The Stanford Daily Magazine Vol.II Issue 5 (03.02.18)

The Stanford Daily Magazine

VOLUME II

•

Issue 5

•

March 2, 2018

Raikes’ Roots Who is Jeff Raikes, the Board of Trustees’ new chair? p. 16

Reading trees p. 4

MULTI-SPORT ATHLETE p. 22

don hAHN p. 26

Thanks to our sponsors Heather J. Furnas M.D. ’79 Kurt Kaull Roman Silva ’96 Linh Vo JOIN US THIS SPRING for

How to Think Like a Futurist I M P ROV E YO U R P OW ERS O F

Interested in sponsoring The Stanford Daily Magazine?

Contact coo@stanforddaily.com

I M A G I N AT I O N , I N V E N T I O N , A N D CA PACI T Y FO R CH A N G E

SPRING20 Featured Spring Courses How to Think Like a Futurist • Baseball: Inside America’s Game Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction to Neural Networks and Deep Learning Improvisationally Speaking • Revolution: The Beatles’ Innovative Studio Years (1965–1967)

WINTER2

The Business of Self-Driving Cars • Visual Thinking: Working with Pictures

Stanford Continuing Studies offers a broad range of on-campus and online courses in liberal arts & sciences, creative writing, and professional & personal development. All adults are welcome to attend.

Spring registration opens March 5 and most classes begin the week of April 2. Enroll today!

continuingstudies.stanford.edu

STAP FUND ELIGIBLE

Hours Weekdays from 7 a.m. to 12 a.m.

Weekends from 9 a.m. to 12 a.m.

Contents

The Stanford Daily MAGAZINE

Volume II, Issue 5 March 2, 2018

NEWS 16 jeff raikes How Raikes’ background informs his new role as chair of the Board of Trustees 20 behind the board of trustees Who is on the Board and how does it operate?

opinions 11 multiracialism Mixed-race students, in limbo, grapple with a tradition of racial “or” rather than “and”

sports 22 jenna gray How one sophomore juggles multiple varsity sports at Stanford

Lightroom Puanui is an ahupua’a, a traditional Hawaiian land division, located in Kohala. The Polynesians who settled in Hawaii in the 11th century created the dryland field system, in which crops are irrigated only by rain — p. 28

ARTS & Life

Creative

04 reading trees

28 lightroom

Emma Heath explores trees on campus and their documentation over time

Featuring the Salkantay Trek to Machu Picchu and traditional agriculture in Hawaii

08 multiracial identites in media How well are multiracial people portrayed on the screen?

the grind

26 don hahn

13 expectations vs. reality

The Daily talks with the Disney producer behind “The Lion King” and other hits

How have Stanford students’ expectations of college matched up to reality?

On the cover: Jeff Raikes remembers his farmland roots. Photo courtesy of Jeff Raikes.

Staff: Editor-in-Chief Hannah Knowles Executive Editor Fangzhou Liu MAGAZINE LEAD Sarah Wishingrad Managing Editors Alli Cruz, Courtney Douglas, Emma Fiander, Regan Pecjak, Julie Plummer, Olivia Popp, Jose Saldaña, Michael Spencer, Ada Statler, Laura Sussman, Aparna Verma, Richa Wadekar, Josh Wagner, Claire Wang LAYOUT Kristel Bugayong, Harry Cole, Emma Fiander, Irene Han, Jackie Lin, Janet Liu, Josh Wagner, Daniel Wu CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Do-Hyoung Park Chief Revenue Officer Kevin Martinez

3

Reading Trees

“D

o you know what the California state tree is?”

I am standing with Sairus Patel in the little arboretum between the Law Library and the bookstore. Sairus is a typographer for Adobe with grey hair and a gentle smile. He’s also a tree enthusiast. He’s explaining to me the difference between the three types of redwood trees in this small area. “This may be the one place in the world where you can see the Dawn, the Sequoia and the Coast.” He says, plucking off a branch from the Sequoia and then the Coast, native to California, and showing me how their needles are different — one with sharp points, the other softer, curved.

“It’s a redwood.” He says.

“But which type?” I ask.

“Both!” He exclaims.

Apparently, when the state legislature voted on the state tree, they didn’t care to check.

4

The fact that there are these three redwood species all within 15 meters from each other (and you, as you walk to Cubberly from the law terrace) is naturally implausible — the Dawn comes from China, and the two other trees grow in different places on campus.

They’re here because Jane Stanford was also a tree enthusiast. She wanted to make Stanford a site of botanical learning. Sairus runs a website called Stanford Trees and their Environs, a catalogue of arboreal existence on campus, which tries to do just this.

The website is based on a book, which he enthusiastically pulls, in all its spiral-bound glory, from his bag. It was written by Ron Bracewell, an electrical engineering professor in the 1950s and (you may be noticing a throughline) tree enthusiast. The book used to be given, along with the whiff of freedom and promise of prestige, to every student on campus.

It’s full of tree walks, detailed descriptions of trees and lifesize images of leaves and branches, diligently copied on the clectrical engineering department’s printer. With the decline of the systematic biology department in the 1960s, study of trees on campus was relegated to hobbydom — an impressive, if not obsessive hobby for Bracewell. As Sairus puts it, “The book records half a century of a man on campus.”

The back of the book features a picture Bracewell, smiling through a thick white beard, perched on a favorite mulberry tree in the quad.

Sairus flips through the spiral bound, typewritten text that looks like a course reader next to his computer, showing me trees on paper and their online counterparts. He has dedicated his free time to translating and updating the site, no small feat considering the translocations of various trees on campus in the

Photo by SARIUS PATEL/ Trees of Stanford

the website,” Sairus says. My friend Julia is the reason I heard about Stanford Trees and their Environs in the first place. She has taken many of Bracewell’s entries and turned them into poetry, transforming lines of the website into stanzas.

“I’m more concerned with the environmental communications aspect of things — how do you make people care about trees?” Oftentimes for her, that just means calling attention to the beauty, not only of the trees themselves, but also of the language that they elicit.

Her poem, “The Pinus Pinea,” named for the same entry, begins: “The P. pinea nuts are known as pinóli, pignóli (which also means pernickety), or sometimes pinóchi, in Italy, where they are much used in pastries and vegetarian dishes.

Evidently Pinocchio was a pine nut.

But why should a pine be not like other pines?

Why should this pine be broad and rounded

Emma heath years since Bracewell’s retirement.

The entries range from precise descriptions of the length and shape of something like Pinus Pine: “An attractive tree of very characteristic round-topped shape without an apical leader which, one might say, looks like a stone,” geographical digressions: “In its natural distribution the tree hugs the entire north Mediterranean coast from Lebanon to Portugal” and playful asides, like the one on the White Mulberry: “If you have mulberry leaves you can grow silkworms, which is fun for youngsters as first the worms and then the moths do their own thing.” Sairus and I look over the website together as he shows me his “Now Playing” section, a feature that spotlights a rotating selection of trees on campus. He wants to spread his amateur enthusiasm for these species.

“Julia has done some wonderful things with

like a stone, while other pines are narrow and taper upwards to an apex? As a rule, flowering trees spread their crowns, while conifers tend to rise above them as conical spires; we may accept this distinction as one of the many differences, in leaves, fruit, and wood for instance.”

Here, the Pinus Pine acquires a personality — it’s persnickety, it’s Italian, and it’s kind of silly. While she’s using the same words, the different form and the repetition highlight moments where a reader might pause to reflect: What makes one pine different from another?

There is an existential grandeur to Bracewell’s question that gestures toward concerns of the self — of individuality and difference, what

distinguishes one member of a group from another, what makes something like the other?

Bracewell’s writing is not intentionally a work of art, but — as Julia’s reconstructed poems remind us — the act of noticing is artful.

When thinking about trees and pernickety Italians, another line of poetry comes to mind: “As the leaves fall away in autumn, one after another, til the bough sees all its spoils upon the ground…” So the famed simile continues to describe the souls in Dante’s “Inferno.” The image comes originally from Virgil (the ancient Roman poet), but Dante uses the leaves to reinterpret theological doctrine: Does one soul return cyclically from one season to the next, like in Virgil? Or is each soul distinctive? In a way, Dante’s leafy metaphor is concerned with the same question that Bracewell’s Pinus Pinea entry raises and that Julia’s poem highlights: What is it to be individual or a part of a group?

Dante talks about the four ways to read his infernal journey: a literal, metaphorical, moral and anagogical, or a sort of spiritual interpretation. In Bracewell’s writing, however, the trees are not metaphorical but rather botanical fact. They don’t stand in for a facet of humanity; they represent only themselves. And thus, Bracewell’s description diverges from a literary tradition that employs nature for largely symbolic purposes. However, the resonances between this Dante’s imagery and Julia’s poem do raise the question: How do we read trees?

What layers of interpretation lie beyond the bark? In a way, Julia’s poetry allows us to think of the trees themselves as texts, not anagogical or allegorical meant to express something about us, humans — but that encompass broader layers of meaning nonetheless.

If one were to peel back the interpretive layers of the arboretum, aesthetic beauty would come first. It’s what’s most accessible to us — the shape and texture, the smell and color: a literal reading of the trees.

“But it’s about more than just being pretty.”

Julia explains. Take, for instance, the eucalyptus — a tree that is almost as ubiquitous on campus as the name Arrillaga. People love eucalyptus.

And, on the surface — that “thin smooth bark that peels off in strips, leaving variegated color patches where the new bark beneath is revealed”— what’s not to love? They smell good, they are used to combat malaria, and (more importantly!) before GovCo was GovCo, it was Blue Gum Lane (a variety of Eucalyptus).

However appealing to the senses, the omnipresence of eucalyptus trees on campus can be attributed to a deleterious invasiveness: They compete with native plants for water and sunlight, and when their bark — those long sheets of multifarious red and tan — drops to the ground, it produces a chemical that is toxic to native trees. Something you wouldn’t know if you stopped at the first level of arboreal 5

Palo Alto, now known for its expansive tech, was once identified by a single tree -a Coast Redwood.

6

interpretation.

Sairus agrees that aesthetic beauty is a way in. But, he explains, “once you see the trees, learn their names, you care more.” He likens a familiar tree to a familiar face. Once you know someone, their features become particular to them, their personality and disposition; it’s hard to mistake them for someone else. But trees aren’t familiar to most people, and a lot of conflation ensues (the Norway Maple versus the Sugar Maple, the White Mulberry and Red Mulberry…).

There are consequences to this kind of misidentification. Some, like the duality of the California state tree, are innocuous (if embarrassing for the 1937 state legislature).

However, a large part of conservation efforts begin with identification. If you are familiar with a tree, say the Coast Live Oak, whose distinctively gnarled branches hover over the Treehouse and Coho courtyard, you would know that they’re susceptible to Powdery Mildew, a species of mold that has recently inhibited their propagation. Or that global warming is causing species to change location — migrating to cooler areas.

Thus, the analysis of tree as text expands to encompass a conservational ring, which leads straight into the next: the historical. That same oak whose canopy lovingly guards your beer

from the dilution of a drizzly evening also produces an acorn that comprised one third of the diet of native tribes that lived on Stanford’s land before Leland Jr. was a star in Jane’s eye.

The tree connects us to the land; Palo Alto, now known for its expansive tech, was once identified by a single tree — a Coast Redwood.

The “tall stick” itself resides alongside the San Francisquito Creek that skirts Stanford’s campus and cuts into the city that now bears its name. That Coast Redwood would go on to achieve great notoriety as the Stanford Tree, usurping the “Indian” in the 1970s (a less tasteful yet incontrovertible element of our institutional history) — and has since transmuted into palms and pines and some imaginative species unidentifiable to even the most sophisticated botanist.

