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Notes -
The War at Stanford - The Atlantic
A few interesting things about this article:
The author is a sophomore student-journalist, and it's really good writing, by any standard. It turns out his parents are both top journalists. Nature vs nurture (vs high-status parents faking achievements by their kids to make them look good) is ambiguous, yet again!
One observation he makes that I hadn't seen in other reporting on campus protests, is that college admissions select for people who are "really good at looking really good," which includes strategic political posturing. This reminded me of my own experience at a high school that hyper-optimized for college admission, where I quickly became jaded by classmates openly-performative "activism." Are the elite student protestors my former classmates' gen-z counterparts? If so, how do my elite "betters" actually go on to do good things? Or, if the elite students are genuinely better than me, why are the people who are the best at looking the best mounting their (electrically conductive material, as required by this deliberately mixed metaphor) flagpole to the third rail? Or, is the sophomore student-journalist's observation true, but irrelevant, making this is just a really well-written, yet redundant, article about campus protests?
The Stanford administration banned calls for genocide, in response to the House hearing, but acknowledged to the reporter that this is illegal, due to a California statute requiring all universities to adhere to the First Amendment, not just public universities. I'm curious what the PR and legal discussions leading to this "ban" were, and what may result from it.
I went to the opposite: good, solid, public high school in the Midwest where everyone was clueless about how admission for the elite colleges worked. There were lots of us who were smart, hard-working, good grades, good test scores, etc. And we just got our asses kicked in admissions to the elite schools, because none of us had the right kind of extracurriculars or the right essays, and the teachers didn't know how to write recommendation letters for us. In retrospect I can see the mistakes I made, but how was I supposed to know that as a naive quakka-like 16-yr-old? I'm still a little bitter about that, and I do think it results in a society that rewards machiavellian sociopaths.
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