Danny Crichton

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

Three years ago, a young and wide-eyed high school senior (which happened to be me) first visited the campus of a gorgeous university nestled in the foothills of the Silicon Valley. Stanford was an imposing institution with that Palm Drive view, and the students seemed to be uniformly smart - smarter than me.

I made the decision to attend this school, despite the storied rains of Admit Weekend 2007. I am grateful for that decision and for my time here so far. Reflecting back, I want to share some thoughts on that decision, and in the process, help all the ProFros here this weekend prepare for one of the most formative stages of their lives.

First, this decision is not the most important one you will ever make. All the top colleges of America are strong schools, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. To an enormous degree, your fit in a university will greatly determine your final performance. If you enjoy the school you attend, your next four years will be interesting and memorable - and I would argue more successful.

But what is "fit"? For me, it is being surrounded by energetic, ambitious, entrepreneurial and interesting people who want to change the world and throw out the old paradigms. Stanford has been a perfect match for me in this regard.

There is also the need to fit into an academic community at Stanford. Since the vast majority of students change their major during their freshman year as they explore new fields, it is incredibly important that there are a wide variety of strong departments to provide options for majoring. Stanford

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

Higher education, the very source of American prosperity over the last fifty years, is now very much at risk in the United States. All one has to do is look at California, which offers perhaps one of the best vantage points to see this destruction of education in action. The state was once the shining beacon of higher education, building the vast University of California system that would make the state one of the most dynamic economies in the world.

The state, once merely mired in perennial budget wars, has now waged an aggressive war against higher education, furloughing professor and cutting large swaths of students out of the system.

I wish it were only the budget cuts that were harming the system. An upturn in the economy and more flush revenues could easily lead to a reversal of the higher education downturn. Alas, budget cuts are only the most recent attack on America's economic crown jewels.

As the number of laws regulating universities increase with each successive year, the administration of the modern university grows ever more complex. Universities in the 1960s had significantly smaller staffs compared to our universities today, where the typical research university now requires thousands of personnel to handle dense regulations while also providing an ever-expanding portfolio of services. For instance, the UC system last year had almost seven staff members for every faculty member.

Another source of stress is the grand ambitions of government and university officials who see their job as increasing the prestige of their institutions instead of improving the core missions of their universities - educating students. Most recently, that has meant a focus on

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

I recently had an enlightening conversation with my residence fellow about community building and the difficulty of creating communities at schools like Stanford. After the conversation, I began thinking: of all the leading issues here at Stanford like relationship abuse and mental health, the root of all of them appears to be a lack of social cohesion and trust - a lack of community.

For an almost entirely residential school, Stanford lacks the close connections between students that are the basis of a strong community. There are of course small pockets of community, but as a whole, there are few things we all share together besides a simple identification with the school itself.

Perhaps we should not be surprised considering the sources of this social fragmentation. It begins with the high degree of connectivity of our generation, and especially among Stanford students. I and others have gone through entire meals without saying a word because we have pressing business to attend to on our mobile phones. Even social networking does not build a true community, instead providing students a wider but weaker virtual community unconnected with their everyday lives.

Connectivity, though, can only partially explain our social fragmentation. The other half is the lack of shared experiences that underpins the development of any community. At one point, there was a limited set of majors available, with a common curriculum for all students. The buzzword in education today though is individualization - from building our own majors to choosing one of the eighty possible combinations of IHUM courses. We simply cannot form any kind of intellectual community when the shared basis of that community does

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

It is always in the days leading up to the end of the quarter that I am reminded of how powerful grades are as a motivator at Stanford. When the quarter begins, there are notably interesting conversations on a range of intellectual topics as students engage in new classes and explore new ideas. But by the end of the quarter, those conversations are hard, if not impossible, to find (case in point: I was eating with a table of eight for 30 minutes last week before someone finally said anything. And it was a request for a napkin).

It is also around this time of the quarter that I attempt (always unsuccessfully) to reconcile grading with the fundamental nature of education. A liberal education is about exploring different subjects, engaging with the knowledge of the human legacy and experimenting with varied ideas. Yet, how can one explore when there is always that looming grade just 10 weeks away? How can one experiment with new ideas and have intellectual conversations when there is a midterm a week (in addition to the usual load of problem sets and essays)?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my first real intellectual stimulation here at Stanford has been writing an honors thesis - an opportunity to explore a topic without that looming grade in the background. For the first time, I have been able to chart my own course, take a different direction for a little while and still manage to gain an enormous amount of knowledge about a host of different topics.

This process of writing a thesis has made me particularly angry at how Stanford has slowly changed its grading to

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

Last week, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a lament of a bizarre trend in American civil society - as institutions have become less elitist and more open, the trust that people place in these institutions has decreased. He certainly does not want to hearken back to the discrimination of the past, but his rose-colored view of the past is in need of strong skepticism.