There is a photo, notorious in family lore, of my mother, sleeping outside the (now forgotten) Henry Meyer Library, sound asleep. The picture, taken in spring quarter of 1979, was displayed on the front page of The Daily under the caption ”A Place in the Sun.” Around that library, Sairus informs me, was an unprecedented collection of Eucalyptus trees (not pictured in my mom’s photo, but hovering nearby). When the library — aptly nicknamed UGLY — was demolished in favor of the more aesthetically pleasing sunken circle Meyer

Green, architects took note of the Eucalyptus species and replanted it around the diamond.

“They will grow, and people will appreciate the trees that people have appreciated decades before them,” Sairus says. For him, there is a pleasure innate and ineffable in recognizing these trees. And maybe there’s something in this sentiment that resembles Dante’s anagogical, or spiritual layer of interpretation.

There’s also another layer of history contained within the trees of Stanford, and that’s one created by the exchange of language between generations of tree enthusiasts. This is the kind of literary history that exists amongst all kinds of texts, particularly a certain genus of poem, the epic.

Remember, for instance, Dante’s autumn leaves? A few centuries later, they surface in another poem: “Nathless he so endur’d, till on the Beach Of that inflamed Sea, he stood and call’d His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intrans’t Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks In ‘Vallombrosa’” Here Milton uses the metaphor of the leaves to describe a vast array of fallen soldiers.

However, by borrowing Dante’s exact phrase he also has a conversation with his literary

predecessor. Dante too borrows the image from Virgil, who borrows from Homer, who perhaps (one can only speculate) borrows from the bald cypress which “in autumn produces cones resembling those of a redwood, except that fall apart as they release their seeds. When the leaves fall they fall in complete sprays.” Each time the leaves change slightly; each author, caught in a web of references, a conversation of sorts, adds new meaning. Tracing this conversation imbues each text with a richness that any one of them lacks when taken on its own.

Sairus’s website is similarly a series of translations and minor alterations of Bracewell’s original text. “Would Bracewell, for instance call this color pleasing?” Sairus answer his own question about Fraxinus (Ash): “No I think not.” Bracewell, in his nearly objective stance toward the trees, also wouldn’t include the “greedy roots”, an adjectival addition Sairus thinks necessary to an understanding of the tree’s character. “It’s important that you know that Ashes need a lot of water if you’re going to plant them. Especially in areas prone to drought.”

Sairus’s playful pragmatism mingles alongside Bracewell’s self-assurance in Julia’s poetry. With her particular repetition, erasure of other details, she adds her own understated

aesthetic into the larger conversation with the past.

“But why should a pine be not like other pines?

Surely the stone pine evolved from ancestors that received sunlight falling from high in the sky, while other pines disposed their foliage on tall masts suited to collecting light from a sun that did not rise very much above the horizon.”

Like any poem, trees contain multiplicities, histories personal and philosophical, political and environmental. What’s cool about reading Stanford Trees and their Environs and experiencing the trees themselves, just like in Dante, is that these layers of interpretation can coexist. We don’t have to choose. We simply have to know they’re there.

Contact Emma Heath at ebheath@stanford.edu.

Photos by DEVON ZANDER/The Stanford Daily 7

MIXED RACE IDENTITIES in

TELEVISION & MEDIA

I

A conversation between Alli Cruz and Olivia Popp

n a dimly lit office space, two white women huddle by a laptop screen littered with pictures of rotund, wideeyed infant children, all of whom are filed under the hashtag: #mixedbabies.

One child stares out from the computer screen with mouth agape, another rolls on their side, while another peeks out from under a white sheet with their young, impressionable eyes. “Oh, I just love mixed-race babies!” one of the white women exclaims emphatically.

This simple scene, which comes from The CW network’s romantic musical-comedy drama “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” focuses “crazy ex” Rebecca Bunch’s (Rachel Bloom) asinine obsession of having children with her high school sweetheart, Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III) — specifically, mixed-race children. As individuals who both identify as mixed-race, we were struck by the potency of this scene to act as a metonym for a larger issue at hand.

After both independently watching the show and noticing this biting critique, we decided to come together to discuss an issue that we had noticed but never directly discussed with each other, recognizing our differences in experiences and lenses through which we view television.

Alli Cruz (AC): All in all, I appreciate the show’s conscious decision to include interracial relationships, but I’m very aware of the fact 8

that “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” has yet to take the opportunity to elaborate more comprehensively on its presentation of mixed-race identities.

Olivia Popp (OP): It’s tough to talk about so much, especially when “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” has already tried to cover so much — same-sex relationships, female empowerment — and a special emphasis on mental health. But yes, with such an incredibly diverse cast already, I agree that some emphasis could be placed on this.

AC: I’d say that, overall, the show’s racially diverse cast is fairly adequately utilized as a gateway to salient discussions regarding race.

For instance, in one episode, the Filipino male lead and love interest, Josh, refutes the term “oriental” as inherently racist and insensitive.

But the show falls a bit flat in its dimensional scope of other various multifaceted identities.

The show’s only mixed-race character, Heather, played by the ever-charming Vella Lovell — opens up little dialogue about her racial identity.

AC: Although this is not to say that all multiracial characters need to talk about their respective identities — about how they think of and carry themselves in the world. But for a show like “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which spends most of its airtime deconstructing social norms, stigmas and stereotypes — one such stereotype, of course, being the rather oversimplified, sexist titular term “crazy ex-girlfriend” — there is

certainly room for more engaging and fruitful identity-based conversations. I will say, however, the mere fact that “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” even showcases a person of mixed descent is a small, progressive step in the right direction.

OP: To the show’s credit I really value the show’s recognition of Lovell’s true racial background, which is black and white — despite her ethnicity, Lovell is often mistaken for being South Asian.

AC: You’ve seen Kumail Nanjiani’s “The Big Sick, right?” If you’ve seen that film, you might recognize her as Khadija, one of protagonist Kumail’s potential Pakistani brides.

OP: That does raise the larger question of POCs (people of color) playing other POCs. Think “Aladdin” on Broadway — many times, Aladdin is played by any such POC, sometimes not anyone who identifies as Middle Eastern or South Asian. But in this case, it isn’t really an intraracial substitution, Asian-identifying for Asian-identifying — it’s something entirely larger. In an interview with Rodriguez at CAAMFest 2017, Lovell stated that she tends to identify as mixed-race or ambiguous, especially in the entertainment community. I can’t blame her for wanting to use that to her advantage, but the fact that performers have to resort to that is just indicative of the industry’s problems as a whole.

AC: I agree. I would certainly take issue with whitewashing POC roles — with one of the most egregious recent examples, of course, being Emma Stone’s portrayal of a white and Hawaiian mixed-race individual in “Aloha” named Allison Ng. But in terms of POCs playing other POCs — well, that gets pretty complicated. In Lovell’s case, I would say that her decision to use her racial ambiguity as an advantage — especially in an industry which systematically underrepresents POCs — is understandable, although I still find the idea a bit disconcerting. I want to say that I totally support any and all visibility for POCs, but this definitely runs into the issue of race-based generalizations. If we openly support mixed-race POCs, like Lovell, playing other POCs across racial lines, can we do so without considering it as a sort of infringement of identity?

OP: It does open so many more questions than answers, but it’s important for us to think about — even Darryl Whitefeather, an openly bisexual character on “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” who identifies as one-eighth Chippewa, even though Pete Gardner is white. Darryl’s identity is treated as a running gag — he has all sorts of Native American art pieces in his office and proudly announces his last name everywhere he goes.

While his character comes out as bisexual, this is treated as much more of a core identity than his self-identified racial background. Characters point out that he really has no true ties to his Native American heritage and simply parades it around as a sort of “exotic” identity — so is it appropriation? Does having this heritage and personal identity entitle one to use it in certain ways? It’s a hard question.

AC: Darryl is just one example of this complex, ambiguous and oft unaddressed issue. Overall, there’s such a lack of multiracial identities across mass media — think about multiracial Native American portrayals, let alone Native American portrayals as a whole. Where are they? Is a character like Darryl a step in the right direction? And, as in the case of Darryl, even when these mixed-race identities are present,

they often fail to engender the complex and productive discussions that surround their very existence. For me, the issue here is that representation of mixed-identities alone is hardly enough to ameliorate the difficult and distinctive discriminatory practices and experiences thrusted upon mixed-race communities. I say “difficult and distinctive” because these experiences, much like the identities themselves, are not one-dimensional. We have to ask ourselves: What is representation, really? Can it exist beyond the mere display of identities?

How can our media open dialogue regarding multiracialism and multiculturalism without oversimplifying and overlooking the nuances of identity?

OP: On that note — is a display of identity just simply the presence of an identity or more so, the purposeful incorporation of this into a narrative?

I think television is a great medium to do that in, especially with large audiences and the ability to capture the attention of viewers for long spans of time over a period of seasons. Studios and producers are so hesitant to do so, though, because there’s no precedent. In order for this to happen, there have to be mixed-race creators actually creating this content — otherwise it’ll never start.

AC: The fact of the matter is that now, in either repressing discussions surrounding mixed-race communities, as in the case of Lovell’s character, or exoticizing them, as with the multiracial babies in “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” the media we consume may be complicit in perpetuating a social structure that categorically exploits racial ambiguity without considering its societal implications, a trend that then permeates into popular culture.

OP: I know a lot about this specific example because of my own multiracial identification, but many actresses who identify as multiracial white and Asian individuals are so often placed into that “badass” role of secret agent, police officer or assassin. Asian women as a whole are placed into

this “dragon lady” role, but multiracial Asian actresses are pushed even more to the forefront.

Take Maggie Q, for example. I’m a huge fan of her as an actress and artist, but of her three major television roles out of six to date, all three of them have been of this designation, and her starring role in The CW’s “Nikita” as the titular spy and assassin is a perfect example. She starred in the short-lived “Stalker” as a police officer, and now she’s part of “Designated Survivor” as a hardened FBI agent.

AC: Stereotypical oversimplifications of multiracial identities like this, as constructed by the media, ultimately do commodify the mixed-race experience as some sort of token item, allowing for the continued marginalization of minority communities within an existing racial hierarchy. Put simply, we need more than diversity for the sake of diversity; we need diversified, variable content/backstories/ plotlines for mixed-race people of color.

AC: As an Asian/Latinx identifying individual, my first conscious experience with mixed-race identity in media came from Alex Russo of Disney Channel’s “Wizards of Waverly Place,” played by Selena Gomez. Gomez’s character, as an Italian- and Mexican-American, was the first mixed-race person in my life — that I can remember, at least — who presented herself as a real, tangible role model in the predominantly white world of television. I feel as though media visibility for Latinx characters, such as Alex, is crucial, especially for adolescent children who are still in their formative years of development, searching for a strong sense of both identity and community, wanting to find themselves in the characters they watch. What’s more, keeping in mind the fact that, according to a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, one third of people just within Latinx community identify itself as mixed-race — largely due to the historical intermixing of European and indigenous cultures — it is important to recognize and subsequently legitimize the expansive definition of Latinx identities. Personally, as an adolescent, I didn’t 9

even perceive Alex to be a Latinx person of color, as the show paid little attention to that aspect of her biracial identity until placing her in a short-lived quinceañera episode.

My inability to recognize and appreciate her identity is perhaps a testament to the show’s lack of meaningful investigation of multiracialism.

Bennet is of Chinese descent.

OP: That’s a great example of how these specific identities in television and media are so important. I also watched “Wizards of Waverly Place” when I was younger, but I didn’t have this reaction, even as a mixed-race individual. On the other hand, I had a similar reaction when I saw mixed-race actresses of Asian descent on other shows with whom I could identify, and this still happens today.

