitter had to make calls on what content violated their rules. Is this surprising to you, did you assume machines did this?

2. There was no direction. FBI pointed out content that filed Twitter's rules (NOT its rules), and Twitter sometimes took action and sometimes didn't, at their own discretion.

3. Communications yes, "arrange censorship" no. See above.

I get that the "Twitter Files" is a perfectly engineered PR campaign to convince conservatives of the one thing they believed all along "they are censoring us!". Well, you are half right. "They" meaning Twitter did take repeated actions against right wing accounts for breaking its rules against harassment, election/public health misinfo, and general awfulness. That's true. But the US government never demanded or received any action.

If you need a reminder about what free speech actually protects (hint: it's not the consequences of being an awful person online). https://xkcd.com/1357/

could you detail a bit who Yoel Roth is and that example? (I see he is/was some guy at twitter, in the/some Safety group.) what's his woke view that he forced/attempted-to-force on twitter?)

Nice try, Yoel!

He was head of the government censorship wing of Twitter, carrying out censorship on behalf of his preferred political ideology as well as the FBI, CIA, and other politically aligned federal government agencies

Note the posts being censored here were child porn and pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis. I agree the US government wants you to censor that.

Sounds like you’ve been mislead about both the relevant contents of Hunters’ laptop (“10% for the big guy”) as well as the content that the FBI and CIA were directing Twitter employees to censor. The best way to get better educated on the topic would be to read the Twitter Files releases yourself.

I did. Your problem is you read them without noticing the parts Taibbi was lying about ;)

The part where he mentioned posts being deleted without saying what they were for instance - you can look all those up on archive.org. They’re penises. The part today about the CIA is just nonsense.

Similarly, the laptop story was suppressed by Trump’s FBI because it sounds worse when you post vague insinuations about it then if you saw the real thing, an obvious fake[1]. You can look up the original “reporting” on the archive too - it comes from Guo Wengui, a Chinese billionaire friend of Giuliani, and it’s full of lurid writing about, again, the size of his penis[2] and claims it’s full of child porn.

[1] https://twitter.com/revhowardarson/status/159983985145688883...

[2] https://twitter.com/beijingpalmer/status/1325259822829334535

>”Your problem is you read them without noticing the parts Taibbi was lying about ;)”

Including the ;) is unnecessary and makes this post come across in a really condescending way.

Seemed a bit too robotic with just a period. Topic’s kind of heavy you know.

It is, but I also feel like it is counterproductive to the message you are trying to communicate. The rest of the post is otherwise articulate and sourced.

Hunter biden revenge porn bad

In fact, it’s illegal! Whether it’s bad or not isn’t part of the decision tree.

You seem to have no idea what Yoel Roth's job was.

> Something to be especially mindful of is the fact that these students are going to “elite” schools and are therefore likely to end up in management or decision making positions.

Well, they only do because people, probably including yourself recruit them preferentially. They don't magically end up in these positions.

Disagree? Make sure you exclude graduates from the top 20 universities in the US in your next recruiting event.

Why does everyone blame the administrators as if students play no part? Inclusion, diversity, and psychological safety are strong values with the current generation of college students (gen z) and are building upon ideas from previous generations (millennials).

The parents of millennials (boomers) have been lamenting their creation for years already.

America created and raised these children and now seems to have some remorse about it, and history continues to repeat itself.

Maybe the dominant culture is leaving some folks behind.

Leftist faculty educated students this way. America created these children, but leftist activists raised them, because parents were too busy working through their own self-fulfillment woes.

It's a cultural shift that seems crafted:

Self-fulfillment -> follow your heart -> feelings first -> feelings only.

We have a whole generation of people who excuse bad behavior and failure with "I was having a hard time, I have to have my support peacock on the plane." None of these people heard "No" enough as a child.

There's value in teaching children to ignore name-calling. "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me." This is what we used to teach. People can be mean, don't let it affect you. Show grit, find it in yourself to continue anyway, and you'll succeed.

Now? Achieve power by exploring your victim-hood and collapse in shaking outrage because someone disagreed with you.

We need to start fixing this, and clearing these piles of frivolous administrators from the staff at universities would be a great start.

