Danny Crichton

This article was originally written for the Stanford Review's Fiat Lux blog

The recent announcement (see Fiat Lux and the Stanford Report) that Stanford was drafting a proposal to build a New York City campus came as something of a shock to many, myself included. Stanford University has maintained a policy of one home campus for years now, in contrast to many of our peer institutions. Why the sudden change?

One well-placed, senior administration official said to me that Stanford now sees its policy as a strategic mistake. According to this source, the university is now moving in the opposite direction, looking at potential new sites both in the United States and especially abroad to open full-fledged satellite campuses (details regarding the implementation of these campuses are in an early formative stage).

Stanford had better move quickly. New York University has made overseas campuses a central element of its strategic plan, arguing that it will become the first "Global Network University, a university that challenges the idea that a university can only deliver education at a single home campus." It has built a major portal campus in Abu Dhabi, and 10 academics centers across the world. NYU is something of a model for the new global university, and featured prominently in The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World, a book published last year by Ben Wildavsky that received notable attention (see an interview here)

However, I believe that the rapid changeover in Stanford's policy stems less from NYU than from the approach taken by Yale in Singapore. In what will become one of the first liberal arts college in Asia, Yale has partnered up with the National University of Singapore to offer a Yale-designed liberal arts curriculum for Singaporean

Informed Skeptic has been quiet over the past few weeks, largely due to a writing series I was developing with the Stanford Review on the future of the Humanities at Stanford. The pieces, variously co-written with Lisa Wallace and Alessandra Aquilanti, looked at three main topics:
,The History of Higher Education (and why this background is so damaging to the humanities),Why students choose the humanities over other fields,The financial future of the humanities

There is a lot of writing between these three articles (over 5000 words actually, so you can really get a hefty dose), but I want to pull out five major points that I think those interested in the humanities should note.

1. The Humanities at top schools are not going anywhere: they are very well-endowed, and at least at Stanford, have received more faculty slots than any other area at the university. The issue, though, is that the humanities have been experiencing declining enrollments, raising the question about the future sustainability of resources devoted to a declining area of study. If these continue to be out-of-balance, priorities at the university could quickly shift.
2. Economic pressure is a persistent - but small - part of the equation in students choosing fields outside the humanities. The greater concern students constantly noted to us regarded the utility of the humanities. This is usually taken to mean "employable," but when unpacked, actually has more to do about receiving an education that is relevant to real problems. In other words, our generation is more practical, but no less desiring of acquiring tools to critically analyze humans and human society. Our look at the English Department at Stanford and its new undergraduate curriculum shows that dramatic change can happen, and quickly. Departments need to develop curricula that provide

This article was originally written for the Stanford Review's Fiat Lux blog

My article on the Intensely Lonely World of Stanford Students has now been visited by more than 1500 people and has been shared more than 100 times. Love the power of the internet!

You may have seen this story in the New York Times about the rising levels of stress and depression among college students. My favorite quote:

"While first-year students' assessments of their emotional health were declining, their ratings of their own drive to achieve, and academic ability, have been going up, and reached a record high in 2010, with about three-quarters saying they were above average. "

Stanford is exceptional, and this is an issue in which we take pride in being a national leader. We are all academically gifted, and we are all stressed out all the time. That stress leads us to ignore the most important part of Stanford: the people who inhabit it.

I want to relate a discussion I had with my primary care physician before I came to Stanford. I was getting a physical before coming to Stanford, and as part of the session, he asked me how much Stanford was going to cost. I quoted the tuition and room and board fees. He then said, "You know how much a library card costs? $15. What are you learning at Stanford that you can't learn at a library?"

I laughed a little awkwardly. I mentioned new research, but he wasn't having my unprepared response. "That's right. Nothing. You know why you are paying almost $200,000 more? It's the people. You get to meet the most amazing people in the world, and they don't go to the county library.

This article was originally written for the Stanford Review's Fiat Lux blog

I noticed the following issue the first time I was sent an email about Senior Gift, but now that I have received eight separate emails, I figured I would bring up a question about the Class of 2011 Senior Gift.

In the emails that have been sent to me, the following paragraph is included to discuss the use of donated funds:

"This money DOES NOT go to the endowment. In fact, more than 75% of Senior Gift will be given out next year as financial aid so that Stanford can continue to attract the best and brightest. Almost 80% of our senior class received financial aid, so this is our opportunity to say thank you and to pay that forward to next year's Stanford students. Even better, each dollar a senior donates is matched almost 3 to 1, which almost triples our impact."