A recent example is Chloe Bennet, now well-known for her role as Daisy Johnson on “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” — her legal last name at birth was Wang, but after a short stint of trying to be a pop star in China, she came back to the U.S. to become an actress. She became frustrated after being unable to secure any acting gigs, so she changed her last name to Bennet — which is actually her father’s first name — and the first audition after her name change, she secured her role as Hailey on “Nashville.” She’s been very outspoken about Asian American representation but suddenly started receiving flack after she spoke openly about changing her name because of racism in Hollywood — some people even began to tell her to change her name back to Wang. Bennet is arguably white-passing — so even with a last name such as Wang and the state of the industry as it is, I’m not entirely surprised that she couldn’t secure any roles. Many viewers were happy to note that the show didn’t engage in erasure of her ethnic background — rather, they cast Nepalese-born, Asian Australian actress Dichen Lachman as her mother, Jiaying, who happens to also be mixed-race.

Nevertheless, Lachman isn’t white-passing and is of German and Tibetan ancestry, while

OP: Where are the Latinx/Asian, Black/ Latinx or Afro-Latinx, Asian/Black and other identities in media? Why are so few biracial characters of dual POC descent?

Moreover, people who are not just biracial, but multiracial. I think about YouTuber and actress Anna Akana as a prime example — she even did a video on this. People often ask her the intruding question that every multiracial person dreads — “What are you?”

Her response is that her ethnic background is incredibly diverse, but most people identify her as Asian, which she also identifies as.

Nevertheless, people are just genuinely confused because of her complex, unique multiracial background. Will there ever be a place for multiracial identities in television or in media as a whole?

10

AC: I have to wonder, like you said — where are the other mixed-race role models and examples? What happens when multiracial children attempt to search for a character like them through media formats that are bereft of such inclusive representation?

AC: Does media visibility for multiracial people reflect what we experience in everyday life, or does the antiquated notion that whitepassing, or at least, light-skinned, multiracial people are more deserving of representation still dominate popular opinion? I believe that, more often than it should, the latter option filters through the public conscious.

OP: The white-passing argument is something I think about all the time. As a non-whitepassing multiracial individual, I often felt so confused and even ashamed when people asked, “Oh, you’re white?” I only really knew my father’s side of my family growing up, and that side of my family is of Polish descent — so I was always felt like there was something.

People saw me as Asian and therefore had

certain expectations of me — which is wrong in and of itself, but I felt dually confused and shut out of communities with which I wanted to identify with because of that. I couldn’t coexist in multiple communities or even exist as myself because people couldn’t come to terms with me. But going back to Bennet, even if she didn’t necessarily look like me, a similar identity crisis can happen — if you identify as Asian, and people only perceive you as white or otherwise, there’s erasure that occurs. In the entertainment industry especially, there are so many set molds of who can “look Asian” or “look Black.” It puts multiracial individuals in a tough place — if a character identifies only as Asian, and they don’t fit that mold, they either can’t play the role or face clapback from viewers stating that it’s erasure of multiracial identity, or they just “don’t look Asian enough.”

Is it necessarily “wrong” to have someone who racially identifies half-white and half-Asian play a character who identifies as 100 percent Asian — or vice versa? Or does it create a deeper problem of distorting expectations of what people look like? Roles designated as “ethnically ambiguous” are also hard to come by, and even then, studios find it a burden to have to address anything remotely more complicated than, say, “this person is Asian.”

AC: We have to ask ourselves these questions as we continue to navigate popular media culture. Maybe if we all keep asking, keep searching, keep demanding, for the underrepresented identities that deserve to be heard, we can channel their narratives into our media and society at large. I want to see and participate in a world where being mixed-race means something very specific — something more than just vague, indiscernible racially gray areas.

Contact Alli Cruz at allicruz@stanford.edu and Olivia Popp at oliviapopp@stanford.edu.

the ‘other’ checkbox

I

by Elizabeth Lindqwister

don’t really look that white — my eyes are just almond-shaped enough, my skin a shade hinting toward olive, my features arranged in such a way that many assume I am Latina or Pacific Islander. My brothers have hooded eyelids and hair as dark as coal, characteristics that lead people to assume and ask which “type” of Asian they are.

And that’s how it goes — the natural, human tendency to group and stereotype others on fleeting physical features means that multiracial and often ethnically ambiguous students are assigned to whichever genetic traits make themselves more prominent, whichever physical features align more with stereotypical racial indicators.

So in this world of surface-level absolutes, multiracial and multicultural students are in the limbo of race — both physically and emotionally — as the “other” and, themselves, seek to find continuity and acceptance in the tradition of racial “or” rather than “and.”

Until recent history, multiracialism was not an acknowledged nor accepted concept; physical race indicators were used simultaneously as tools for single-race categorization and, often, as means for discrimination. The infamous “one-drop rule”, implemented in tandem with the Jim Crow laws and propagated primarily in the American South, systematically categorized mixed-Black persons under their minority roots, acting as a way to extend discrimination to anyone of any black heritage.

One of the most famous cases of this was in Homer Plessy, a man seven-eighths white and one-eighth black. Plessy, who had predominantly white physical characteristics, was categorized and segregated as black because of his distant black relatives; he refused to abide to segregation laws while boarding a train car and was subsequently arrested. The resulting court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, would go down in history as a crucial probe on the 14th Amendment, but it also persists as a prime example of the enduring impact of the one-drop rule in structural racism. It fundamentally classified and compared races in relation to each other — one race being deemed the “one-drop” contaminant, a pollutant to the “ethnic purity” of a racial whole.

The base of multiracialism, especially for marginalized ethnic groups, is thus rooted in inequity: inequity with the racially homogenous and inequity within the mixed community itself. Of course, every mixed-race experience will be unique simply because each combination of ethnicities — even those of the same “combinations” — manifests itself in different physicalities, added on top of socioeconomic differences that inevitably shape cultural attitudes. A person who is half-black and half-white would have a very different experience in society than a person half-Asian, half-white, for example; physical categorizations of race explain that to us and prove that a large part of the multiracial experience is in how others perceive and subsequently stereotype us.

Recent conversation regarding race has come to include mixed-race individuals as a sum of their parts or a perfectly blended solution of differing elements. Phrases like “Blexican,” “Blasian” or, in my case, “Swietnamese,” are thrown around to refer to mixed-race persons, often just in jest, but also as an important indicator of what it means to be multiracial.

By nature, being multiracial means you belong to different communities, different languages and different cultures. You’re a sum of often incongruous parts but are never entirely composed of one, continuous whole — it’s not easy to come to terms with the internal plurality that exists genetically within you but that fails to psychologically reconcile a cultural totality.

As the child of a Swedish father and a Vietnamese mother, I feel pulled in opposite directions by two cultures that diverge sharply in their typical religions, practices and values. Because I speak neither Swedish nor Vietnamese and have lived in America my whole life, identifying entirely with my Asian side has never been appropriate, nor has been altogether belonging in the Scandinavian, white community to which I genetically have access. And although I am proud of being half-Asian, I still feel outsider to the wide array of Asian communities active on campus — half could never equate to whole, partial could never correspond to membership.

For Jade Lintott ‘21 — who identifies as Chinese, White and hapa — partial proves to be a divide even within the bounds of her family: “My nonwhite features make me stand out when my dad’s side gets together, and my Chinese is too broken to ever let me feel connected to the Chinese side. As far as I am concerned, my immediate family is basically an island.”

And because existing on the island of multiracialism means being stranded, stranger to the shores of racial wholes, there is a fear of missing out on the “full” racial experience. It is a desire to feel deep belongingness in one identity, rather than feeling a shallow connection to a plethora of cultures.

There does exist a vitality in the unique mixture of multiculturalism, however. When unforced to declare fidelity to just one facet of their cultural background, mixed-race persons have the ability to grasp onto the hybrid experiences of their cultural backgrounds and have unfettered access to their melange of identities. Throughout my childhood, my family established a mixed-culture tradition in celebrating the Lunar New Year with my Vietnamese mother and cooking traditional Swedish cuisine with my Swedish grandmother. My siblings and I would alternate between telling people we were just Asian, or just white. We accepted the racial pluralism within our genes yet embraced a single checked box for race in encounters with society.

And that checkbox? It’s the eternal existential crisis of multiracialism. Those checkboxes in college applications, job searches and census reporting are the representation of the eternal and often forced categorization — the mixed are either the “other” or can only be marked as one part of their ethnic whole, often at the expense of their other ethnic identities. Alternately, by checking the “mixed” box, multiracial 11

students could choose to transcend the boundaries of monolithic race groups but at the cost of diminishing the prevalence and importance of the individual races that make up their ethnic being. Throughout all of these identity “options” of being mixed-race, ambiguity runs strong.

Do mixed persons have an ethical, racial obligation to act more “Asian” or more “Hispanic” based on how they look? Must the multiracial be categorized culturally by the way they express their race? Is there such thing as a shared experience of being simply “mixed”?

Is “mixed” a race of its own?

An internal struggle arises in this crisis of self-categorization, and yet our own decision to identify with just one side of our ethnic identity is often overridden by society’s decision to categorize us on its own desire for physical, racial absolutes. Belongingness to an established whole — full Asian or fully Latinx, for example — thus feels incomplete to the mixed person, while belongingness to an ambiguous “multiracial” is unacknowledged in the larger society.

Within society at Stanford, this trend rings surprisingly true. In terms of diversity and support for the different races on campus, Stanford is successful in providing a wide variety of communities. It boasts over 30 different Asian American-associated clubs and a dozen different groups in the Native American Cultural Center. For those ethnically categorized and comfortable with it, Stanford likely has a club for their background.

Not as much if you’re multiracial.

Stanford boasts a 10 percent mixed-race population — a percentage significantly higher than the national average — yet multiracialism has had a spotty and incomplete history on campus. There have been numerous attempts, both successful and not, to establish working multiracial communities where these students could connect with each other on their uncertain identities and checkbox crises.

In April of 1990, a group of students formed two multiracial support groups: Spectrum, for biracial students, and Asian-Americans of Multiracial Descent. At NSO in 1991, Stanford implemented the first “Faces of Community” program, still active today, to open the door for dialogue on the multiracial, multicultural student body on campus. In June of last year, the Asian American Theatre Project (AATP) put on a production of “Purple Rain” to discuss the implications of a mixed-race heritage. Sigma Psi Zeta Sorority and Sigma Theta Psi are notably the only explicitly multicultural-oriented Greek organizations at Stanford, both of whom only include female members, while the Multiracial Identified Community at Stanford (MICS) is less than a year old in activity on campus.

Although these groups have existed across different contexts and time differences of over 20 years, they were founded with strikingly similar goals and intentions. Spectrum aimed to “provide a support base for students who may have had little or no interaction with other multiracial students before attending Stanford,” while MICS president Becky Peoples ‘19 says that the goal of the organization is to “create a space where people could come together and not have to feel like they had to choose one racial side over the other.”

Through all these attempts at community, these ideas run strong: support, open discourse and understanding of a common, yet unique, experience.

Yet an underlying, unfortunate point of communion among these groups is their failure to exist and be active on campus for sustained amounts of time. With the exception of MICS and the multicultural sororities, every mixed-race group formed thus far has faced difficulties in creating a solid group for an indefinable group of peoples, and in finding ways to relate to the multitude of experiences a mixed-race student may experience. As Peoples noted, “if leadership is representative of just one particular [racial] mix, then it’s a lot harder to get people involved and keep these groups alive.”

Many of the older multiracial groups were founded by predominantly Asian-American students, which were eventually subsumed under the Asian American Activities Center. Groups like MICS were sometimes put under hiatus after difficulties defining group goals, often resulting from diverging visions from group members with differing racial experiences.