Institutions today are more open and transparent than ever before. There has been a democratization of investigative tools - cameras are cheap, connections to others are quick and gatekeepers that used to screen this information are no longer in power. We know more information about more things than humanity has ever previously experienced. Even the National Enquirer is writing possibly Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative pieces.

Yet as this information has increased dramatically, our ability to adapt our standards to the deluge has not caught up. We still expect our politicians to be pure, and we are outraged over the abuse of public funds. We distrust the mainstream media, but then proceed to believe a blogger with little more than a computer and an opinion. But has anything really changed? Is our world really more corrupt and less trustworthy, or are we experiencing a classic problem in statistics - we are beginning to detect what has always been in existence.

There are voluminous examples of scandals throughout the years, so we cannot claim that the good people of the past were entirely pure. I doubt people are sleeping with their staffs more than in the past or stealing money in more significant amounts (inflation-adjusted of course, for both sex and money)

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

The liberal arts have not had a strong few decades considering the steep decline of the humanities major and the concomitant rise of business degrees. However, recent and thought-provoking discussions on the value of the liberal arts in business curriculums have rekindled an age-old debate on the value of education: is it about learning to think or learning to do?

This divide in education is at the heart of the so-called 'techie' versus 'fuzzy' divide here at Stanford. Engineers build bridges, write software programs and design processors. They are doers, not thinkers. Those in the humanities and social science ponder deep thoughts, write papers elucidating these thoughts and then go to lunch to talk about Keats or Hume. They are thinkers, not doers.

For such sophisticated consumers of information, Stanford students appear to have bought into this stereotype and have agreed to this core divide. That is unfortunate, because I fervently believe that this divide does not exist at all. Having spent time on both sides (I consider myself a 'tezzy,' which is fortunate because the alternative combination is unprintable), I can state that both the social science and humanities students and the engineers are thinkers and doers.

The social sciences focus on devising a science of humanity, with the ability to predict actions and explain phenomenon. They generate hypotheses, collect data and determine theories that provide predictive power. In this way, they devise solutions to problems, such as how to distribute resources fairly. The same action mentality exists in the humanities. History pieces together evidence from the past to explain our world and to provide better information about our current environment. Philosophy

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

We Stanford students are so overcome with the Busyness, I wonder how we get anything done at all.

It is an epidemic, far more insidious than the Piglet flu. Once one person is infected, the entire social network around that person seems to come down with the same strain. Looking at population infection rates, the Busyness takes a few weeks to reach critical mass, generally about four to five weeks into a quarter. Once it strikes, social lives are crushed, tensions rise, and Facebook encounters increased web traffic (this one did not make any sense, but the Busyness strikes in odd ways).

The sad part is I am apparently infected with it. So are you. The Busyness seems to have grown particularly virulent this year. The economic shocks of the past year have lowered immunity levels, and there is no vaccine in the works. Even Vaden may not be able to stop this latest affliction.

I am providing this information as a public service announcement. They (third-person conspiratorially plural) do not want you to know about it. Imagine the fear and panic that would sweep through the student body if students knew that a terrible scourge was being transmitting. I thought long and hard about the consequences of revealing this information, but the Busyness itself pretty much prevents any sort of panic from transpiring. People are just too busy to respond to the Busyness.

The most important element in reducing infection rates of the Busyness is identifying possible carriers. My admittedly anecdotal research indicates that one of the most correlated factors is location. Where does a person spend the bulk of their time? The

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

I cried a little when I read this story.

The New York Times ran an article last week titled, "As School Exit Tests Prove Tough, States Ease Standards," in which the reporter notes the typical cycles in exit exam difficulty. When exit exams are first released, they legitimately cover the knowledge expected of a high school graduate. As poor test scores roll in, legislatures quickly work to ease the difficulty of the test to ensure high graduation rates.

This trend is certainly nothing new. What particularly struck me was this paragraph: "Critics of Arkansas's [exit exam] system say it fails to show true math proficiency because students have only to score 24 out of 100 to pass the test and those who fail will be granted two additional chances to take the test. After that, they can take a computerized tutorial that is followed by a test." Our standard for graduating seniors is less than one in four correct on content from Algebra I.

Where are the politicians and education leaders when the discussion of a knowledge-based economy comes up? Economists, labor leaders and corporate heads have all identified the most significant paradigm shift in centuries. Education is not just a hobby for the bourgeoisie, it is a prerequisite for every single citizen of this country to find a basic job to put food on the table.

We need to radically reconsider our notions of what an education is if we are to thrive, nay, survive in the 21st century. We have lowered our expectations, lowered our bars and lowered our standards to the point where the goal of high