Maybe I am thinking more long-term, but what exactly is wrong with putting money in the endowment and having an impact on Stanford in perpetuity? It's not as if the endowment is some monstrosity: it is a huge agglomeration of separate accounts, each with a balance and a mission. Why can't our class create a partial fund for financial aid? Given some back-of-the-envelope calculations ($20.11 per student, ~1700 students times the 3:1 gift matching) means that we could have a $5,000 yearly payout. Forever.

Instead, the money is used in next year's operating expenses: a sort of flash in the pan instead of a sustainable gift. This move toward using senior gift donations toward operating expenses is a growing trend at universities, which use senior gift funds as an unrestricted source

I was just reading the survey and analysis of a new Washington Post poll conducted on the perceptions of American economic competitiveness. Not surprisingly, most Americans believe that the country is falling behind (glad people are paying attention), but the more interesting point was question two of the poll: "Do you feel that being number one in the world economically is an important goal for America, or that being number one is not that important a goal, as long as we're one of several leading economic powers?"

The answer sort of shocked me, as barely more than half said yes to the question. Slightly less than half of the country believes that America should be the top economic power in the world, and we wonder why American competitiveness is declining? Part of the problem is the framing of the question, since being one of "several leading economic powers" is sort of a pointless statement - America is not going to be falling behind a significant number of other countries any time soon.

To a certain degree, I understand this point of view. The world is a large place, and more than able to accommodate several large economies. However, these answers are also ironic given our capitalist nature: we are in this for ourselves, we are number one right now, and we don't want to be number one in the future? Try asking Goldman Sachs bankers, "Do you feel that being number one in investment banking is an important goal for Goldman, or that being number one is not that important a goal, as long as the company is one of several leading banks?" I doubt the response would be this mixed.

Let's extend this hypothetical question to another arena. "Do you

I haven't updated my blog recently due to the new quarter and a new series of articles I am writing for the Stanford Review. I am looking at the changing role of the humanities in university education, especially at Stanford. The first piece looks at the history of higher education and how its changing structure has helped and (mostly) hindered the development of the humanities over the past 100+ years. It is available online at http://stanfordreview.org/article/fraying-at-the-edges.

This article was originally written for the Stanford Review's Fiat Lux blog

Last time on ROTC, I wrote about the apathy of Stanford students on the movement to remove the ban on ROTC on campus. Along the way, I presented a handful of views which generated a healthy exchange in the comments section. Definitely check out that article and its responses.

Rather than responding to the criticisms of that article (many of which are fair and well-argued), I want to take a more encompassing look at the cultural differences between the military and elite universities. It is my fundamental thesis that the military's culture today is largely independent of the culture that exists at places like Stanford, a disconnect that did not exist until the last few decades.

I will start by looking at how the military culture has evolved since the end of the Vietnam War, and what the causes of that change might be. Then, I will look at the current attitudinal differences that I believe are the most striking differences between the armed services and elite student bodies. Implicit in an article of this type is the risk of generalization, so I disclaim upfront that no discussion of groups as diverse as the U.S. military and elite students can possibly encompass everyone.

Where did the culture change come from?

Most commentators focus on the draft as the crucial difference between the pre- and post-Vietnam armed services. The argument is that the draft ensured a level of equality of service in the military, and thus, military culture was not so different from civilian culture since the two were essentially the same group of people.

The problem I have with this analysis is that it makes two broad assumptions that I don't think

This article was originally written for the Stanford Review's Fiat Lux blog

The humanities may have been in decline for several decades now, but recent events are signaling that a critical period lies ahead for these disciplines. The recent cancellation of programs in literature and foreign languages at the University of Albany was only the most recent example of colleges aggressively cutting their humanities departments to skeletal staff, often transferring the funds to more "practical” majors like business or IT administration.

Many answers have been trotted out to evaluate and presumably solve the problem. Stanley Fish, a prominent English professor at Florida International University, has argued that the humanities are essentially useless, but in a response to the Albany cancellation, wrote that "it is the job of presidents and chancellors to proclaim the value of liberal arts education loudly and often and at least try to make the powers that be understand what is being lost when traditions of culture and art that have been vital for hundreds and even thousands of years disappear from the academic scene.”

Taking a different approach, Joshua Landy, a Stanford Professor of French, argues that the humanities can open windows into ourselves. His advice? "Don't major in economics." The humanities have an intrinsic usefulness that can engage the young (and old) mind in new questions and new realities, and that passionately pursuing our own questions is much healthier than a rush to major in something practical.

An historical perspective of the situation is offered by Louis Menand, a distinguished professor of English at Harvard. Writing in his recent book The Marketplace of Ideas, he argues in one chapter that the development of humanities and its paradigms arose from the need to professionalize the disciplines - in effect, to require