Isn't that largely because the most marginalized groups started speaking up, and started being heard? Hasn't it progressed from there?

I think it's fair to say LGBTQ, women and brown folks are being hurt in tangible ways by dominant language (words can in fact hurt when they influence generations of behavior), and like most progress there seem to be some who are experiencing downsides now that things are changing.

Who decides who has sour grapes?

Were these bureaucrats just waiting in the wings for an excuse to pounce with regressive policy?

Blaming the staff without examining the broader cultural shift seems as bad as an emotional support peacock.

The staff is using "inclusiveness" as the political cudgel it was intended to be. The people exercising power are doing so on behalf of the so-called marginalized with no evidence that the measures they're taking are beneficial in any way.

Words cannot harm you. Actions harm. Please stop perpetuating that nonsense.

Name-calling or epithet-hurling has not hurt anyone in a tangible way (tangible means "touchable" something physical). Bias, and discrimination based on bias or prejudice does cause economic and sometimes physical harm. It is proper behavior we need to teach, not hypersensitivity to phrasing.

This is it. Dangerous allyship... but I still think you aren't giving words and behaviors they lead to enough credit - the odds of the participants of this thread being in a marginalized group (myself included) are low, no language and set of behaviors systemically oppresses us.

I worry we throw the marginalized baby out with the bath water in discussions like this.

I agree with you that words do have power and meaning, but disagree with the current zeitgeist approach of censorship.

It causes far more harm on average than any minimal help it does in some cases. There’s substantial active harm in the amount of gaslighting and ill conceived redefinition of words going on. It’s exactly the sort of whitewashing of thought that’d lead to the world found in The Giver.

> throw out the marginalized baby

I think that’s just an updated version of the “white mans burden” — the white man has a burden to take care of the poor colored people.

The real way to change such things is over time by hard work and engagement. Dismantling actually oppressive systems in financial systems and laws. Giving opportunities not outcomes. Reducing things like inflation which disproportionately affects poorer people. And a hundred other things, all of which were working over the last decades with improvements in almost every metric for marginalized groups. Still lots of real work left.

    Were these bureaucrats just waiting in the wings for an excuse to pounce
    with regressive policy?

Yes. American culture has always been a tug of war between puritanical norms and libertine norms, and we're seeing the latest mutation of the puritans taking over. It doesn't seem that way, because this iteration of the puritans have co-opted the language of the libertines, but if these university administrators were transported back in time, they'd be enforcing Prohibition laws with equal zeal. Transported further back in time, they'd be organizing the expulsion of Catholics, Quakers and other "heretical" religious sects. There is, and always has been, a large segment of America which looks at the average frat kegger the same that a Taliban mullah looks at a collection of unveiled women. They hate fun, and, given a chance, they will do their utmost to banish it. And if fun can't be banished, it will be regulated into submission.

Of course, they don't do this for themselves. No, of course not. They do it to improve the moral worth of the people. Their zealotry is driven by the purest of intentions.

    Who decides who has sour grapes?

The ones who have placed themselves in a position to define which grapes are or are not sour: the aforementioned bureaucrats.

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C. S. Lewis

This reminds me of an old saying:

"The beatings will continue until morale improves."

I enjoyed reading this. It brings a nice perspective on the issue which is hardly talked about.

> ...we're seeing the latest mutation of the puritans taking over. It doesn't seem that way, because this iteration of the puritans have co-opted the language of the libertines, but if these university administrators were transported back in time, they'd be enforcing Prohibition laws with equal zeal. Transported further back in time, they'd be organizing the expulsion of Catholics, Quakers and other "heretical" religious sects...

This rings true to me, and I find it very insightful. Thank you for writing it.

I agree with this sentiment a lot. Many people could benefit from understanding that a whole world of hard facts exists outside of their feelings.

There also appears to be a whole world of alternative facts.

>> Self-fulfillment -> follow your heart -> feelings first -> feelings only.

This is it. This sentence is 100% correct.

The problem is not valuing inclusion, diversity and psychological safety. Those are just the excuses used by bureaucrats to justify removing autonomy. You can promote those values without requiring people to preregister attendees for every party.

