Among the Intellectualoids/Benetton U.
Ferguson, Tim W.
At the World Dance on a Saturday night in late September, I saw the New Stanford University. Along a campus street, multicultural bands were playing variations on Latino funk. There, on a ministage...
...I did catch sight of many attractive wine bottles on the tables at the fancy soirees I couldn't afford to attend...
...The quarrels lurked barely beneath the surface of public and private discussions...
...The 50 The American Spectator January 1992 show's producer answered anyway...
...Still, the driving concern of Stanford now is money...
...Is this what the world is coming to...
...Gorby could have told him that...
...their normal class schedules disrupted to allow visitors to attend a wide range of special lectures...
...Not only has the indirect-cost scandal brought the roof down on part of that exercise, but Kennedy's last major crusade as president is a long-announced quest to emphasize undergraduate teaching...
...For all the smiles of centennial weekend, tensions remain acute on many fronts...
...D The American Spectator January 1992 51...
...I puzzled over the absence—at the bestseller table—of P J. O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores...
...Stanford was throwing a weekend centennial party for itself and 10,000 alums, and the self-conscious theme was the school's acquired reputation for pluralism with a vengeance...
...Daryl Joseffer, a former editor of the publication, argued that no sooner had multiculturalism become university policy than it was repulsed at the "human level" in a backlash against P.C...
...Departing from his text, which propounded his vision of "family values," Wilson denounced his tormentors as "fascists," fielded an orange thrown at him, and received a standing ovation from the rest of the crowd...
...Although I can't speak for the throats, I will say that the grounds of the otherwise tidy campus were definitely parched...
...According to a column in the Review, the campus conservative weekly, most Stanford students have had their fill of political correctness...
...Former Secretary of State George Shultz scored high at an early gathering when he dared suggest that those who voluntarily come to a university, like immigrants to a new country, buy into certain customs and conventions...
...In search of coherence I retreated to the relatively controlled indoor postings...
...In keeping with local grooming standards (which have improved markedly in fifteen years) they were as well-scrubbed as Benetton models, and just as diverse...
...Not to worry, as I learned at the highly computerized order desk: thirty-two copies of P J. had been stocked and sold out...
...It beats me how the event scheduled for that hour—a keynote address by Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney—would have been thought the likely target of a raucous crowd...
...If his objective was to shake the complacency of an affluent student majority and not let it be graduated in splendid isolation from swirling demographic change—and a university may properly set this as a goal—he should have found a better way ("missionary" postings...
...This mega-merchandiser now devotes a loft to the requisite capuccino bar...
...John Frohrunayer ('64) was to address "issues facing the arts in the '90s...
...Whatever you say, ma'am...
...Yes, this is what the world is coming to," he told the Stanford Daily...
...It was thus rather odd that the Queer Nation wing of the homosexual movement chose to disrupt the final convocation by harassing the speaker, California Governor Pete Wilson (whose wife is a Stanford grad), who'd just vetoed a job discrimination bill sought and expected by the gay lobby...
...The Gaieties is not what you might think it would be in this context (at least not entirely...
...one bygone dollie asked rhetorically...
...This little act of grace was followed by another of even greater portent: a male classmate seated near the wall discreetly offered his chair to the grounded coed—and she accepted...
...When one aging alum arrived late at a small, oversubscribed session, an undergraduate offered up her chair at the roundtable and plopped down to the floor...
...But matching the current student body with alumni bodies accentuates how much the world is changing: the contemporary classes are a good deal less white (and, like most California schools, significantly Asian-24 percent...
...But one should not discount the possibility that the university, after a decade of hyper-social activism, will find a younger candidate with whom it can lean back toward corporate America...
...as was the work of various Palestinian artists ("Grapes and Figs Are in Season," one flyer announced...
...Although private funds were raised to fund many of the new structures, they often served as mere leverage for bringing in the cranes...
...The kiosks devoted to public notices were ever in chaos—a reflection either of Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" or of Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction...
...In his forthcoming book on American intellectuals, Anderson argues that the alienation of the modern university faculty from American life is rooted in their fraudulent presumption to being teachers...
...I said generally: at the campus crossroads of White Plaza, I saw one young woman sporting a T-shirt with the word HISPANIC encircled and slashed...
...Whereas a personnel link between the institution and the Reagan Administration in the early 19£10s angered or embarrassed many at Stanford, the tie to Yeltsin is a source of widespread pride...
...In fact, he says, to avoid teaching they have constructed a "research" apparatus that includes placing articles in ever more obscure and impenetrable journals...
...Achap from the Class of '51 remarked that he hadn't been back since graduating and was amazed by the number of buildings that had sprung up, even as non-professional school enrollment has been stable...
...indoctrination and speech control...
...Booze is another serious subject at Stanford...
...There, on a ministage in front of my old freshman dorm, a dozen students performed what I would call a cappella calypso...
...Its big-name scholars helped "sell" the centennial, and there was growing interest in Hoover's advisory links to Boris Yeltsin's government...
...I wanted to see whose books were selling, as opposed to just being sold, a big difference in the case of Raisa Gorbachev's I Hope, as I soon learned...
...A special version was produced for nostalgic alums or those who'd already sampled the local lounge acts...
...James Rosse, a colleague in that effort, is now the university provost...
...The kindest thing that can be said is that the policies he initiated or accepted—the "awareness" drives, the limitations on satiric speech, the symbolic demise of Western Civ—have instead magnified and hardened those human differences...