But perhaps the reason why these groups haven’t lasted for decades is because of the ambiguity of simply being of mixed-race. We cannot even categorize ourselves into a racial check box because we are a beautiful mix of opposites, a heterogeneous combination of color.

We live in the gray space of race.

Having no ethnic, overriding common ground to align ourselves with means that there inherently isn’t a solid basis on which we can discuss our unique experiences … except for the understanding of not having common experiences with our forced racial categories.

But though the uncertainty of multiracialism can perhaps explain the difficulty of forming these types of groups at Stanford, it doesn’t mean the cycle of forced categorization needs to continue.

Ultimately what determines your identity as a person is a conglomerate of your experiences and influences, separate and at once intertwined with your physical appearances, your background, your genetic makeup. The multiracial checkbox can be seen as a diluter on your ethnic mix, or it can feel freeing from the monolithic categorization of race. You can choose to live in the gray space; you can choose “other.” Each checkbox narrative, whether it be monolithic identification or the embrace of the “mixed identity,” is a narrative that deserves to be heard — we must think of race outside of the box.

Contact Elizabeth Lindqwister at elindqw@stanford.edu.

12

Expectations vs. reality

by Avery Rogers

Driving up to my house for winter break — the first time I’d been home since September — I felt that same feeling I’d get after coming home from a family vacation: Well, that was fun.

Back to real life now.

Except this was different: Stanford was real life. My house, the yellow walls and the olive trees that stained the sidewalk, the canopy bed and the books lining my desk: That was the vacation now. Fall quarter had been a whirlwind, a summer camp on intellectual steroids. But it had also been a time of learning, of familiarizing, of turning Stanford from a palatial dreamland into a reality.

Stanford had become more than the pictures of the Main Quad church at night, the hundreds of advertised clubs and groups, the professors who were often invited to speak on NPR. Stanford still is those things, but it’s also the little, real things: the basement laundry room, the weekend walk to Trader Joe’s, the dining hall hours, the weekly reflections for

an introsem.

Back at my house for winter break, I realized how much my perspective of Stanford had changed. Two years before, it had been a five-percent-acceptance-rate school for which I’d never make the cut. One year before, it had been the honeymoon phase of my acceptance letter and all the incredible but overwhelming daydreams that came with it. Now, it was my life, only partially lining up with my clueless preconceptions.

Reflecting on the past quarter, I wondered how my expectations of Stanford had differed from those of my peers and how those differences had shaped our transitions from Stanford-as-daydream to Stanford-as-reality. It was in this spirit that I conducted the following interviews with students from each class, trying to understand how Stanford has evolved in their minds since their admittance — and how they have evolved, too.

Angie Lee '21

I

Angie Lee ‘21 (MELISSA DU/The Stanford Daily)

can’t pinpoint a moment when I found out what Stanford was. To the extent of how much of a serious dream school it was, I saw it in "High School Musical 3," and I saw that Gabriella goes here, and I love "High School Musical," so I was like "hey, that’s a cool school." But then I came here for a summer camp the summer before sophomore year for a screenwriting class, and I loved everything: the campus, the energy, the whole vibe. I hate to admit that I had a dream school because I feel like that’s really petty, but it was my dream ever since then.

Of course, I didn’t think I was going to get in. I remember on the day I came home from school and the results were going to come out at 5 p.m., so I watched "Harry Potter" until 5:01. Then I saw the results, and I freaked out, and my parents and I were crying.

I have a disability called Spinal Muscular Atrophy, which puts me in an electric wheelchair. For this reason, I live with caregivers on campus. My parents also moved out to Hayward, California from Chicago so they could be close in case of an emergency or if a caregiver couldn’t come. It was interesting because I left my home in Naperville, a suburb of Chicago where I lived for 16 years, yet

I have a new home in Hayward where my parents moved and also a home here in my dorm, West Lag. So I think the hardest part of the transition for me was deciding where home is, and I’m still struggling with that. Is it here at Stanford, or in Hayward, or back in Naperville?

There was also a culture shock in terms of the kinds of conversations here. It’s not that the people back in my high school didn’t have any intellectual vitality, but it was a huge public high school, and not everyone cared as much about academics or things in the world that I’m passionate about. It’s been really cool to be thrown into an environment where everyone cares and wants to learn and have deep conversations. So that also shocked me, but in a good way.

Fall quarter was kind of a whirlwind of meeting people and adjusting to the classes.

But now in winter quarter, the whirlwind is gone, and I’m getting used to life at Stanford, which sometimes makes me catch myself being less thankful to be here. Like, school is school — I don’t want to be doing my homework. I catch myself being less thankful than I was fall quarter. Then I take a minute to think about it, and I’m thankful again.

13

Cristina Brentley ‘20

Sean Volavong ‘19

Cristina Brentley ‘20 (MELISSA DU/The Stanford Daily)

Sean Volavong ‘19 (MELISSA DU/The Stanford Daily)

G

I

rowing up, I never knew about “good schools.” I’m from a predominantly low-income and Hispanic community, and the only “good school” you knew of was Harvard. In middle school, I remember my principal being like, “If you get into Harvard, then you can go to college for free.” So going to Harvard — that was the dream.

That’s where I was going to go.

For me, though, I’ve always been a part of a relatively small community, and I’m really used to being a part of something collaborative and something open to discussion. I think when I visited Stanford during Admit Weekend, I felt a much bigger presence of the Latino community than at other schools and more of an open area to discuss and meet people. I thought it was really interdisciplinary, like the HumBio major, which is what I’m majoring in now.

For me, moving away from home was really hard. I grew up and lived my whole life in a town that’s super unique, being a border town.

In my entire schooling experience, all of my teachers and classmates were Hispanic, and I was used to constantly being surrounded by the culture, the food, always hearing Spanish. I think that was the biggest adjustment for me, as was leaving my family.

For me, being in The Leland Scholars Program (LSP) was one of the greatest parts of the transition. A lot of people had similar experiences and worries, and a lot of my closest friends now came from LSP. But the classes were still a big adjustment. In high school, I often had the same teachers over and over again, so I really knew them. At Stanford it’s harder to get in contact because of the big lectures, and even if you do meet them and talk to them, they’re not the one who’s in charge of your grade.

I was really excited before coming here to be somewhere where people were going to be passionate about school because I was always the odd one out in high school. I was into really random intellectual, niche things that the average high schooler doesn’t really know about, like public health. I was excited to be able to learn exactly the stuff I wanted to learn, and I knew there were people doing research here that I’d be really interested in. I think getting onto campus freshman year, I was surprised at how quickly I was able to find opportunities to do things. Freshman year, I worked at a research lab, and I think that was one of the best experiences I’ve had.

There’s always something happening at Stanford, and life moves really fast. But I think that I’ve found and surrounded myself with the people that make me remember all the little things.

14

grew up in a low-income household in Arkansas, where not a lot of people know how to get out of the state to go to other places.

Growing up, I was coined as the kid who was going to get out of Arkansas — it was actually my superlative in the yearbook. In high school, I stumbled upon this program called Questbridge which connects high-achieving, low-income students with scholarships to places like Stanford. Questbridge is a ranking system, so I ranked about seven colleges, even though I never had the opportunity to visit for financial reasons. I just looked on Google Maps and was like, “ooh, cool campus!” and I would think I would want to go there.

I actually ranked Pomona College first. I wanted to go to a school like my high school where I kind of dominated the social scene, and I was really close with my professors, and so I ranked all these liberal arts colleges first. Then, in the final round, Questbridge gave you the choice to change your rankings. It’s a really bad thing, but being low-income, my parents’ expectations were a key priority, and I really wanted to make them proud. I didn’t know if my parents would be innately happy if I went to a place like Pomona, so at the last minute, I changed all my rankings. A few weeks later, I got a little email, and I knew I was going to Stanford. It was exciting. Stanford wasn’t my first choice, I’ll admit, but the fact that I got in persuaded me enough to highly consider this place.

When I came to college, I had a lot of expectations. Although I knew I was the one to get out and wanted the world to revolve around me, my family stressed to me to be very humble about my backgrounds. I came to college to have fun, sure, but also worked to keep my southern hospitality and my roots with me, and to remember my home back in Arkansas and to have a mission. A lot of people here are persuaded by the grandeur that is Silicon Valley and making a lot of money, which is true, but it’s not necessarily my cup of tea to do so. Which is ironic, given that I’m low-income and definitely want to make a lot of money, but the current pathway that I’m on — work in urban planning or city management back in Arkansas— is not going to make me very much money.

I think the problem with Stanford is that it can be toxic for your life’s mission. So I tell new students: You don’t have to pursue something to validate your own background or identity. You don’t have to take three years of French to validate that you can speak French. You don’t have to take a certain course load to validate that you can handle it. So stay true to your passions, and don’t become intoxicated and unfocused by all of the other opportunities here at Stanford.

Emily Koufakis ‘18

Francisco Lopez ‘18

Emily Koufakis ‘18 (MELISSA DU/The Stanford Daily)

Francisco Lopez ‘18 (MELISSA DU/The Stanford Daily)

M

I

y dad had always been a really big fan of Stanford, although he went to school in Queens. He had always dreamed of going to Stanford, but he didn’t grow up very privileged, so he didn’t think he could afford a private education. Growing up, my dad would always put on the Stanford sports games, and I kind of inevitably became enthralled by Stanford through my dad, even though he didn’t even go there.

When I was becoming extremely competitive in sports, specifically lacrosse and field hockey, that’s when I learned more about Stanford, and it was actually the first school I visited. The first time I walked on campus, that’s when I knew I was definitely going to apply here.

The transition was not easy. I had always been very competitive in sports and balancing a rigorous schedule, as most students here do before they get to Stanford, but the expectations were still extremely high. Stanford recruits arguably the most competitive lacrosse players and students, and you have to have that ability to balance your sport with your academics. We would wake up before class to lift in the morning and practice another four hours in the afternoon. When I was exposed to the Olympic-style lifting, I really struggled because my body had never been exposed to that kind of conditioning before.

Overall, the expectations were very high, but Stanford also made them transparent from the beginning, which I appreciated a lot.

Trying to find an outlet from the team was also hard, since it’s 20plus hours a week year-round, and I was really craving a break from the sports side of it. I wanted to be involved in a bunch of activities by the time I graduated Stanford and really put academics first. Having played lacrosse my entire life, I was honestly drained in a way, and I felt like I was really defined by the sport and nothing else. I was always “Emily the Athlete,” and I realized after my freshman year that I really wanted to do something else for the first time in my life, and I was lucky enough that Stanford was the place to do it.

I don’t like to say I quit the sport because I’m still a coach for a girls’ lacrosse travel team in Palo Alto. Lacrosse gave me so much in my life — I knew I was coming to Stanford by the time I was a sophomore in high school, which is crazy — so I’m still connected to the sport. Leaving Stanford lacrosse was by far the hardest decision of my life, but it really made me grow up. After quitting lacrosse, it was an entirely different world. I was like: What do I do first with all this free time? And it’s funny that I say that because now I feel like I have the same amount of free time as when I played lacrosse, I’ve just found other ways to occupy that time, but I feel just as busy.

was a Questbridge pre-scholar, which meant I got to be in a Facebook group for low-income students that had a massive amount of resources about a bunch of schools. In that Facebook group, Stanford was talked about a lot, and after doing my own research, I realized I wanted to apply there restrictive early action. I’d never been to California; I had no idea. I’d only seen the pictures of Stanford when I first applied, but what I saw about the resources they have here was such a massive gap from what I had in high school. So massive that I could do anything here.

Now I think back to freshman year, and I realize I made many mistakes. Honestly, I thought Stanford was going to solve all my problems. Not that I had problems, but I thought Stanford was going to solve everything for me, all of my worries, and everything was going to be figured out completely from being here. But that’s not true.