>> the parents of millennials (boomers)

OI. The parents of the millenials are the X-gens mate.

Sometimes known as the lost generation, or latch-key-kids etc.

The boomers are _our_ parents! And don't you forget it.

Now, get off my lawn :)

no, the millenials are a very large group because their parents were an even larger group, the boomers.

> OI. The parents of the millennials are the X-gens mate.

Usually, yes, but not always! I'm 29 (born in 1993), which I think is pretty clearly in the range of millennial (definitions vary, and I've seen cutoffs anywhere between 1994 and 1997, but I don't think anyone would put me in Gen Z by any reasonable stretch of the imagination). My parents were born in late 1958 and early 1959, which is probably not within the most common definition of boomer, but I've met other people my age with parents born a few years before mine. I don't think anyone would consider someone born in, say, 1955, to be Gen X, and having a kid at 39 in 1994 would have been somewhat unusual but not really that crazy (especially if the other parent happened to be a few years younger).

If that still doesn't convince you, I don't think I have anything else I could say, but maybe reading this comic might provide a compelling argument: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EOdaSW2XUAE1Pxm?format=png&name=...

I am an old millennial (39), both of my parents are square in the middle of boomer, and had me when they were 23 (they are in their early 60s now, so born at the tail end of the boomers). Still, it's not like they had me at 35, they were 23 and still entirely skipped gen X. They'd could have been born even earlier and had me later in life without much risk.

I get where you're coming from but I think maybe relax a bit there...

And then these elites will graduate and run the country’s major unelected institutions, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, consulting firms, expert agencies, non-government organizations, charitable foundations, think tanks, etc.

I've also noticed that a lot of the elite and ivy league schools have started pulling themselves from the US News and World Reports ranking system. Which is a great ploy to keep the mystique of these schools alive while they lose most of the educational advantages that they had over other schools.

> while they lose most of the educational advantages that they had over other schools.

The dirty secret is that they haven't really had those supposed educational advantages for a long time, if ever.

I attended undergrad at a large university that was (and still is) around the 75-100 range in US News rankings. I then attended graduate school at a top-10 US News school. My expectation coming in was that compared to my peers in undergrad, the undergrad students I was teaching as grad student would on average be smarter and work harder, and would have better resources available to them. All three were false. They were on average more ambitious and more demanding (in terms of e.g. asking for points back on assignments), but not smarter.

There are very real advantages to attending an elite school, but they are primarily social rather than educational. Having letters of recommendation from top scholars helps you get into grad school. Making friends with other people attending an elite school can provide all sorts of opportunities down the road. Just having the name on your resume will open doors for you. The undergrad education itself, though, probably isn't better.

At one point there was a huge filtering effect on who got into the best schools, if you start with and concentrate top performers you get good results no matter what; and can set a faster pace in addition. The proportion of legacy and diversity students (combined with the national push for a reduced emphasis on objective testing) completely eroded this.

Not only are the students of less quality, the pace has to match the bottom, so they don't fail out all the special entries.

This has been my observation as well. When I meet a boomer that went to an elite school I often find them impressive. Anyone that is a millennial that went to an elite school, rarely is more impressive than the folks I’ve met from second tier schools. For Gen-Z it’s a mixed bag.

All those schools have going for them these days is a reputation that’s no longer deserved, social connections, wealth and a sense of entitlement that scores them freebies from time to time.

almost all the undergrad students at elite schools are elite students. That is not at all true of second tier schools. That doesn't mean you can't find and establish a cohort with great students at a lower tier school, and the professors at lower tier schools are often excellent, but it's simply not true that you can move down the bell curve of board scores and not notice; though a friend of mine was fond of saying, "you need to live in a tall building to be able to see everybody else who lives in a tall building."

> almost all the undergrad students at elite schools are elite students.

Based on my own experience at an elite school (as a graduate student, teaching undergrads), this is definitely false.

> Why are people so willing to accept that from childhood leagues to professional, in basketball, football, soccer, etc. society scours and finds all the best players, and nobody is out to prove that it's not true, but that somehow we as a society are incapable doing it in intellectual fields?