...underneath was printed with instructional emphasis, CHICANA...
...Even without the Hoover Tower, which loomed over the centennial ceremonies in Frost Amphitheater, the institution would be an imposing presence...
...In the face of prolonged drought, it is thought unseemly to use water for non-indigenous landscaping...
...It's hard to imagine Kennedy showing any sympathy for a senior fellow at Hoover...
...This "edifice complex," as a wag once tagged it at a campus construction site, will be one of President Donald Kennedy's lasting legacies...
...Stanford remains home to the brighter sons and daughters of the elite, particularly from the western U.S...
...For now, Kennedy's celebrated guest of a year ago, Mikhail Gorbachev, is faintly archival...
...than resorting to heavy-handed behavioral and thought modification...
...Anderson and others think that drive explains the limp faculty defense of Kennedy when his troubles mounted last spring...
...Not that the place is ready to become a hotbed of Young Republicanism...
...Under new leadership, Hoover appears to be back in the good graces of the Stanford administration, even if not with a big chunk of the faculty...
...Kennedy has an interesting defender (of sorts) in Martin Anderson, of the Hoover Institution...
...In addition, because high technology science today offers such vast and lucrative commercial possibilities, a keen understanding of links to the business world ought to be a qualification for heading any first-rank university...
...At the Green Library, Helen Caldicott's latest engagement was prominently advertised (what has she left to say...
...But bonhomie generally overcomes politics at a tightly knit school...
...Nonetheless, the kids displayed pleasant tolerance for their elders, despite having Tim W. Ferguson is "Business World" columnist for the Wall Street Journal...
...The Rams Head performing troupe managed to offend a few oldsters with the safest of sex scenes...
...The gist of The American Spectator January 1992 49 this mysterious acronym, according to a full-page notice in the campus Daily, is that any host serving alcoholic beverages had better keep them away from minors and make soft drinks "at least as accessible and attractive as, and more plentiful than," the hard stuff...
...On the other hand, I can also report that armed Santa Clara County sheriff's deputies were keeping eyes out for any improper containers entering the opening convocation at 9:00 a.m., Sunday...
...John Gardner's current snooze was also on display, for all who slept through his commencement speech last June...
...This compulsion may also have sped his downfall, in that the federal government has used Stanford as Exhibit A in cracking down on research overcharges by major universities...
...Can't deprive those California rice farmers of a few of the billions of gallons of irrigation they need to qualify for their crop subsidies...
...The school was the first to extend married-student housing to "domestic partners," who've now been granted similar privileges at the student health center...
...The left, more entrenched than ever in campus power bases, would likely raise unholy hell...
...The event was all in good cheer—and free, too, unlike the pricy World Dinner beforehand...
...I'm not sure how well the centennial conformed to EANABS...
...He locked horns with the institution's longtime leader, Glenn Campbell, over such matters as the Reagan Presidential Library, and eventually saw his crusty nemesis brought down...
...Rushing off to class with some of the alums, I saw a sign in one window of the humanities building with the large letters, HOMOTEXTUAL, a reminder that gay rights are written in stone at Stanford...
...This spring," he reported, "the People's Platform, a coalition of radical students of color, was overwhelmingly ousted from the student government it controlled for four years...
...No survey of Stanford would be complete without a check of its various barometers of progressive activity...
...It's an annual student musical revue...
...Catered cuisine hadn't been served in such tented opulence since Malcolm Forbes's last birthday bash in Morocco...
...His infamous yacht and wedding reception cost peanuts by comparison...
...For weightier evidence, I headed to the campus bookstore, which seems to get bigger every time I return...
...My favorite was the housekeeping service devilishly camouflaged as "Women at Work...
...As a result of the federal probe and other setbacks, perhaps $50 million will have to be axed from its budget...
...If George Shultz, a Hoover fellow, were willing (and younger—he's 71), the Stanford trustees presumably would love to appoint him president when Kennedy steps down at the end of the current academic year...
...centennial then, of multiculturalism, of what Donald Kennedy in the centennial valedictory called Stanford's "great experiment: to construct a learning community that both confronts and overcomes human differences...
...Paying off the balance on the facilities and maintaining all this new space is what accounts for nearly all the growth in indirect-cost reimbursements that landed President Kennedy in hot water...
...A nicely staged number called "Contraception" ended with a gratuitous display of a banana a la condom...
...Fraternities and sororities, despised and lambasted by the campus left for supposedly engendering `racism, sexism, and homophobia,' had an extremely successful rush this year...
...In the ultra-prestigious academic league in which Stanford competes, even the perception of retreat can be devastating...
...A few years back the university introduced a policy called EANABS...
...The audience for this celebration was tilted toward the traditional, to judge by the applause meter...
...Both at the library and at the Political Science Corner, advertisements for Central American refugees willing to be maids could appeal to both the ideological and the hypocritical sides of campus liberals...
...One person who could fit this presidential profile is Michael Boskin, who will be winding down a term as President Bush's chief economic adviser...
...Boskin is on leave from the Stanford faculty and, before departing for Washington, was instrumental in forming an economics center on campus that attracted millions of dollars in corporate-type support...
...Into the evening on Friday, two top Siberian leaders addressed about a hundred listeners at a Hoover hall...
...Certainly, its existence cannot be ignored...
Vol. 25 • January 1992 • No. 1