Over time, my freshman year became harder and harder. Cutting off my family was not healthy for me, and having this perspective that Stanford was the solution to everything was also unhealthy. I realized that, yes, I had a lot of resources, but it was very much up to me to realize how to utilize them to the fullest extent. It’s not paradise — that’s what I realized. You make the most out of it.

I became a lot more focused on my studies in sophomore year. I came here with such anxiety about not having a family or community, so that was my priority. I cared about my studies, but there was definitely a gap there. So I found a balance sophomore and junior year, picking what I liked and not doing everything at once. I also got a lot closer with my family the summer after my freshman year. We talked about what that year had been like for everybody and what the expectations were now that I’d experienced Stanford that year.

If I could say one thing to my freshman self, I would have said to myself to ask for more help, in every sense: emotional stability, mental stability, homework, especially going to office hours. Now I live there sometimes, and it’s great. I almost never went my freshman year because I had that anxiety, of course, that I wasn’t good enough. I realized that it’s hard here, and the homework is meant so that you go and ask for help. The resources are here, but it’s up to you to go and use them.

These interviews have been lightly edited for clarity.

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr@stanford.edu.

15

AARON KEHOE/Stanford News

Chair of the Board How Jeff Raikes’ roots shape his new role as head trustee

D

ecades before he was called to vote on divestment as a Stanford trustee, new Board chair Jeff Raikes ’80 protested the University’s investments in apartheid South Africa alongside other student activists. As a freshman in 1977, he was one of 294 students arrested at Old Union for a sit-in meant to pressure the Board of Trustees into rethinking a previous vote.

Stanford ultimately agreed to change its investment policy, but Raikes has since come to question the effectiveness of divestment as a strategy to advance social causes. Over the course of a career that has spanned technology, business and philanthropy — he has been both president of Microsoft Business Division and CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and now devotes his time to his own philanthropy — he has developed what he sees as a more a pragmatic approach toward social justice.

“The research suggests that the actual act of divestment doesn’t really have much impact,” he said. “What can have impact is increasing the awareness — and sometimes that’ll lead to things like product boycotts, [or] other things that stigmatize the behavior of companies.”

Slightly over half a year into his four-year term as chair of the Board, where he is now on the receiving end of students’ petitions and is an important figure in the running of the University, Raikes plans to draw upon the 16

strategic leadership he has learned throughout his career to make decisions. His experiences at Stanford, in tech and at the helm of major nonprofits shape his priorities and tactics moving forward, even as he seeks to keep his Board role distinct from his other work.

“What we do in our philanthropy — that informs the perspective that I bring to the Board chair role, but the Board chair role is one in which I have to think very deeply and be supportive of the best interests of the University,” Raikes said. “My ultimate responsibility there is loyalty to the institution ... the student body, as well as the faculty and the university leadership.”

“Stanford has grown dramatically in terms of its stature, not unlike my experience growing up with Microsoft,” he continued.

“Specifically for Stanford, I think about the importance of making sure we continue to have a bold vision to move forward.”

The Board As Board chair, Raikes leads the 33 trustees in their work supporting the long-term strategy and direction of the University.

The Board convenes five times per academic year on a volunteer basis to make decisions about the University’s endowment and properties. Raikes says the trustees’ most important work is to play a supporting role to

by Katie Keller

the President and Provost, with whom they convene in an executive session each meeting.

“My number one goal, personally and as a member of the Board of Trustees, is to help make sure that President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Persis Drell are as successful as they can be,” Raikes said. “They’re the ones leading Stanford.”

Raikes believes the role of the trustees, unlike that of full-time administrators, is to draw on their professional backgrounds and networks outside Stanford to make a contribution to the University. As a guest of Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, for instance, Raikes spoke with senators in Washington, D.C. in late January about the impact of the recent tax bill on universities such as Stanford, which will see a 1.4 percent tax on its endowment as a result.

“I had an opportunity to ... give them an additional perspective on what the negative impact might be,” Raikes said. “And many of my colleagues on the Board have been doing the same thing.”

The Board’s fiduciary responsibilities encompass approving Stanford’s operating budget, its capital budget and all architectural campus improvements; this makes the trustees a target of many requests for changes in how funds are allotted. As they work on a new budget each fiscal year, their focus is the long-term wellbeing of the University and its

endowment.

Broadly speaking, the trustees “have an opportunity to scope and shape Stanford to where it’s an even more impactful university around the globe,” explained former Board Chair Steve Denning MBA ’78, always with an eye to “long-term strategic issues.” “[The trustees] work collaboratively with Persis and Marc in pushing the frontiers forward,” he continued.

Trustees also come into the spotlight on campus as the recipient of student appeals.

Issues like University divestment from fossil fuels and private prison affiliates have brought student groups into conflict with the Board and left activists dismayed: One SU Prison Divest leader blasted the Board last fall for choosing “essentially to do nothing” in response to students’ petition.

Raikes, on the other hand, contends he’s prioritized improvements in the Board’s overall investment responsibility process over individual divestment requests, both during his time on the Board Committee on Investment Responsibility, and now as Board chair.

Under his new leadership, the committee has been conducting a review to make sure its definition of “investment responsibility” still holds in the 21st century based on input from students, faculty, staff and alumni.

“We’ve got a lot of feedback, both from the Advisory Panel on Investment Responsibility and Licensing as well as the people who were submitting requests [for divestment],” Raikes explained. “And we said, okay, let’s take a step back and think about the Statement of Investment Responsibility, the process that we take and ways in which it might be changed or improved.”

He emphasized a quantitative approach to investment strategy reform: “What does the research evidence show? What may be the mechanism that is most consistent on these issues in terms of academic freedom, freedom of speech [and] robust dialogue?”

Still, Raikes said that student protests are valuable, even when they don’t change Stanford’s investment portfolio.

“I may disagree with what [student protesters] think is the right conclusion, but if their interest in that issue shapes a lifelong interest in issues of social justice, then that is what I am happy about,” he said.

Raikes’ measured response to calls for divestment, which Denning called “a delicate issue,” reflects a leadership style that he’s developed over the course of a long career.

“He’s obviously very experienced in terms of how you run organizations,” said Denning, who worked closely with Raikes during his transition into Board leadership. “[He] is very strategic, very thoughtful … someone who’s

both quantitative and qualitative in terms of being pragmatic and testing things to make sure his intuition is correct.”

For Kenneth Nunn ’80, Raikes’ roommate for several years in college and fellow apartheid protester, activists’ achievements in the late 1970s remain “one of the most significant things” the two of them have accomplished. He believes such movements “opened the door to breaking the back of the apartheid regime.”

However, he acknowledged that adulthood comes with new concerns and an increased aversion to risk.

“The thing about being a student, of course is … you have a tremendous amount of power as a student that you don’t necessarily have when you have a job or you have a career or a business or something like that, because there are all these externalities you have to be concerned about,” Nunn said.

“Students have the ability to express their opinions about things and get others who have concerns and have constraints to look at it,” he added, “and perhaps see it through their eyes and perhaps expand themselves in that way.”

While the two friends may diverge in their opinions on divestment now, Raikes says it was his time at Stanford from 1976 to 1980 and his friendship with Nunn that first opened his mind to questions of justice and discrimination.

Stanford roots For Raikes, starting college was a significant transition from his upbringing on a farm outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. His Midwest roots are still strong, though. Above his desk is a framed aerial shot of the farm, where he points out the house and the cattle feedlot with pride.

“As I like to say, growing up in Nebraska — growing up on the farm — I learned some of the most important values in my life: work ethic, passion for what I do,” he said.

“Going into Stanford — it complemented those values,” he continued. “But my world was opened. Expanded.”

Raikes’ white, rural upbringing differed greatly from that of Nunn, who is AfricanAmerican — even though Nunn grew up close by in Omaha. The two became fast friends, and Raikes expressed gratitude for the open and honest dialogue that they were able to share throughout their time at Stanford.

“I mean, the white farm kid from Nebraska — you know, he could have just basically decided to ignore me,” Raikes said. “But instead he was willing to help me see … some of the biases, prejudices and awful language that I had learned growing up in a completely homogenous community.”

“We were less than 40 minutes apart.

And we grew up in two completely different worlds,” he mused. “[Nunn] really helped me see a part of the world that had been invisible to me.”

Nunn, who now teaches law at the University of Florida, recalled his relationship with Raikes similarly. Raikes wasn’t exactly the rural farm boy you see in movies, Nunn said — Raikes had traveled, and his father ran what Nunn called a fairly “sophisticated” operation — but racial divisions meant that Nunn and Raikes came from highly separate worlds.

Amid a pushback against affirmative action, Nunn was struck by Raikes’ approach to racial injustice.

“It was interesting that, as a person who had access to privilege in the way that Jeff did, that he’s a person who I think gets race — gets its significance in American life and culture in a way that a lot of people do not,” Nunn said.

“Addressing racial disparities and sort of making our culture and society as a whole a richer and fairer society is something I think he’s committed too, because, I think, of what he experienced when has was at Stanford,” he added.

Raikes often says that in college, he got onethird of his education inside the classroom and two-thirds outside. He sought this other two-thirds in large part through his continued allyship with the Black community; he lived in Ujamaa for his latter three years at Stanford and worked as a resident assistant there during his senior year. (When Nunn decided that he would move to Ujamaa for his sophomore year, he told Raikes he was sorry to part and had enjoyed being roommates; to his surprise, Raikes happily came along).

“I can trace the work of the Raikes Foundation directly back to my experience of being roommates with Kenneth, living in Ujamaa [and] being a peripheral member of the Black community,” Raikes said.

Like many students coming to Stanford from rural school districts, getting used to the academics was tough for Raikes, who went to a small school where only 20 percent of his graduating class went on to college.

He remembers receiving a 47 percent on his first calculus midterm of freshman year, after which he went to meet the professor, Peter Winkler, “thinking [he] should drop out of Stanford and go back to Nebraska.”

“I didn’t really have to study in high school and it kind of worked out OK,” Raikes recalled.

“And so I thought I should read the textbook and calculus before the first midterm.”

To his shock, Winkler said that many of his Stanford classmates had already studied calculus in high school. Raikes had not. But with Winkler’s encouragement, Raikes stayed at Stanford — and aced the next midterm.

17

Raikes came to Stanford expecting to be a business major, which he said his father supposed would be useful for farm management. He was left briefly directionless when he arrived as a freshman and found out that Stanford had no undergraduate business school. He eventually designed a major that merged engineering, business and computer science under his mentor at Stanford, Professor Bill Linvill, who was founder and first chair of the engineering-economic systems department (now management science and engineering).

Raikes’ emphasis on computer science may seem close to a track that many current undergraduates take, but he was quick to qualify what CS meant in that era.

“Relative to today, that era was kind of the Dark Ages,” he quipped, adding that he “was part of the first class to work on a terminal, rather than punch cards.” In fact, CS wasn’t even its own department yet — it was housed in applied mathematics.

But like many students at Stanford today, Raikes quickly fell in love with computing.

“I was fascinated with the idea that you could use software to help you manage information,” he said.

He developed expertise in economic modeling using VisiCalc, which he described as “the grandfather of Excel.” And he first applied this computing to what he knew best: managing the family farm.

“In fact I did a series of spreadsheet products, like feedlot management and a feed ration calculator,” he explained. “Not only did it help on our farm, I actually turned that into a business and we sold those spreadsheet templates to other people. That was my passion.”

Raikes’ academic experience at Stanford came, he said, with adopting a “growth mindset” about some of the challenges he arrived with. His residential experience, on the other hand, taught him to put his background and personal obstacles in context.

“Today, I can look back and see that I had privilege: I’m a white heterosexual male who grew up in a middle class family with college educated parents. I was riding the up escalator,” he said. “I was not running up the down escalator.”