Because athletic performance can be objectively and reasonably easily measured along many (not all) dimensions. Intellectual performance is (1) much harder to measure objectively and (2) much less socially acceptable to use such measurements. Good grades can indicate high intellectual performance, or they can indicate grade inflation. A high SAT score can indicate high intellectual ability, or it can indicate that your parents paid $4000 for SAT prep courses and 1-on-1 tutoring. Basing college acceptance on a battery of psychological tests might be somewhat better than current methods at selecting elite students, but (1) those tests would immediately become the subjects of a new test-prep industry and (2) it's not socially acceptable to do that.

I went to a school with lots of parties, and I don't believe the presence of parties causes students mature to any extent. Most students acted like kids and were unaware of responsibility until after graduation regardless.

My gut feeling is being responsible for your own well being (rent, food, job) is important for contextualizing other aspects of your life, like studying vs play.

Do people really need college to grow up?

A big party to celebrate the cofounder of FTX!

as someone not hailing from the US the entire setup sounds bizarre to me and I wonder why students even still participate in this. Over here in Germany on-campus living is uncommon. People just rent flats in the city, go to uni and the limit to how much they can party is usually determined by how much they can piss off their landlord or neighbors, which is how it ought to be given that everyone's an adult.

Why are people over the age of 18 voluntarily putting themselves into an environment where they have to ask if they can have a party? Why is this nonsense not simply dying on its own? The real problem is that people don't simply leave. Easiest way to not be annoyed by some bureaucrat gone mad with power is to separate school life from private life.

> People just rent flats in the city, go to uni

Stanford is an edge case because, as a sibling commenter says, it owns a lot of real estate, but also it's in an insanely high cost-of-living area, so students can't necessarily afford to live just anywhere. At most "normal" universities in the US, you can just live off-campus and do what you want (or at least, follow the city and landlord's rules, not the university's).

My understanding is that universities in the U.S. often own much of the real estate around their campuses. (This is particularly true at Stanford; even faculty members who want to live nearby end up renting from Stanford or "buying" land leases.)

Yup.

University and hospital affiliates are often the biggest slumlords in their area. Having a buffer to make room for future expansion that produces income is a winning strategy.

> "associate vice provost of inclusion, community and integrative learning within the Division of Student Affairs"

OK, Stanford alums on here, no more donations until Stanford gets the administrator/faculty ratio back to 1990 levels.[1]

[1] https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-administrative-bloat-is...

> The party-planning process will be streamlined and more administrators will be hired to help facilitate student social life.

This could be a line straight out of "Brazil" or some similar work, I laughed out loud.

Too bad the ending of Brazil isn't funny.

The more administrators will be hired part reminds me of a poster at my dads work back in the 1970's. It read.

'Adding more engineers to a project that's in trouble is like using gasoline to put out a fire'

Off hand it feels like the issue here is the universities idea is the committees jobs is to ensure the students party responsibly without taking on any actual responsibility themselves.

I almost doubt Christian universities could be more straight-laced than this. It's just weird. I mean, I don't expect all campuses to be line Oneonta or Santa Cruz, but WOW!

To be honest when I went to Uni., I never really understood the hazing aspect and the overboard frat parties, but some partying as long as you don't have extraordinary excess or condone danger (ala hazing) it's part of growing up. Stanford is overcorrecting.

Is SUNY Oneonta really considered a top tier party school exemplar?

Do you need to be at top tier Uni to get properly drunk, drugged and rowdy?

If the uni is in a big city you have other places to discover and party.

I was curious because I knew some Oneonta alums and had no idea that it was a party school. Whereas the go-to party school examples that come to mind for me are places like Az state, Colorado, Wisconsin, etc

Governance of private life. There must be a committee to oversee your party planning, and it must be done for you.

That's so far down the planned-economy planned-society political line (control is required) that it's sad they can't see this for a the outright sickness that it is.

Communists gonna communist.

It seems like this is a symptom of a crazy boatload of money that has come in over many years via having close ties to silicon Valley. The property and wealth of the school is so high that these jobs and bureaucracy are created just to have a reason to spend this money. Like, once all your basic needs of a university are met, the next thing you spend your money on gets more and more disconnected from reality.