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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.
A problem with this essay is that it takes everything that a Jewish student says as true, when we don’t actually know if what they allege is true. There are no links to police reports and investigations, and no rigorous comparison of “Jewish student victimization” versus “Palestinian student victimization”. That is problematic because it allows a random anonymous Jewish student the power to change the discourse, because he can tell his story to the author who then writes it in the Atlantic. It’s doubtful that the author has as many Palestinian friends as Jewish friends, or considers everything a Palestinian student alleged to be true in the same way he does for Jewish students.
The piece in the Atlantic is… a story. It is written to persuade the reader. He omits things not part of his narrative, like that a Jewish organization was caught writing a hoax anti-semitic message at Stanford. Similar hoaxes have occurred at other universities: 1, 2, 3. Jewish groups love their hoaxes. If one of the only(?) people caught writing something antisemitic is Jewish, what then is the probability that the other writings and postings are by a Jewish student? We can’t ignore that there would be a strong motive to do this and that it has been done frequently before.
If there have been some altercations and insensitive comments which have victimized Jewish students at Stanford in the year 2024, I expect to see a video recording or audio recording, at the very least I would need it to be confirmed by two gentile witnesses who are not affiliated with Jewish organizations.
edit here’s a Twitter thread of alleged altercations at Stanford in which an Arab or Palestinian was victimized. Are these events real? Well, isn’t that the point — the author picks and choose which hearsay to post in his article. We need a clear breakdown of victimization rates, not more hearsay narratives.
Having commuted past the rival Palestine and Israel protest tents for most of their existence, I can say that the account in this story is hilariously overwrought and overdramatized.
Many people are anti Zionist to some degree. It’s not an extreme view. I guess if you’ve grown up in a particular bubble this might come as a shock to you as you enter the real world.
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