opinions-organizations-stanford

There's a lot the school could do. While I think Stanford does care about undergraduate life, they don't have an institutional structure that allows student concerns to effect change. As a result, there are a number of policies that really bug students, but Stanford will not budge. Here are some of them:

• The "housing crunch": Stanford stuffs every increasing amounts of undergrads into the same amount of housing, making it hard for students to get any privacy (or even to sleep without negotiations with roomates). They claim this is because there is a "housing crunch", but the crunch is purposefully created by the administration because each year Stanford admits more students than it can house without stuff students in tighter spaces.
• Faculty. Many faculty here are great and love students and are good teachers. A few are not. Unfortunately, often those few somehow end up teaching the large first year lecture classes anyways.
• Faculty hiring. Stanford claims it cares about both teaching and research but cares a little more about research. However, every two years or so a tremendously popular professor doesn't acheive tenure, despite rallies of large numbers of students in their favor (in one case like this the administration denied tenure over the department's recommendation!). I think the school does not really care about hiring good teachers.
• ResEd?. This is a bureaucracy charged with making student life good, and making it educational. So far so good. The problem is that they have their own ideas on how student life should be and they brook no dissent. ResEd? constantly plays power games with student-run houses, playing them off against one another and constantly threatening to de-house them because they're "not as good for the community as they could be" (of course, the students could tell you which houses are good for the community and which ones are deadweight, but they never ask anyone except their own like-minded student employees; as a result, all of the houses except one or two that used to have personality and generate a social life have been either de-housed or drained of life).
• (Lack of) intellectual contributions to the world. One would expect that as a university, Stanford would work to increase public knowledge. Sadly, although Stanford videotapes large numbers of its classes, it does not allow the general public to view these at cost (or at all!). The alumni magazine had an interview with an administration member who said that Stanford was worried about "diluting its brand". Instead, Stanford should follow the path of M.I.T.
• A bunch of little issues. You are not allowed to walk-in and see many of the registrar bureacrats; you must make an appointment. We have no real student union; nominally we have one, but instead of giving the space to students, the university rents it out for a profit to useless things like a travel agency. Students are not allowed to park in the student union parking lot. We used to have a reading/studying week before final exams, but it was repealed. Housing uses room damage fines as a profit center; they charge large fees to fix stuff, but people have reported going back to their old rooms to find that the stuff wasn't actually fixed. Until this year, students weren't allowed to take out movies from the library. Students are issued a parking permit only for their residence, so they can't drive to another park of campus to visit friends. Campus security officers sometimes have quotas and ticket parking violations even on saturday nights when the parking lots are half full.
• In summary, the university seems to care about growing its research and making tons of money than anything else. As I said above, I think that in truth the university does care about undergrads in addition to research -- it just doesn't seem that way when they ignore undergrad concerns.

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