Raikes still remembers an early encounter with racial profiling while visiting a convenience store with an African-American friend — Raikes had kept his hands in his pockets as he walked in without a second thought, but his friend saw the frightened store owner reach for his gun, fearing that the pair was armed. “Don’t ever do that again,” his friend told him later.

Raikes’ education about discrimination and race stuck with him. Today, he and his wife donate to the Comparative Studies in Race and 18

Ethnicity program (CSRE) at Stanford, and he remains a staunch defender of the ethnic theme dorm.

The philanthropic enterprise Upon entering the Raikes Foundation headquarters in Seattle, where Raikes currently devotes the majority of his time, one can quickly get a sense of the approach to leadership Raikes hopes to project. Dozens of buzzwords are painted in blue cursive all over the front wall — “risk-taking,” “collaborative,”and “YOUTH” jump out — and snippets of conversations about “growth mindsets” rise above the white noise of raindrops hitting the windows.

According to Executive Director Erin Kahn, the Raikes Foundation broadly aims to improve outcomes for low-income and marginalized youth by improving education, expanding learning opportunities and ending childhood homelessness. Kahn emphasized the foundation’s focus on supporting the coordination between private, public and nonprofit sectors to build systems that support children effectively.

“Part of the unique role that philanthropy can play is what some people refer to as innovation capital,” Kahn explained. “A lot of our work, you know, takes advantage of the fact that we can be nimble; we can take risks and we can make investments that are hard for the public sector [and for which] there are no market forces [in] the private sector.”

Raikes’ strategic approach to philanthropy might sound sterile. But Nick Tedesco, who worked as a program officer at the Gates Foundation under Raikes’ leadership, said Raikes got his big start in philanthropy precisely because the Gates believed that business know-how could help to power their philanthropic enterprise.

“Bill and Melinda [Gates] respected the approach that [Raikes] took in business, and wanted to be able to apply that to their philanthropy,” Tedesco said. “Which is something that you’re seeing in the [philanthropic] sector more broadly: You’re seeing a lot more of this business acumen that is being leveraged to accomplish social good.”

Though he is known as a strategist and planner, longtime colleagues and friends have also described Raikes as something of a risk-taker. He took the helm at the Gates Foundation in September 2008, in the heat of the financial crisis that rocked the philanthropic sector. Even though the foundation’s endowment fell, its grantmaking grew by 10 percent in 2009 under Raikes’ leadership.

In a 2010 interview with the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Raikes explained the decision as a calculated risk.

“You want to try as best as you can to invest in building short-term momentum,” Raikes said, “but recognize that you have to conserve enough of your resources to deliver on very big, audacious, long-term goals.”

The Gates and Raikes foundations were part of a new wave of business-minded philanthropy in the late 1990s and early 2000s that saw the logic of entrepreneurship applied to the work of giving. Journalists coined the terms “venture philanthropy” and “catalytic philanthropy” in response, and the approach has drawn criticism for emphasizing metrics and measures visible to the foundations at the expense of issues that might matter more to recipients.

For his part, Raikes described his philosophy simply as a synthesis of compassion and reason.

“Philanthropy is a journey, and in the journey you will often be led by your heart.

You have a passion, or you see something in society that draws your heart to it,” Raikes said, a sentiment he’s espoused in other interviews over the years. “But you also need to pair it with the mind.”

Raikes as chair Raikes says his career in philanthropy has allowed him to lead based on his “own personal philosophies on a lot of issues.” As board chair, though, the long-term good of Stanford as an institution must take priority over his own personal agenda.

“I wear two hats,” he said. “I wear the Raikes Foundation hat and I wear the Stanford University Board Chair hat, and when I wear that Board Chair hat, I have to set aside my own personal philosophies might be or political views might be. At the end of the day, Stanford and universities have to be a platform for academic freedom and for freedom of speech.”

Raikes thinks of the Board as a “thought partner” for University leadership — a “sounding board – to poke when appropriate and to cheer when appropriate.” It’s a relationship he’s seen from both sides in his career, as a trustee himself of the Raikes Foundation and with his close work alongside trustees Bill and Melinda Gates as CEO of the Gates Foundation. “[Raikes is] respectful of the role of trustees: we’re a collaborative, collegial, cohesive body that’s quite driven to make Stanford an even better university in the future,” said former Board Chair Denning. “But at the same time, he’s someone who understands that trustees have one role, and the president, provost and leadership team have another role. They run

Photos Courtesy of Jeff Raikes the University day to day; we kind of shape at the edges.”

Raikes emphasized that the priorities and approach that he’ll pursue on the Board differ from his approach to philanthropy in that the former has less leeway for individual ideology in decision making. But his role as Board Chair calls for the same big-picture approach that Raikes’ other roles have required, in that doing what he believes to be best for the entire system of Stanford often means making decisions that can’t possibly be ideal for all stakeholders.

Recent controversies on campus have brought this challenge to light for Raikes — in particular, he cited conservative writer Robert Spencer’s highly disputed speech.

“We stand at the Raikes Foundation for exactly the opposite of [Spencer’s views],” Raikes said. “But with my Stanford hat on, I have to recognize that having these discussions, having that dialogue is important.

While I certainly support free speech, I think there is an interesting challenge in trying to decide whether something is free speech versus hate speech.”

“That’s the kind of issue we wrestle with — fortunately, we have a great philosophy department with people who think a lot about ethics,” he said with a laugh.

“I obviously have my views on social issues that the students care about,” he allowed. “[But] what the Board can do is to encourage the University to have a robust platform for dialogue… so you’ll find me actually encouraging other views into the dialogue that may be different than my own.”

Salazar, Raikes’ Office 365 collaborator, noted Raikes’ willingness to risk possible controversy if he thinks it will do good for the organization.

“My bet if I need to predict anything, it’s that [Raikes] would be willing to take some more social risks,” he said.

Even though not all groups can benefit immediately from decisions made by the Board and University leadership, Raikes says he has continued to prioritize gathering input from all the sources he can.

When Raikes was appointed Board chair in January 2017, he took a “listening tour” among Stanford faculty, administrators and students as well as his peers at other institutions.

During his transition into his new role, Raikes and the rest of the Board have also devoted time to synthesizing input from thousands of University stakeholders for Stanford’s longrange planning process, which Raikes says will play a large role in his work in the coming years. University leaders received over 2,800 ideas from the Stanford community; Raikes himself submitted seven proposals.

“I probably had 1.4 percent market share of the alumni submissions — seven of 500,” Raikes said with a laugh. “I wanted to participate in the process, see what it was like.

I find it very rewarding.”

His ideas ranged from an undergraduate program in multicultural leadership development to promoting continuing education for alumni — who, he predicted, will be changing careers much more frequently as technological change accelerates.

Raikes also proposed a program called Cardinal Pathways that he hoped would support students who wanted to pursue careers in the nonprofit sector and in global health and development. After seeing his daughter, Gillian Raikes ’16, take on a socialsector job in Nairobi, Kenya, he was inspired to help others with similar interests find postgraduate experiences like hers.

“She and many of her friends who are interested in the social sector found it hard to get into these kinds of opportunities early in their career,” he explained. “And so they end up going to high-tech companies or something like that, because that’s the only view of a

career path they have.”

As the outgoing Board Chair, Denning expressed concern about the current political climate toward higher education and the difficulties that might pose for Stanford as Raikes tackles his new role.

“There is more disruptive change in the world today than there has been in recent memory,” Denning said. “Federally funded research has been in decline in certain areas, the fact that we have a tax on large endowments — I mean, it demonstrates the role of universities in our society are not well understood and not well appreciated.”

“In fact, [universities] provide an enormous benefit to us collectively, and I don’t think we’ve been as effective as we could have been in communicating what those benefits are,” he added. “Because if people understood, then we wouldn’t be having some of these adverse impacts.”

As Board Chair, part of Raikes’ task is to represent Stanford to the outside world to poise the university for future growth — a prospect that he is optimistic about.

“Stanford’s on an incredible trajectory,” Raikes said. “The level of talent that we bring in terms of students — undergrad and graduate — and faculty is, you know, the best it’s ever been.”

Raikes admitted that one of the ideas he submitted to the long-range planning committee was “a little selfish”: his proposal that Stanford establish itself as a leading provider of lifelong learning opportunities, so that graduates like himself can continuously ready themselves for career changes and learn about new fields.

“Gosh, I wish I could be a student again,” he said with a smile. “It’d be amazing.”

Contact Katie Keller at ktkeller@stanford.edu.

19

by Gillian Brassil

Behind the Board

From green-lighting building projects to managing an over $20 billion endowment, the 33 members of Stanford’s Board of Trustees wield no small role in the University and its future. The Board of Trustees was established on Nov. 11, 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford to serve as directors for the University. The official job of a trustee, as expressed on the Board’s website, is to share “responsibility for setting the direction of the university, ensuring Stanford’s continued well-being and working to sustain its foundation of excellence.” In practice, this means duties such as consulting with top administrators, appointing presidents, approving budgets and making sometimes controversial final calls on matters like divestment from private prison affiliates and fossil fuels. The Daily took a look at how the Board operates and how it shapes Stanford.

Who’s on the Board?

The trustees consist of the president of the University and 32 other members.

Candidates for trustee are not necessarily alumni of Stanford. According to University spokesperson E.J. Miranda, eight seats on the Board are designated for alumni nominated through the Alumni Committee on Trustee Nominations (ACTN). The Board’s Trusteeship Committee reviews those picks in addition to making its own nominations. Selections then go before the entire Board.

Candidates who would be 70 years or older 20

when their term commences and current faculty, staff or students are not elgiible. They must show a “serious commitment” to the University’s wellbeing.

The ACTN’s selection of new trustees occurs every two and a half years, with new trustees starting this April; the next selection process will begin in July of 2019. The Board is capped at 38 trustees who serve in five year terms.

Philip Taubman ’70, the Board’s secretary, said one of his goals throughout his Board term and now as secretary is to increase Board diversity. He hopes to see greater representa-

tion of gender, ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status and professions.

Taubman says representation of all but the latter has improved since the time he served on the Board from 1978 to 1982. Of the 32 trustees listed on the Board’s website in addition to University President Marc TessierLavigne, 14 have backgrounds primarily in investment, while another six hold business leadership roles outside the realm of investment. Another six started their careers in investment, business or tech before shifting to a focus on philanthropy or nonprofit work.

Eighteen out of 32 have an MBA, mostly from

Stanford or Harvard, and many head companies. Net worths in the millions and billions abound.

The newest members of the Board include Carrie Penner M.A. ’97, Walmart heir and Board chair at the Walton Family Foundation; Felix Baker ’91, Ph.D. ’98, a managing partner at Baker Brothers Investments; Jerry Yang ’90, M.S. ’90, who co-founded Yahoo! and AME Cloud Ventures; and Henry Fernandez M.B.A. ’83, CEO of MSCI Inc., which provides tools to support investment.

Meanwhile, Board members marking the end of their five-year terms in March include Fred Alvarez ’72, J.D. ’75, partner at law firm Jones Day; Gail Block Harris ’74, J.D. ’77, lead director of Evercore Partners; Bernard Liautaud M.S. ’85, general partner at Balderton Capital in London; and Lloyd Metz ’90, managing director of ICV Partners.

How does the Board operate?

The trustees meet five times every academic year, although additional sessions may be called; four of those times are on campus, and one is an offsite retreat with an emphasis on longer-term planning. In-person attendance is expected at every meeting.

The Board supports University leadership on a broad range of University issues — some of which are confidential, such as the selection process for an incoming University president.

Secretary of the Board Taubman said the process must be confidential to protect individual rights of candidates; such secrecy is common among high-profile University searches.

Just as the president is selected by the Board, the Board can fire the president.

Board members also make decisions related to resource allocation, land use, academic programs, facility plans, University rules, federal and public support of education, community relations, minority representation, finance and fundraising. Trustees are volunteers and are responsible for all University decisions carried out in their name.

“The Board is a consulted body to support the president and provost with the perspective from the outside looking in,” Taubman said, adding that the Board exists for feedback and discussion.

“It’s a continuum of conversation in which the president and provost are in conversation with the Board about what’s happening at the University,” he said.

As Secretary of the Board, Taubman works closely with Tessier-Lavigne and Board Chair Jeff Raikes ’80 to discuss issues that the Board should address, ensure the Board plays the role it is designed to play, support management and plan meetings.

Once something takes the form of an action item, the Board needs to take a vote. According to Taubman, it is generally hard to predict

whether a matter that comes up for discussion will make it to a vote.

As part of their advisory role, the trustees are assigned to various committees, which work on individual areas the Board presides over. Committees -- which include Alumni and External Affairs, Development, Land and Buildings and Finance and Globalization -- help the Board accomplish more specific projects; for example, the Land and Buildings Committee has focused on planning Stanford’s expansion into Redwood City.

Trustees serve on Board committees with students and faculty representatives. Additionally, trustees may be asked to serve on school or departmental committees or panels.

Board meetings last about a day and a half and comprise both committee and full group meetings. Meetings include presentations from various deans, department heads, on-campus institutes and other stakeholders aimed at providing a holistic perspective on current happenings on campus.

Individual con.sultation also occurs, especially with the Board chair, Taubman said.

The Board also reviews the annual budget developed by the provost, including on the construction of new buildings. Construction requires a number of approvals — site selection, design, concepts and financials — that the Board must vote on.

Outside of meetings, trustees might be asked to represent Stanford at events related to University matters and are encouraged to participate in alumni and fundraising activities.

Looking ahead Recently, the Board has been reviewing the long-range planning process, an initiative launched by Tessier-Lavigne and Drell that called for community input on the University and its direction over the next 10 to 15 years. Ideas from the nearly 2,800 offered by students, faculty and staff — vetted and summarized into white papers by steering groups — go to University leadership for discussion supported by the Board.

“As trustees, we can leverage our networks, speak to the people to which we’re connected, learn their viewpoints and provide an external perspective that will contribute to the process,” Raikes said in an interview with Stanford News. “Stanford has big aspirations for its impact on the world. So a big question for us is: How can we as trustees tap into our external experience in ways that really enhance what [Tessier-Lavigne] and [Drell] and University leadership will do as part of long-range planning?”

Raikes said the Board’s 2018 spring retreat will focus on long-range planning as well as the negotiation of the Santa Clara County General Use Permit (GUP), which will govern the University’s land use for years to come

and is negotiated between Stanford and the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.

Stanford is in the process of applying for a new GUP spanning 2018 to 2035 — as Taubman put it, the University is “running out of square footage.” The Board consults with Tessier-Lavigne on these negotiations.

According to Raikes, another important topic for trustees is Stanford Medicine, one of the biggest single contributors to the overall revenue of the University and home to revolutionary discoveries in healthcare and biotechnology.

“I expect that with the volatility with U.S. healthcare, there will be some twists and turns ahead,” Raikes told The Daily. “We don’t know what those things are going to be, but the Board can be very attentive to what those challenges and opportunities might be. We have Board members with specific expertise in the health care field, and they will be particularly valuable in those discussions.”

But Raikes also hopes trustees are able to learn more about discoveries made by all departments.

“Stanford has become a focal point in the world because of the University’s profile in a number of dimensions,” he told Stanford News.

Taubman hopes that Board matters and objectives become clearer to the public in cases when the work is not confidential.

“We’re trying to make an effort, and going forward, we are trying to make more of an effort to talk about more what the Board does,” Taubman explained, adding that the Board holds a press conference after every meeting to present the Board’s public agenda.

Raikes admitted that a challenge for trustees is staying in touch with campus life. He also noted the complexity of Stanford and its seven schools.

“I oftentimes hear from Board members it really takes a few years to get up to speed on the University,” he said. “Many are contributing right out of the gate, but they make a fair point.”

For students frustrated with the Board’s decision making on topics like divestment, the Board is disconnected from the student body.

In a response to trustees’ decision on fossil fuels in 2016, members of Fossil Free Stanford criticized the Board for “choosing cowardice over leadership.” Students stated that they were “deeply disappointed that Stanford’s Board has chosen to ignore the calls of the student body and Stanford community.”

Taubman views the Board differently.

“The Board is not some distant, detached, aloof institution,” he said. “I would hope students would think of the Board as a benevolent institution.”

Contact Gillian Brassil at gbrassil@stanford. edu. Josh Wagner contributed reporting.

21

Jenna Gray: The story of a multisport athlete

by Laura Sussman

22

Photo Courtesy of Jenna Gray

23

J

enna Gray walks into her interview with her hair in a tight bun and her workout gear on, a big bottle of water in her hand. She’s wearing a red shirt that says “Stanford Women’s Volleyball” in block letters.

Had Gray come in on another afternoon, her shirt might have said “Stanford Track and Field,” or – had it been last school year – “Stanford Beach Volleyball.”

There are other athletes in the school who compete in two varsity sports that are quite similar, may it be track and field and cross country or volleyball and beach volleyball.

But very few compete in two sports that are completely unrelated.

Gray is one of a select few athletes that participate in more than one sport. Last year, as a freshman, Jenna took on the extensive task of playing three sports, two of which had partially overlapping seasons. The additional sport was beach volleyball.

This year, as a sophomore, she is playing two: volleyball and track and field, where she throws the javelin. Her choice to drop beach came this

24

year because she feared that it was too much time committed solely to playing sports.

“School-wise, last year wasn’t too difficult because I took a lighter load in the spring because I knew that I was going to be busy, but this year is the HumBio core which requires you to take 10 units already, and then I have my language, which is five units of sign language, so that’s an automatic 15 units built in,” she explained. “So this year that was kind of my decision in not doing beach this year, because obviously school comes first, so that’s been a big factor in choosing to do just track and volleyball, because it’s been a lot heavier this year.”

Gray loves having the opportunity to play multiple sports, and she has learned a lot from each one. The sophomore in college played volleyball all four years of high school, captaining her team junior and senior year.

Her school team was extremely successful: It won the Kansas state championships three times (2012, 2013, 2015) and got second place in 2014. Gray as a player also won recognition

as an Under Armour All-American, a Max Prep All-American, a PrepVolleyball All-American and more.

This extensive resume got Gray recruited to play volleyball on the Farm. Her freshman year with the indoor team led to personal and team honors. The team itself won the NCAA Championships, while Gray was selected into the NCAA Final Four All-Tournament Team.

The freshman setter played in all 34 matches and started 20 of those matches.

What Gray has learned most from playing indoor volleyball is “the complexity of all the moving parts and getting to direct a lot of different things, and the strategy is a lot different in that I get to run my own offense and go to different people.”

She says that it remains her favorite due to its emphasis on teamwork. Pick-ups in times of need or the excitement of winning, Grey thinks, are better done with a larger team.

Gray’s career with the javelin was a bit different. Once done with her volleyball season during her junior year of high school, Gray

began looking for another sport that would fill the gap between volleyball seasons without taking up too much time. Both her cousin and one of her best friends threw the javelin, and they convinced her to try it out, saying it was “’super social, you practice for like 45 minutes a day, it’s going to be so laid back.’”

Gray ended up trying it out and going on to win the state championships that same year. She decided javelin was something she enjoyed and continued to throw in her senior year. Throwing at Stanford was not necessarily planned out, since Gray had already been recruited for the volleyball team.

When asked whether she considers herself a recruit for the javelin throw, she responded that she always calls herself a track “walk-on.”

“I don’t know how I got in contact, either the track coaches saw my throws or my high school track coaches contacted them saying ‘Have you seen her throws? She’s already going to Stanford, you don’t have to work on the admissions process.’ But, then we got our new coach and I asked if I could do track and he

said he didn’t care. So then I started practicing the next week.”

Track for Gray is a completely different experience than the loud, boisterous team sport that is indoor volleyball: “I’d say the biggest thing with track is that I’ve always done team sports, and so when you win or do well it’s just yourself, so that is the one thing that has been the biggest change for me.”

But track has also taught her things that volleyball has not.

“In track I would say the biggest thing is that it’s the same thing over and over again, so I learned a lot about smaller movements and how to use my body; that was the biggest thing.

It’s like, it requires a lot of focus. You only get three or six throws at each competition, so focusing on the really small details.”

Despite her love for the sports she plays and the people she plays them with, Gray does sometimes feel that she is missing out on the Stanford experience. She admits to sometimes feeling “FOMO.” or fear of missing out, especially when the weather is nice. Having to

bump around from one practice to the other, she realizes that she is not able to go tan or go to the pool with her friends who are not as busy.

Sports commitments also make academic work harder to fit in, since Gray’s calendar is chock-full with conditioning, practice, games and more.

Still, Gray loves having the opportunity to participate in multiple sports.

“I would go from a full team sport to a pair sport to an individual sport, so it was really interesting and fun seeing the different dynamics and the different amount of focus you had to have for each sport,” she says, laughing. “Also having three sets of teammates was really fun.”

Contact Laura Sussman at laura111@stanford. edu.

Photos courtesy of Jenna Gray

25

r i f e , , y ai d

m a e ’ : R ‘ A talk with Disney producer Don Hahn

by olivia popp

Photos courtesy of Disney

Y

ou’ve probably never heard of Don Hahn, but if you’ve watched one of many classic Disney films, you’ve probably seen his work. A Disney employee for nearly 40 years, Hahn is a film producer and director who helmed flicks including the original “The Lion King” and “Beauty and the Beast” — but Hahn is also so much more than that. Known for having a distinct creative vision and love for animation, Hahn actually started out in college as an art minor and a music major who entered animation because of its place as an amalgamation of many art forms. “Animation is something that got me excited because it used everything I liked to do — it used painting and color and art, and also used music and writing and storytelling and all those things,” Hahn says. He speaks passionately about the importance of art and storytelling, believing in a holistic approach to making films — Hahn jokes that he’s a “real maker” as well as a “painter and a musician,” which allows him to explore his creative fields of vision.

When I first began talking to Hahn, I had to ask why he is so drawn to animation. I was curious — producers seem to rarely get recognized, let alone producers in animation. Yet there must be some reason why Hahn’s work has been so universally recognized and why he continues to find it so rewarding. Hahn jumps in eagerly: “I love working in animation for a number of reasons. One of the biggest things is that you can work on a story and work on the film all the way up to opening day. You have this ability to iterate and fix things. It’s the secret weapon, really, of a lot of Disney films, and a lot of animated films in particular. You can test them with an audience. You can go out 26

again and again and polish them until they’re really working well. That’s something you can do to an extent in live-action movies but not to the extent you can do it in animation.” It’s clear that Hahn loves the uniqueness of the format: “One of the things I love is the sense of worldbuilding and creating worlds and characters that are probably a little bit more fantastical than what you’d see in live-action.”

As I listen to Hahn speak, I can’t help but notice his incredibly childlike enthusiasm for the medium of animation, and it’s not just for his own work. Hahn applauds the animation pursuits of many companies: “There’s many, many studios, and many are getting into animation, which is kind of exciting. It still gets down to the old ‘sit around a campfire and tell a story’ issue. Everything that’s old is new again, and some things change, and some things never change. That’s part of the fun of making an animated film.” Even his roots in music shine through when he speaks poetically about film: “A film is music. It’s a continuous, time-driven way of expressing yourself — and that’s music.”

Hahn also takes great pride in his own storytelling and recognizes his place as an influential producer in the animation and Disney circles. Still, he expresses a desire to this to make art that is both meaningful and beneficial. As the Executive Producer of Disneynature and the owner of his own production company, Stone Circle Pictures, Hahn wants to use his position to expand outwards from traditional narrative fiction films. “It’s rewarding to tell stories about oceans, or chimpanzees, or African cats and lions — and they’re seen by a large audience. Those films have been really important to me, and I really

want to make more in the future,” Hahn says about his Disneynature productions. Hahn finds the challenge and process of creating nontraditional films — especially documentaries and films that aren’t just narrative fiction works — rewarding and also a way to flex his own storytelling muscles. Hahn asks, “How do you make a story and tell a story about the environment that’s not like eating your broccoli? That’s a channel changer right away. How do you make something that’s entertaining and compelling?”

With regards to Stone Circle Pictures, Hahn says, “Being able to have my own company allows me to produce and direct my own films where I can grow from nothing and tell stories that maybe a large studio doesn’t want to make — not because they’re not interesting stories, but because they address a social issue or give voice to someone who doesn’t have a voice. I’m very fortunate in that I can have a company in which I can create and write and bring together a group of people that can make films that mean something to me.”

With Stone Circle Pictures, Hahn isn’t afraid of straddling the line between producer of blockbuster films and independent filmmaker.

Hahn says, “I’m at a place in my career where I want to make films that are more experimental or more cutting-edge in terms of their story or technique, and I want to tell stories about people — sometimes there’s just heroes of mine — or about social issues. It’s important to use all my chops, and all my abilities, and all my connections in the world to focus on issues that are really important to our world, and that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing right now.” Many of Hahn’s personal passion projects lie in this realm as well: “The film

p

I’m working on right now is about Howard Ashman, who wrote the lyrics to ‘The Little Mermaid’ and ‘Little Shop of Horrors,’ and he died during the AIDS crisis. It’s a story of someone who was brilliant and whose life was cut short. It’s a story that’s close to me, and a story that may be losing attention in this era, and I want to shine a light on it.”

Hearing about Hahn’s pursuits achievements brought me back to what drew me to his career in the first place, the creation of a complete cultural phenomenon known as “The Lion King.” Hahn’s tour de force is undeniably “The Lion King,” so I had to ask the inevitable question: Was “The Lion King” really just pitched as “‘Hamlet,’ but with lions”?

Hahn claims the film was in fact not initially inspired by Hamlet (although the commentary on the 1994 “The Lion King: Platinum Edition” DVD states otherwise). Hahn has a pretty solid defense for the film: “It’s pretty original in terms of storytelling. The idea of “Hamlet” didn’t really come to the front until we were already pretty deep in the making of the movie. I think the idea of Simba’s father’s ghost showing up to him and him questioning his life and that kind of thing started to make us feel like, “Oh, this is a lot like ‘Hamlet’! But it’s also a lot like the Joseph story from the Bible. It’s a mashup of a lot of different stories.

There’s a familiarity, but it’s still fresh.” Hahn also tosses in a fun tidbit: “In fact, when we started out, we used to call it ‘Bambi Africa,’ a sort of coming-of age story set with the music and visuals of Africa.” (I don’t know if I’m convinced one way or another, but for you curious folks out there, at least we’ve now got an answer from the producer himself.)

Even if “The Lion King” is still vivid in his memory, Hahn is always looking forward to the next iterations of animated works. He speaks fondly of director Jon Favreau’s vision for the upcoming live-action “The Lion King,” starring Donald Glover. Hahn supports the innovations in animation, saying, “The worlds are blending, and the boundaries between animation and live action are blending.

The original ‘The Lion King’ was done with pencils in 1994, and it was a really successful experience with the audience. I have total confidence in Jon [Favreau] to create the same kind of experience in his movie. It will be a live-action-’looking’ recreation but with all the tools and bells and whistles of modern technology. That’s really exciting to me — stories are meant to be told and retold. I think what’s exciting now is seeing new storytelling pop up in areas like live-action filmmaking, in gaming, in virtual reality, in augmented reality — all these places where animation is now really relevant and important to storytelling. I love that.”

Upon his expression of interest in unconventional usages of animation, I ask if Hahn has any plans to move into live-action or to be involve in more collaborations that incorporate live-action elements, such as executive producing “Maleficent” and the live-action “Beauty and the Beast.” Hahn explains some of the more fascinating combinations of liveaction and animation that work its way into his own films: “You can bring the Beast alive in ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ and you can have that be a character — he’s an animated character that’s walking round with a live-action Beauty. There’s great tools that are starting to migrate into live-action, and that’s why it’s kind of becoming an exciting time in film because all of those tools are starting to get really good.” Nevertheless, it looks like Hahn’s heart still lies in animation, but he leaves himself open to potential options: “I think I would use anything in the future. I think that’s the truth to many filmmakers now — I think it’s foolish not to. But there’s nothing wrong with not doing that. Take ‘Dunkirk’ — those people were all real. That’s a creative choice, and same with animation. You don’t want to eliminate any of those creative choices, but you don’t have to use it.”

Hahn’s dual sense of artistic autonomy and team interdependence strikes an interesting chord. I asked about Hahn’s experience as a producer at Disney, and he is quick to clarify, saying, “I’m a creative producer.” Nevertheless, he’s still a producer: “Your job is to pull together a team of people who can tell the story. There has to be some sort of consensus around what the actors are trying to get at.

You’re trying to create a safe room for people to contribute in. You’re here to help the director tell a story.”

Hahn’s grasp of his responsibilities of a leader is paired with his humbling view on collaborating with others: “When I am successful, it’s because I’ve found great people to support that story and been able to tell that story all the way from the first day on the movie all the way to its release. Even now, when ‘Beauty and the Beast’ came out as a live-action film, it was my job to support those filmmakers and be a cheerleader and a coach and a psychotherapist.” This emphasis on a cohesive team dynamic is refreshing to see in the entertainment industry, and Hahn describes the experience: “Each film is really different.

Each film is like building a family, but each film has all the problems of a family. There’s a lot of love, and a lot of infighting, and a lot of good meals together,” he jokes.

To finish up our talk, I ask Hahn about his educational experiences and what advice he has for individuals attempting to break into the industry or just do art, which turns into

an intriguing motivational speechlike — yet not unwelcome — tangent.

Hahn believes in the power of diving headfirst into a project or venture rather than waiting around. Hahn was a percussionist who “learned how to play in the back of a symphony, but [he] didn’t learn how to make an animated film for 10 years.” He followed his own advice in saying that education and art “doesn’t have to be limited to your field of study” by jumping directly into the film industry immediately after college. Hahn, who began working smaller gigs on Disney films, is practically the definition of working one’s way up the entertainment industry, beginning as a production assistant and now working as an executive producer and head of DisneyNature, amongst other things. “I was more thrown into the deep end. But you know what? We’re never prepared. The world you’re preparing for is changing under your feet. Roll up your sleeves; jump into the world,” Hahn says.

Looking to the future, Hahn has big plans in store, and he hopes you do too. He clearly knows he’s talking to a college student, prefacing his advice with the fact that he occasionally teaches at Chapman University.

Sometimes, students need a bit of goading to start, and Hahn takes no prisoners when it comes to encouraging students to pursue their art. “Instead of saying ‘ready, aim, fire,’ I say ‘ready, fire, aim.’ What are you waiting for?

What are you going to do? What’s important to you? What are you going to say? What do you have to say? Steering it as it goes is really important. It’s unsettling; it’s uncomfortable to me and to a lot of people. It’s like jumping out of a plane and building your parachute on the way down,” he says. “I don’t believe in retirement. I feel like your life is art.” Whether young or old, he encourages you to relentlessly pursue what art fulfills you, even if it’s hard. “Sometimes school and culture puts us in boxes — don’t let that be the end of it. Immerse yourself in your craft.”

Contact Olivia Popp at oliviapopp@stanford. edu.

27

LIGHTROOM

The Salkantay pass, for which the trek is named (Day 2).

Different views of the site (Day 5).

A view of the terraces once used for agriculture (Day 5).

There are many sights to behold throughout South America, but without doubt, one of the most revered is Machu Picchu.

Recognized as one of the seven Wonders of the World, the ancient Incan capital was home to several of the most prominent members of the once-great society. Throughout the city, one can find remnants of several religious symbols, the combination of which lead many people to say the ancient sight has some of the most powerful energies in the world.

Machu

One of the last bridges crossed by those wishing to visit Machu Picchu

28

Along the way, visitors never know what they might come across (Day 4).

During the earliest hours of the day, Machu Picchu looks all the more mystical as the sun rises over the nearby mountains (Day 5).

A sign along the route gives visitors a bit of hope and encouragement during the 50+ mile hike (Day 4).

Picchu

u (Day 4).

With all its history, the site is visited by tourists from across the world. Pictured here is part of the Salkantay Trek to Machu Picchu, a five-day-long hike ending with a visit to the site.

Michael Spencer

Different views of the site (Day 5).

29

LIGHTROOM

Sugarcane bends in the strong 40 milesper-hour gusts of winds that are a common feature of Puanui. Sugarcane acted as a companion plant to sweet potato. It was a windbreak and mist trap for the sweet potato that was grown nearby.

Working at Puanui is highly labor intensive and requires constant upkeep. Marshall and Simone Spezier ’20 work together to till a bed of dirt in preparation for planting sweet potato (‘uala). ‘Uala once provided the basic caloric intake for roughly 135,000 ancient Hawaiians.

Kohala Polynesians settled Hawai’i by the 11th century and found a land much different than the one they had come from. They adapted to their new environment and created the dryland field system: a system in which crops are irrigated completely by the rain.

It is well known that the Polynesians were the greatest navigators of their times.

However, as demonstrated through their highly productive field systems, they were arguably the greatest farmers of their era as well.

In the Leeward Kohala Field System, the outline of field lines created by ancient Hawaiians can be seen. The field lines follow the contours of the land and indicate where old plots of crops once were.

30

Haw Tiffany Ong

Peter Vitousek, Stanford professor and researcher, looks over a land that was once cultivated intensely and covered by 25 sq.uare miles of crops. A sugar cane (ko) and sweet potato (‘uala) research plot can be seen below.

Puanui

wai’i

Puanui is an ahupua’a (traditional Hawaiian land division) located in Kohala, Hawai’i. It is part of the Leeward Kohala Dryland Field System, which once stretched 25 square miles. At its peak, the field system fed a larger population than exists today on the island.

Today, Puanui is used as a research and educational land. The main focus of the research is to answer several questions: How did ancient Hawaiians perform sustainable agriculture? How can learning from the past inform the future of food security? The goal of research is not to recreate or reimplement ancient Hawaiian practices. Rather, the goal is to synthesize understanding of the past with current research and practices to help foster an agriculturally sustainable Hawai’i.

Puanui was once intensely cultivated by ancient Hawaiians; however, the labor-heavy field system Hawai’i currently imports about 85 percent of its food. Hopefully, Puanui quickly collapsed after European contact in 1778 can serve as a beacon for the possibilities of this land of incredible fertility brought new diseases that killed 90 percent of the and potential.

Hawaiian population.

Kehaulani Marshall, executive manager of Puanui, holds a harvest of sugarcane.

The Milky Way looms over a row of sugarcane.

31

HEY, CARD! PRE-ORDER

THE QUAD 2018 A campus tradition since 1895.

It’s a great keepsake for anyone, packed with event coverage, this year’s milestones, class photos and so much more!

PURCHASE HERE: http://jostensyearbooks.com/?REF=A09801557 CONTACT THE YEARBOOK TEAM: yearbook@stanforddaily.com